In speaking of this movement, I would not propose to speak to the movement and most certainly not for the movement.  Rather I would like to position myself today as someone who speaks with the movement from a position that is alongside the movement parallel to it.  I shall not presume to state what the movement is about (speaking for) nor what the movement should be about (speaking to), but only about some of the things that this occupation is directly and actually doing, as seen from a space that is parallel to and adjacent with occupation (speaking with).

The parallel and adjacent position from which I shall be speaking is that of political philosophy.  You might think of we political philosophers as those of your friends (and frienemies) who get paid to be obsessive over contemporary politics, and especially the conditions thereof.  In speaking of the mobilization that is taking place with the occupations, the role of the political philosopher is that of helping to make sense of this mobilization by articulating some of the concepts that would be adequate to its conditions.  It is in this sense that I write from a position that is right up next to (adjacent) and tracking along with (parallel) the occupations.  What I would like to say, then, are only a few things about what the occupation provokes and excites, but also disturbs and afflicts, in a space adjacent and parallel to it.

Two Simple Ideas. I will attempt to speak today to only two ideas.  The first is this: the occupation provokes us to think about politics as a practice of problematization, or what might more simply be described in terms of the idea of politics as questioning.  The second idea is this: the occupation provokes us to think about politics as a practice that is procedural as much as it is substantive, or what I might more simply describe in terms of the idea of politics as involving processes that concern how we do what we do.

These two ideas are both relatively simple.  One is the idea of question.  The other is the idea of process.  These are simple ideas in that everybody understands them.  But the simplicity of an idea should not be mistaken for its unimportance.  The most elegant and influential ideas are often the most important.  Let me give an example, or rather two.

Take as a first example the idea of democracy—an idea that is quite simple to us today.  The idea that the means of governance of a people should be directly reliant upon those people who are governed is after all not extraordinarily complex.  You can state it a simple phrase: the governed should be their own governers.  This idea of ‘governed governers’, what philosophers like to call in their fancier terms ‘conditioned conditioners’ (i.e., that which is conditioned also contributes conditions to its own conditioning), is relatively simple and straightforward.  Democracy says simply that if you are governed, then you should be part of that which governs you.  The impact of this idea, however simple it may be, has been profound and lasting.  It is at the very heart of our greatest modern ideal of freedom, which offers another useful example of a simple idea.

For freedom, like democracy, is a relatively simple idea whose impact and importance simply cannot be overstated.  Anybody who does not understand democracy cannot understand freedom.  And anybody who does not understand freedom is in desperate need of the help that can be offered by those of us who do.  The help we can lend is not primarily philosophical or conceptual, as if we can help people become free by telling them what freedom is.  Freedom is a practice.  Freedom is a doing.  You cannot be free unless you are acting freely.  You cannot be free unless you are making yourself so.  To think otherwise is to mistake freedom for comfort or happiness or the satisfaction of desire, none of which is freedom, though they may sometimes be involved in it.

Questioning. The first of the two ideas I would like to speak about concerns questioning.  My idea is that occupation may be usefully seen as a practice of what I might call ‘problematization’ or ‘becoming-problem’.  To situate this a little bit, allow me to make a theoretical distinction common among political philosophers.  At the heart of democratic practices of freedom are two profound kinds of struggle or labor that necessarily require one another.  These are the struggle of questioning and of reforming.  Political struggle and the act of political critique almost always involves both of these processes.  I like to think of these processes as interdigitated.  On the one hand we have acts of putting questions to political organizations and on the other hand we have acts of reforming political organizations.  Situated one on each hand, these processes reach out for one another and in gaining grasp of each other they thus interdigitate.

So my first idea is just the simple one that occupation is at the present juncture an intervention in the spirit of this first process of problematization of questioning.  Occupation is in the first place and primarily about putting a question, at least for now.  Though the time of questioning and the time of reforming are interdigitated, there are events and actions in which one of these properly comes to the fore.  There are durations, not just moments of time but long and real stretches of human action, in which questioning is the proper form for critical political mobilization to take.

Consider the lone body of an anonymous Chinese student standing inert before a tank whose long barrel flashes its ugly teeth straight at his chest—this student has no chance of defeating the tank or of making the tank do otherwise, except of course by questioning the tank and asking the tank to doubt itself.  Consider the bright black bodies of those poor Southerners who sat with determination at a lunch counter or on a section of the bus labeled ‘not for blacks’—these citizens had no chance of overturning the law by way of their political disobedience, except of course by questioning the polity itself and making the society that made those laws doubt itself.  Consider the fragile bodies of those courageous Americans who centuries ago thought it worthwhile to stand up for, fight for, and if need be die for an idea and practice that to many in their world seemed laughable and absurd—these citizens had no chance of overturning by themselves a system of monarchial authority so as to make room for the practice of democratic freedom, but what they could do and did do is put the question to the old system of absolutism and demand that it justify itself in the face of relentless questioning.  Contesting an army, a society, an empire.  These are acts of courage that must have felt so lonely at the time but have in time become for us the very paradigms of solidarity.  These are vivid examples from our political history of the time of doubt in which we once again find ourselves.

