Contingency and Stability in History
According to one usual story, necessity connotes stability whilst contingency connotes instability. Foucault is anything but the usual story. One thing that makes his work so provocative and appealing is his attribution of stability and contingency to the selfsame objects of his historical inquiries—or to put it differently, his employment of stability and contingency in the selfsame analytic for historical inquiry.
Foucault’s objects of inquiry are often remarkably stable structures such as disciplinary power and their corollary institutions such as prisons. Unlike those who take this stability as flowing from some necessity (which the historian would prove by way of a causal explanation referring to, say, economic necessity or social efficiency), Foucault shows how high degrees of stability sometimes flow from the contingent coalescence of congeries of chancy occurrences. The fact that these very stable structures and institutions emerged contingently does little to unseat or disrupt them, however. They are, after all, remarkably stable.
And that, after all, is part of Foucault’s point. This is why Foucault is not content to merely make a philosophical or ontological point but rather works in a way that combines philosophy and ontology with history. Since these stabilities are conditioned by a massive historical inertia, we cannot easily transform them. If we do wish to initiate a transformative response to the problematizations that these stable structures and institutions form, then one thing we would require is a historical inquiry that places at our disposal an understanding of the materials which conditioned the emergence of these stabilities. A historical understanding of these conditions equips us with a reflexive relationship to the contingencies which make us who we are such that we can begin the long and hard labor of transforming those remarkably stable structures to which we find ourselves subjected.
[n.b.: this is a paragraph from my genealogy book.]
Where is all the pragmatist historiography?
It’s a truism to anyone who has bothered to think even just a little bit about it that philosophical pragmatism is thoroughly invested in locating ideas, practices, activities, and judgments in their historical context. Here is one way to think about this. A key pragmatist commitment is to contextualism (in a generic sense) according to which we can discern the meaning of an idea only by tracing out its effects in the context in which it operates including importantly its historical and temporal (but also its cultural, geographical, etc.) contexts.
One can see this historical contextualism quite clearly across the full range of pragmatisms from Deweyan classicopragmatism to Rortyan neopragmatism. Many of the best books in the pragmatist canon are best read as intellectual histories which do they work they do by ably putting certain philosophical themes into the historical streams in which they flowed. I am thinking of Dewey’s Quest for Certainty or Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (and there are countless other works by Mead, Addams, Du Bois, &c.).
If historical contextualism is so central to pragmatism, however, one would have expected pragmatists to have turned their attention to the philosophy of history or what some of us like to call historiography. Yet there is surprisingly little work in this area. Dewey wrote almost nothing sustained on the topic (cf. a few pages in the 1938 Logic). Rorty wrote an article in 1984 (cf. the Philosophy in History volume he co-edited). Harvard intellectual historian James Kloppenberg has a nice piece on this in Metaphilosophy in 2004. Rutgers intellectual historian James Livingston (cf. his blog) gives some sustained attention to broader meta- questions impacting these issues in his 2001 Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy.
This is all great work, but none of it represents a full-fledged pragmatist historiography. This is not a criticism of this work, because that is not its goal.
I find this curious. Nobody seems to have attempted to fully work out the ramifications of pragmatism for historiography. Where is that work? Where is all the pragmatist historiography? Where should someone like myself who is preparing some material on this topic go fishing around next? And, assuming I am correct in hunch that though there may be some more work in this area I have yet to find there is not much of it, why has all the pragmatist historiography gone missing? Why didn’t Dewey or Rorty or anyone else write a paper called “The Theory of History”? (Or did they and I am missing it?)
So far the best resource I have found is work by the mid-century pragmatist (some deny him this label) John Herman Randall, Jr., specifically his 1958 Nature and Historical Experience and 1963 How Philosophy Uses Its Past. I am working through it so more to report soon.
This topic has been of some interest to me for awhile so please comment or email with any thoughts. I have an article entitled “Historicism in Pragmatism” forthcoming in Metaphilosophy which addresses these issues from a general perspective but does not develop a detailed pragmatist historiography. I am also working on a second piece on John Herman Randall and pragmatist historiography in connection with an upcoming event I helped co-organize.
My hunch (unsurprising to anyone who knows me): the pragmatists here have a great deal to learn from the genealogists: pragmatist historiography ought to look like a history of problematization: go Dewey+Foucault!
The Function of Critical Inquiry
From a discussion of ‘novelty’ over at the ARC/Rabinow Concept Work blog where I wrote:
“What function can and ought critical inquiry serve today? Not denunciation of course! (Nor its contemporary twin, snarkiness!) We can seek to understand where these conditions came from, of what elements they are composed, and to what stresses they are susceptible. To denounce is beside the point and nobody is listening anyway. We might take as our example Foucault, who never said that ‘discipline’ was a bad thing even if this was the takeaway message for almost everyone who read him too quickly: discipline is a condition of who we are and so we would do well to understand the broader problematization by which it conditions us.”
Book Cover, New Job, &c.
