What does Pragmatism mean?, you ask? Read William James' 1904 What Pragmatism Means:

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence. There can be no difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere - no difference in abstract truth that doesn't express itself in a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

[...]Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude, but it represents it, as it seems to me, both in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed. A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once tor all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.

Amen.
posted by neel master at 9:35 AM

	i awake in babylon i want to escape this armageddon jah jah open up the iron gate and let your children repatriate - Max Romeo, "Open the Iron Gate" c.1970 album review album review
(not the album cover)

posted by neel master at 12:00 AM

Deconstruction's Legal Career
By J.M. Balkin

Both deconstruction and structuralism are antihumanist theories; that is, they tend to emphasize that people's thought is shaped and determined by structures of linguistic and cultural meaning. Both deconstruction and structuralism asserted that people are culturally and socially constructed, and that they internalize culture much in the same way that they internalize a natural language. The linguistic analogy is particularly appropriate: A speaker of English cannot make the words of that language mean whatever she likes; more importantly, she doesn't even want this to be the case, because part of being an English speaker is having internalized a sense about what is the proper way of talking and thinking. For the structuralist and the deconstructionist, language speaks us as much as we speak it.

As this example demonstrates, an antihumanist approach tends to deemphasize people's autonomy; it views people as the product of cultural forces largely beyond their control. In its most extreme forms, it tends to dissolve the individual (sometimes called "the subject") into structures of social meaning. Deconstructionists attacked the structuralist contention that there were universal and fixed structures of meaning that shaped all human thought. They argued that the structures of social meaning are always unstable, indeterminate, impermanent and historically situated, constantly changing over time and accumulating new connotations. But these criticisms didn't challenge the idea that individuals were constructed by larger social and linguistic forces, and deconstructionsts didn't dispute that individuals were not fully in control of the forces of social and linguistic meaning.

[...]Bringing deconstruction into law schools also required a new focus on the point of deconstruction. Legal theorists were primarily interested in using deconstruction for normative or critical purposes. They wanted to criticize some (but not other) doctrinal distinctions as incoherent, they wanted to show that some (but not other) parts of the law were unjust and needed reform, and they wanted to demonstrate that some (but not other) ways of thinking had undesirable ideological effects that concealed important features of social life and therefore promoted or sustained injustices. But each of these tasks faced two central problems.

The first difficulty was that literary deconstruction was not primarily devoted to these normative and critical purposes. Indeed, literary deconstruction spent much of its time showing the ambiguity, uncertainty, and impenetrability of all literary texts, the reversibility of all positions, and the instability of all theoretical conceptions. It did not focus specifically on pointing the way to a more just world.

To use deconstruction lawyers would have to modify it so that it could serve a critical and normative function. Deconstruction would have to mean something different for lawyers than it would for literary critics and philosophers. Deconstruction would become a series of rhetorical strategies for criticizing certain legal doctrines and legal arguments in order to show that they were unjust, ideologically biased, incomplete, or incoherent. It would necessarily discriminate between better and worse positions and interpretations, and it would state its conclusions in the language of normative prescription. Deconstructive legal argument, in short, would become a form of normative legal thought. Among legal scholars, Pierre Schlag has been virtually alone in recognizing this change and speaking out against it.(1) Schlag has thus taken the seemingly paradoxical position of being against the use of deconstruction for normative purposes.(2)

posted by neel master at 11:41 PM

The Politics of Reason: Critical Legal Theory and Local Social Thought
James Boyle

This is either a book or the longest law review article of all time. I doubt I'll ever read the whole thing, but I wanted to link it so I would remember that it exists. It looks like a history and defense of critical legal theory as an intellectual enterprise. It looks incredibly far-reaching; the endnotes are a skeptic/subversive's who's who: Kuhn, Adorno/Horkheimer, Treatise of Human Nature, Marcuse, Barthes, Berger/Luckmann. And that's just in the first twenty or so notes (245 total.)

I know i've reached a pinnacle of laziness when I define an article by its endnotes. I'll read it, I swear. Here's a tidbit:

There are a number of ways in which one could explain the fact that left-wing scholars wish to analyze the 'subjective' side of law while centrists and conservatives wish to ignore that subjectivity or to search for new sources of objectivity. The simplest explanation would be the one raised in discussing the first and second traces: only by appearing to be objective could law appear to be separate from politics. Leftists have traditionally seen this search for objectivity as merely another way to reify the current arrangements of society so that they appear to be both natural and neutral, and thus to remove social and political choice from individuals.(59)Centrist and right-wing scholars, on the other hand, have always nursed dark, Hobbesian fears of the slippery slope to anarchy or fascism, a slippery slope that is at present walled off by a fragile belief in a government of 'laws not men.'(60) It is these fears that form the anxious counterpoint to their paeans of praise for the rule of law.