In 1948 the American political philosopher and democratic champion John Dewey quoted a prominent scientist of his day who had written of our overwhelming need for a “Ministry of Disturbance” to put the question to a self-governing population that is all too easily tempted by the long and slow drift toward complacent depoliticization.  The function of a present-day ministry of disturbance should be to afflict the unafflicted, to disorder the orderlies, to contest the uncontested, to substitute energy for apathy, and to relentlessly put questions to all those who put themselves in the position of having the answers.  Occupation is quickly becoming not just a ministry of disturbance but a whole barrage of ministries of disturbance.

If that idea is helpful for us today, and I think it is, then we should perhaps try to think of and practice occupation as an act of problematization.  It is for this reason that I hope that those involved in occupation linger for as long as they can in the time of the question mark.  I hope they let that moment last for as long as they can, as we can, as you can.  The occupiers will be chastised for having no direct vision, for not offering solutions, and for not making any particular demands that are capable (or not) of being satisfied.  And I hope that the occupation can sustain the courage to resist that childish chastisement.  As soon as the work of the various visioning committees is done, and a platform is forwarded in terms of tangible solutions, the occupation will have lost much of what today gives it its leverage, mobility, and force.  The time for that will eventually come.  But that time is not yet here.  For our practices of politics are today in desperate need of questions.  We are awash in answers, solutions, proposals, policies, and visions—I do not know about you but I myself am drowning in answers as I find myself shouted down from almost every corner by those who would pose to know the best way forward.  So many in our midst today like to pretend that they know how to make things right, most often by claiming to know how to keep things the way that they are in their fundamentals.  We are so rarely prepared to put the question to our current forms of political organization.  This is why it is important that we shine bright lights on the unasked questions of the present.  We should force the issue in refusing to accept any and all easy solutions, slick platforms, and mere courtesy acknowledgments.  By lingering in the question mark, we refuse the ugly temptations to think that solutions to our deepest problems are easy, available, and always just around the corner.

My hope is that some may find the courage and stamina to let the symbol of the occupation be a question mark—and to let occupation be a bright symbol of the question that we should continuously and vigilantly put to power wherever we find it being exercised, including of course by ourselves.  This brings me directly to my second simple idea.

Proceeding. Who are we questioning?  To whom are we putting the question?  Is the doubt that the occupation inflicts upon our current political organization a doubt about the kinds of outcomes of our political organizations or is it also a doubt about the procedures that lead us to these outcomes?

To situate my second idea, allow me to return to political philosophy and offer a second distinction that is commonly adverted to amongst my friends and frienemies who are philosophers.  Political philosophers like to distinguish ‘procedure’ from ‘substance’ when they talk about politics.  Nobody thinks procedure and substance are entirely distinct.  But the point of the political philosophers is just that too many of us fail to make this distinction where it counts most.

As an example of the substantive aspect of politics, consider the ethical ideal of equality.  Much of what the occupation is about is a substantive ideal of equality that is not being met by our current political organizations.  Inequality is rampant.  It is destructive.  It is too often violent, because it acts as a condition for the reproduction of violence.  Inequality by itself cannot possibly be unjust—certain inequalities are a fact of birth.  What is unjust rather are forms of political organization that pass on or reproduce inequalities so as to entrench and deepen them—the inequalities of birth need not lead directly to the massive structural inequalities of life.  The occupation movement is to be admired for the bright question it puts to the fact of the reproduction of inequalities that is doggedly defended by our current forms of political organization.

As an example now of the procedural aspect of politics, consider the various ways in which we might seek to achieve equality in the context of current political organization.  We might seek to lessen inequality by demanding of the government that it implement more progressive taxation.  We might seek to lessen inequality by demanding of corporations that they not be unfairly privileged by government subsidies or exceptional exemptions that the humble citizens of the middle and lower class do not enjoy.  We might seek to lessen inequality by demanding of our communities that they more firmly stand against inequality by implementing direct local measures.  We might, lastly, seek to lessen inequality by demanding of our very selves that we do what we can to stand against inequality and to further equality in whatever ways come within our capacity—think here not only the charity of money but also of the democracy of labor, energy, and effort that the occupy movement so excellently exemplifies.