It’s been awhile since I’ve updated anything here. That’s a sign of business not laziness, of course. (It’s also a function of the increasingly-useful way in which status updates are handled on facebook.)
Two main pieces of news.
First, I am now living up in Eugene, Oregon where I have a one-year appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Oregon. I am (if it’s not obvious) quite pleased to be up here: great colleagues, great graduate students, great program, and a great place to live.
Hunkering down for a solid year of solid work in Eugene should give me the opportunity to update the blog more often. So I plan to start on that.
Second, it now appears as if my book Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty will be out with Columbia University Press very soon (sometime next month, apparently). I was quite pleased that Columbia was able to get the rights to an image of the painting that I have long hoped would grace the cover of the book, Ducham’s Nude Descending a Staircase, no.2. You can read a little more about the book on Columbia UP’s website.
So, more soon I hope. I’m investing lots of time in lots of projects right now. Some of them will be bloggable in short order.
Foucault’s Hourglass of Threads
To make sense of the complex relations composing the various aspects of a philosopher’s work it is often useful to package these aspects together into simple images that offer memorable portraits of their relation to one another. Hence one of the most reliable tools of the contemporary philosopher: the chalkboard diagram: someone should, I am convinced, put together a book of our diagrams, with large high-quality images flanked by short little explanatory notes along the margins.
In the case of important parts of Foucault’s work, I often find it useful to coordinate their relation in terms of a diagrammatic image that I call Foucault’s hourglass of threads.
Obama: Pragmatism: etc.
A few items of interest, re: Obama and Pragmatism.
Pragmatist scholar John Capps and a colleague at Rochester Inst of Tchlgy are teaching a course on Obama as Pragmatist this quarter entitled “Reading Obama”. The course syllabus looks great (not only b/c of what’s on it but also as a model for how to put together a course on pragmatism and some theme or person of contemporary interest).
Another scholar of pragmatism, Michael Eldridge at UNCC, has put together a page that offers a nice selection of resources on Obama and pragmatism. This is very helpful and should prove even more helpful going forward.
(Btw, if I haven’t posted much lately, here or elsewhere, it’s because I’m in Foucault-land this quarter. I’m doing a senior seminar on Foucault at UCSC right now with a bunch of really incredibly talented students. Whoever doesn’t simply love teaching must have never had an opportunity like this.)
What’s wrong with Lessig’s “Harmful To Minors” tag?
In Code v 2.0 Lessig advances an argument about how to deal with harmful content on the internet (i.e., how to help parents keep their kids from checking out the plethora of online porn). You can find the argument in Chapter 12 on the wiki version of the book. Search for “kids-mode-browsing”: page 253 in my old-fashioned printed book, with dog-eared page.
I do not follow the argument. But it seems to me that it is so obviously objectionable that I must be missing something important here. Probably there is some legal nuance I am not sensitive to. Ah, the delicacies of the intelligence that ever elude. I would be grateful if any random reader (or friend) who comes along might help me see the light.
Lessig’s argument is in service of his proposal for a “kids-mode-browsing” (KMB) based on a code-level implementation of a “harmful to minors” ([H2M]) tag. The proposal is meant to address both the producer (speaker) and consumer (listener) sides of the speech transaction in a way that is consistent with both a viable interpretation of First Amendment rights and the perceived need to protect kids from content society deems harmful to them. The implementation of the tag shifts the burden of identifying harmful content to content producers and purveyors (i.e., websites). The implementation of the browsing functionality takes advantage of this tag to enable parents to configure their kids’ computers (or desktop profiles) such that content so-tagged will not be objectionable.
(Preliminary) Response to Lessig
A number of political theorists have concluded that the new set of technologies and practices known as the internet undermines some of the core epistemic, civic, and moral conditions for democratic culture. See, for instance, my post on Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.o. I disagree with Sunstein et. al. but I find their arguments worth addressing.
One way of addressing these arguments is to take them seriously but to offer some kind of response, perhaps provisional, as to how the challenges contained therein might be met. This is how I have been reading the work of cultural critic and Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig (at least this is how I have been reading it this week). Lessig’s work is probably the most important of that which tries to respond to the problems laid out by Sunstein and others. It is the most important not only because the most influential, but also because the most radical. Lessig’s work is also usefully representative insofar as it aims to respond to the problems posed by seeking to restore the familiar equilibria of liberal democracy as we have known it for quite some time now.
Castells: Seeing Networks Everywhere He Looks
A little obligatory reading lately, namely Manuel Castells on the network society. This is for my ongoing research project on emerging internetworking practices (i.e., what most people misleadingly refer to as ‘the internet’). Castells I regard as obligatory here insofar as my object of inquiry in many respects overlaps with that on which his impressive body of work is focused. But in a first pass through some of his most recent suitably-sized (i.e., <50 page) self-summaries of his work, I am struck by the extent to which my method is quite different. So what are the differences? Read the rest of this entry »