These citations seem to overlap significantly with an essay from Geertz's collection Local Knowledge. I think the essay's called "Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective." It's a shame that there's so little full-text Geertz available online. The indispensable "Thick Description" is available, however, and it's available here.

Haskell is the home of the department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. I once spent a summer fixing computers there and elsewhere for the Social Sciences division (I was even called to fix the computer of economics Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas. This particular fix involved clicking the Microsoft Office Toolbar closed, saying "you're welcome," and walking out the door.) Anyway, the lobby of Haskell contains a display of photographic portraits of renowned anthropologists. Apparently, they are the result of the hobby of some other famous anthropologist. I always found the portrait of Geertz to be the most compelling, even before I had any idea of who he was. I was going to post a picture here, but a cursory search for something suitable has left me underwhelmed. My advice to Geertz-seekers is to visit the lobby of Haskell.
posted by neel master at 11:34 PM

People say that I like to pretend it is the sixties. I know I do. There was enough to worry about back then that people could be forgiven for succumbing to nearly hysterical paranoia about society. After looking at the stuff at The Situationist International Archive, I get the feeling that I might be grateful to President Bush for helping me live my delusion in ever-greater agreement with reality.

The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle's form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system's conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

"keep voting...i'll do the rest."

-Guy deBord, The Society of the Spectacle

posted by neel master at 12:14 AM

we're having some problems with the archives. sorry.

also - there is a freshly installed counter which currently reads one. I only wish there was some way to excise and frame that one, the way one might frame a first dime or dollar earned.

Anyway, here's some content. City Journal has published an anti-Rawls screed. I think it misrepresents him. I doubt that I'll be attempting to confirm this hunch, however, since that would require re-reading all two million pounds of A Theory of Justice. It's heavier than the Bible, for christ's sake.
posted by neel master at 1:17 PM

I need this:



It includes this:

Nuclear war, nuclear war
Talking about nuclear war
It's a motherfucker don't you know
If they push that button yo' ass gotta go.

posted by neel master at 2:04 PM

Eva Domanska:

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, as Hayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a "bitterness" stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. An ironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline. A current stage of irony manifests itself in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a "prison house of language." An intellectual parlor-game produces "second-hand knowledge" that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony?

This text is a "post-postmodern post mortem to postmodernism." I am grateful to Postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative.

Don't we all.
posted by neel master at 2:14 AM

First Things is the journal of religion and public life. This month's issue features an article by Damon Linker that argues against the legalization of marijuana. Linker, a philosopher by training, begins his case by running through a litany of common and thoroughly lame objections. But just as the end of the page draws near, Linker pulls out his secret weapon: Allan Bloom.

The pleasure of smoking marijuana differs from the kind of pleasure that accompanies smoking a fine cigar or sipping a well-brewed cup of coffee, and more pertinently, it also differs from the pleasure of mild drunkenness. Whereas alcohol primarily diminishes one’s inhibitions and clarity of thought, marijuana inspires a euphoria that resembles nothing so much as the pleasure that normally arises only in response to the accomplish­ ment of the noblest human deeds. Marijuana . . . provides its users with a means to enjoy the rewards of excellence without possessing it themselves. Bloom again: “Without effort, without talent, without virtue, without exercise of the faculties, anyone and everyone is accorded the equal right to the enjoyment of their fruits.”

A country that consumes ever-greater doses of mood-altering prescription drugs might not deem this to be a significant problem, but it should. The danger is not merely that seeking happiness through pharmacology cuts us off from the world as it truly is. It is also that the very attempt to reach happiness in such a way must ultimately fail. [...] Whereas pleasure involves enjoying something good, happiness arises only when we judge ourselves worthy of enjoying it.

posted by neel master at 12:42 AM

Intoxicating Class: Cocaine at the Multiplex
By David Banash
for Postmodern Culture

Both Steven Soderbergh's Traffic and Ted Demme's Blow explore cocaine and its relationship to politics in the American imaginary. However, the reception of both these films is troubling. Traffic is lauded as the first honest look at the failure of the drug war, while Blow is either hailed or dismissed as yet another compelling but nonetheless vacuous celebration of the decadence of the '70s and early '80s. The almost universal mainstream acclaim for Traffic indicates just how much the worst kinds of conservative ideologies continue to inform even purportedly liberal attitudes toward drugs, while the dismissal of Blow as anything more than a decadent fantasy or simplistic cautionary tale misses its much more accurate indictment of the American idealization of capitalist conquest.

posted by neel master at 12:03 AM

Other Than Postmodernism: Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics
By Frank Palmieri
for Postmodern Culture

In works by Pynchon, Mailer, and others in the sixties and seventies, a paranoid vision associated with an urge to order, with science, technology, and bureaucracy stands at one pole in opposition to a tendency toward disorder and an ability to tolerate uncertainty. Eliminating this pole of anarchy and flux, The X-Files instead opposes scientific rationality to belief in government conspiracies or paranormal phenomena. However, the series consistently authorizes Mulder's belief, both in the paranormal and in the conspiracy to conceal the alien presence, while Scully's scientific reason almost always proves to be woefully inadequate to the phenomena they encounter. The series further suggests a close relation between belief in conspiracies and religious faith, for example by repeatedly citing Mulder's poster of a classic grainy UFO photo carrying the caption, "I Want To Believe"; it thus renders equivalent and authorizes all the forms of belief that it considers. The X-Files also insists on the accessibility of a single, unqualified truth. The prospect of learning the hidden truth motivates first Mulder and later Scully in their efforts to uncover the government conspiracy; such a unitary and unqualified notion contributes to the epigraph for most episodes as the title sequence concludes by announcing, "The Truth Is Out There."[7] With this notion, The X-Files reinforces the agency of the liberal humanist subject: Mulder is the heroic individual on a quest to uncover the truth that the government has lied to the American people. The series thus updates alien invasion plots to attack human hybrids, reworks captivity narratives to include aliens in the place of native peoples, and bases conspiracy theories of the sixties and seventies on a belief in the availability of an absolute truth to an autonomous subject.

posted by neel master at 11:57 PM

Celebrating Erving Goffman
By Eliot Freidson

Goffman's language in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is very cool, with sufficient irony on occasion to seem more amused than sympathetic. There is a sense of detachment, not engagement. The very use of the vocabulary of the stage gives the impression of insincerity and contrivance on the part of the participants. So it is no wonder that this work is often characterized as cynical by naive commentators. Few are likely to see it as a celebration of the self; more likely is the view that it is at least neutrally a dissection , or more actively an exposé of social manners. But such reactions are superficial and unjust because in this book Goffman analyzes the ordinary , everyday people in everyday life, circumstances in which personal ruin is more literary than real, in which the price to be paid for failure is not much greater than embarrassment, circumstances in which efforts to sustain creditable selves are largely successful. In contrast, there are circumstances in which the self is profoundly threatened, in which it is attacked and discredited and its actual survival put to doubt. It is in those circumstances that Goffman shifts his stance and creates an eloquent and passionate assertion of the dignity and value of the self and a defense of its right to resist the social world even when, from the observer's point of view, it resists what may be for its own good.

We are all familiar with Goffman's work in Asylums, and especially his notion of the total institution as a "forcing house for changing persons, as a natural experiment on what can be done to the self" (p. 12). [...]The process is carried out in the name of God, or Country, or in the name of Justice or Cure, all exalted names and exalted goals. Decent people cannot contest the goal of transforming the slack, casually sinful civilian into a dedicated servant of God or Country or the People, nor can they disapprove of the reformation of the criminal and the cure of the insane so that they can be returned to everyday life as "useful" citizens. Nor does Goffman disapprove. What he documents, however, is the self's resistance to its stripping.

posted by neel master at 11:42 PM

Why I Am Also a Symbolic Interactionist
By Eliot Freidson

First, I must say that I believe that human activities and institutions are so complex and fluid that any attempt to describe them literally is hopeless, and to ascribe general rules of causation ludicrous. I believe that we must consider all our efforts to understand them to be provisional and inevitably linked with the limitations of our personal biographies and social and historical positions. Uncertain as our knowledge may be, however, since we invoke the rules of evidence and logic, there are good grounds for us to claim that our conclusions should be granted special (but by no means exclusive) authority. While lay people are not self-conscious about the concepts and theories underlying the way they make sense of their experience, and do not attempt to elaborate and contest them systematically and logically, it is our task to do so. We attempt to collect information systematically and evaluate it self-consciously and critically. Furthermore, we try to organize that information by theories which give it coherence. That intellectual discipline is what justifies our claim of privileged knowledge. But it also creates the danger of falling into the serious intellectual trap of extending our concepts and theories well beyond their useful limits.

I say this both for defensible intellectual reasons and for indefensible reasons of faith, or dogma. Let me get the indefensible reasons out of the way first. Quite simply, early in my intellectual life I read enough of the Sophists and Cynics to become infected with their spirit of skepticism sustained by reason. I was also deeply influenced by philosophical writings in what might now be called semiotics, which taught me to be very wary of mistaking words for things. Furthermore, I have read enough history to know that in every age there have been theories claiming to explain virtually everything, only to be displaced by others which prove to be equally transient. I believe that all theories, all approaches, are provisional and partial, that there is no hope of One True Explanation, One True Theory. For that reason, I think organized Schools, whether of Symbolic Interactionism or Positivism, are intellectually dangerous because they try to sweep away all other modes of thinking and research in order to gain hegemony over intellectual life. Hegemony for any one school imposes unacceptable restrictions on the way we can think about something as varied and complex as the social world.

posted by neel master at 11:35 PM

A quick biography of our man Erving Goffman.

A sociologist well-known for his analyses of human interaction, Erving Goffman relied less on formal scientific method than on observation to explain contemporary life. He wrote on subjects ranging from the way people behave in public to the different "forms" of talk, and always from the point of view that every facet of human behavior is "significant in the strategy and tactics of social struggle, " a Times Literary Supplement critic says. Roy Harris, in another Times Literary Supplement review, calls Goffman "a public private-eye. . . forever on the lookout for candid-camera evidence which might lead to divorce proceedings between ourselves and our social images."

posted by neel master at 6:29 PM

See what all the fuss is about. Long excerpts from Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.

In our own Anglo-American culture there seems to be two common-sense models according to which we formulate our conceptions of behavior: the real, sincere, or honest performance; and the false one that thorough fabricators assemble for us, whether meant to be taken unseriously, as in the work of stage actors, or seriously, as in the work of confidence men. We tend to see real performances as something not purposely put together at all, being an unintentional product of the individuals unself-conscious response to the facts in his situation. And contrived performances we tend to see as something painstakingly pasted together, one false item on another, since there is no reality to which the items of behavior could be a direct response. It will be necessary to see now that these dichotomous conceptions are by way of being the ideology of honest performers, providing strength to the show they put on, but a poor analysis of it.

posted by neel master at 6:17 PM

Apparently, Jonathan Yardley is an enemy of all that is true and right in America. The entry below links to an article that puts a great dent in his credibility, and the article to which I'm about to link will do it all over again. Michael Berube's "Public Image Limited" was published as a defense of the broadening of academic horizons often denigrated as political 'correctness.' At the height of the raging early-nineties debate over p.c., Berube contributed a much needed lefty voice to the overwhelmingly sarcastic and dismissive condemnations appearing in mass media.

academic literary critics are normally considered to be roughly as necessary to contemporary American life as catapults and moats, undoubtedly there's a sense in which one is obligated to "politicize" a discipline with such vast potential for saying intelligent things to people who are curious about what they've read and haven't read, curious even to know why anyone should read anything, for what possible purposes, in what varieties of ways. But that's not what people think we do. Thanks to our limited public image, most folks now believe we brainwash our students by feeding them '60s radicalism alongside what one New Republic commentator calls "warmed-over Nietzscheanism," thus turning them into agents of political correctness. It's simple, really: whenever my students hear me snap my fingers and quote Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, they spontaneously begin to decry homophobia, sexism, racism, ageism, monologism, lookism, bagism, dragism, and journalism.

The result so far is that recent literary theory is so rarely accorded the privilege of representing itself in nonacademic forums that journalists, disgruntled professors, embittered ex-graduate students, and their families and friends now feel entitled to say anything at all about the academy without fear of contradiction by general readers. The field is wide open, and there's no penalty for charlatanism (quite the contrary), for few general readers are informed enough to spot even the grossest forms of misrepresentation and fraud. In fact, many journalist-critics, from Jonathan Yardley to Roger Kimball, profess outright disdain for a discipline in which you actually have to do research before you begin writing; in early 1988, for example, one of Yardley's columns attacking the "young fascists" of the academy derived every piece of its information from Joseph Berger's slight New York Times article of the previous week (thus confirming the suspicion that The Washington Post takes its cultural news from back issues of the Times).

posted by neel master at 7:21 PM

History Wars

Mark Noll is a professor of Christian thought and history at Wheaton College and is a writer for Christianity Today. In the latter capacity, he writes trenchant articles about all kinds of things, articles that often challenge the conservative orthodoxy and often name names. In "History Wars," Noll chronicles the public debate over the content of a 1995 Smithsonian exhibit about the atom bomb and Hiroshima. He takes opportunistic conservative ideologues like Jonathan Yardley, Newt Gingrich, and Lynne Cheney to task for ignoring or distorting important truths about the process of writing history.

I love Mark Noll. Let me explain: in high school, I wrote an article for the newspaper advocating the legalization of marijuana. All the stoners loved me after that, because as a straight-arrow clean-as-a-whistle nerd, I possessed immaculate credibility. It is much in this way that I love Mark Noll; a Christian contra Gingrich is a handy and punishing and legitimizing rhetorical ally for a self-loathing leftist like me.

In the days immediately preceding the cancellation, the presidents of the Society for Military History and the Organization of American Historians wrote to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, chancellor of the Smithsonian's board of regents, imploring him to preserve the exhibit. Even as they did so, House Speaker Gingrich summed up his opposition in these phrases: "Political correctness may be okay in some faculty lounge, but…the Smithsonian is a treasure that belongs to the American people and it should not become a plaything for left-wing ideologies."

[...]

Bad as such lack of sympathy was, it was not as bad as the reasoning of the exhibit's harshest critics, which revealed a dangerous notion of historical truth. The problem was revealed in appeals made by critics to allow the events of 1945 to be viewed in its own time. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, who persuaded the Senate to pass a resolution undermining Harwit's effort to mount an informational exhibit, insisted that "we should not interpret the dropping of the bomb as we look at it today" but rather "put it in the context of the time."

The difficulty with such criticism is that one of the main objectives of Harwit and his associates was to do precisely that—to use documents from April through August 1945 (some not made public until long after the deaths of their authors) in order to show how American leaders at the time were thinking about the use of the bomb. It was these documents from the times that contained lower casualty projections, considerations of Soviet diplomacy, speculations on when Japan might surrender if the bomb were not used, and even a few anguished reflections on the morality of bombing largely civilian populations.

Criticism that attacked the NASM for "re-writing history" in order to promote "revisionist" perspectives was, thus, mendacious or ignorant. But other criticism was even worse. Jonathan Yardley, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote on October 10, 1994, that the proposed exhibit "can fairly be called anti-American propaganda." This judgment was questionable. Yardley's broader cultural warrant supporting this judgment was ludicrous: "Especially now, when the rank odor of deconstruction hangs over the scholarly community, it is easy for people to fabricate intellectual arguments for the triviality of facts and then to find whatever 'meaning' they choose in such facts, or non-facts, as they are willing to 'deconstruct' for their ideological convenience."

In actuality, it was the staff of the NASM that was trying to respect facts, to tie historical interpretation to actual contemporary documents, and to push past "ideological convenience" in order to present the mission of the Enola Gay in broad historical perspective. It was tub-thumpers like Yardley who were trivializing facts, divorcing events from meaning, and squeezing the results of historical re search into a preconceived ideological grid.

posted by neel master at 6:58 PM

Irrationalist in Chief

Leon Kass is a professor of classics at the University of Chicago (my would-be alma mater.) He and his wife Amy enjoy somewhat legendary status at the U of C. Like the Africanists John and Jean Comaroff, and the recently departed Homi and Jacqueline Bhaba, their marriage functions as both a family unit and a tiny academic regime. The Kasses are notoriously conservative; they team-taught a course on the defense of marriage during my last semester at Chicago. Anyway, neon Leon's name is being bandied about as a candidate for some or the other Bush administration position concerning bioethics, a development that disturbs me and American Prospect writer Chris Mooney alike. Here Mooney draws a very nice distinction, a very nice distinction indeed.

Indeed, in his 1990 Hastings Center speech, Kass complained: "Most religious ethicists entering the public practice of ethics leave their special religious insights at the door and talk about 'deontological vs. consequentialist,' 'autonomy vs. paternalism,' 'justice vs. utility,' just like everybody else."

[...]

It's important to note that the objection is not that Kass has religious views, but that he thinks it's fine to base his arguments on them when making policy recommendations for a pluralistic society. Contrast this, as Virginia Postrel does, with the noted Rice University bioethicist Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. Engelhardt is an Orthodox Christian who edits the journal Christian Bioethics. But he also knows what it means to advance bioethical theories that must suit a nation composed of diverse viewpoints, arguing: "If all do not listen to God so as to be united in one religion ... , the only source of common moral authority among moral strangers will be consent."

posted by neel master at 6:16 PM