In putting a question to our current forms of political organization, then, one might rightly find themselves excited by the work they see taking place in the context of the occupation movements.  One might see, for example, that the occupations are as much about questions of political procedure as they are about issues of political substance.  Seen this way, what occupy enacts is the idea that our political problems today include not only substantive problems of inequality, violence, racism, sexism, classism, and crony capitalism, but also problems of the process of democratic freedom itself, insofar as we live in a democratic state that is so frozen over as to lack almost in its entirety the energies of democratic dynamics.  A state describes a position of being still, perhaps even of being stuck.  A dynamic describes a position of motion, and of transition.  Democracy is all about transitions.  Let us not allow democracy to be state-ified.  Let us rather make it as dynamic as it can be.  There never has been a democratic state: but rather only democratic practices of state-making.

One way of making democracy dynamic is not to think of political questions as questions that are primarily directed at the state, as if our mobilization can be reduced to a petition to the state to bring about some ideal state.  Think of these questions as being directed, rather, everywhere.  They are directed at the state and the corporations.  But they are also directed at our communities, our neighborhoods, our cities, and our counties.  Lastly, and I would insist most importantly, let these questions also be directed at our selves.  What are we doing?  How are we lessening inequality?  Or how are we furthering it?  What are we doing to actually and directly make freedom in our midst?  These are among the most interesting, because most radical and most self-searching, questions that the occupations are raising.

In 1982 the French political philosopher and resistance agitator Michel Foucault wrote of the importance of a “politics of our selves”.  Foucault’s point was just that our political procedures and processes are embodied not only in institutions and concrete material realities, but above all in the humble everyday actions we undertake to reproduce them.

If this idea is helpful, and I think it is, then we should be prepared to accept and act on the difficult idea that the protest of our politics must also be a protest of our selves.  This claim might seem oblique or obtuse.  But it is not.  All politics is ultimately democratic politics in that it always depends ultimately on those who are involved and engaged.  If our political organizations are not what they should be, this persists only insofar as we let it.  To the extent that we remain passive and lethargic, slip into what used to be masterfully referred to as political ‘drift’, then we lose the gain that is democracy.  We must protest against who we are such that we do not get torn along by the drift.  In protesting who we are, we also put ourselves in a position to protest all that is around us.  This is exactly what occupation does.  Think of who you were only six weeks ago.  Are you not now a protest to where you were, what you did, who you had become?  Are we now not all on the verge of becoming a protest to ourselves?  Occupy yourself, many have said.  That self-protest would be at one and the same time a protest against the processes we find ourselves enmeshed in makes perfect sense.  The only way to protest the system is to refuse one’s complicity in it.

The protest of who we have allowed ourselves to become is exactly what democracy looks like.  More than anything else, democracy is the antipathy of apathy.

A Symbol. Occupation is the problematization of our political selves.  Occupation is not a stance or a position—and insofar as every position is capable of reversal, one should be thankful that occupation has not yet become just one more position on the map.  Occupation is not a solution or a proposal—and insofar as every solution is all too easily refused and refuted by our current political organizations one should be thankful that occupation has not yet become just one more proposed proposal.

I would like to think of the occupations as a volley of question marks and arrows.  If this symbol is helpful, then we should at least remind ourselves that it is difficult to overestimate the power of a question in motion.  A question in motion is among the weightiest forces in the entirety of human action.  If you do not believe me, you need only ask yourself if you really do not believe me.

The starting point of Dewey’s argument in The Public and Its Problems is Walter Lippmann’s thesis, expounded in his 1922 Public Opinion and 1925 The Phantom Public, that the public is today, in Dewey’s phrase, “lost” and “bewildered” (116).  The public finds itself midst multiple gluts of misinformation.  It cannot cope.  Inquiry and deliberation are hardly capable of being intelligent.  This can be seen as a serious insult to democracy.

Dewey’s articulation of the problem he finds through Lippmann is more detailed and analytically exact than he is typically given credit for.  One way to make sense of Dewey’s argument is to see him as outlining a concept of what might be called dual-form severe pluralism.  Where for Lippmann, this sort of pluralism amounts to a condition incompatible with democracy, for Dewey this pluralism is a challenge to democracy which democracy may yet reconstruct.

Dewey’s text outlines two corollary forms of pluralism which I will call internal pluralism (or fragmentation) and external pluralism (or distribution).  These two forms of pluralism are corollary and hence Dewey’s concept of pluralism is dual-form and they both run all the way down such that Dewey’s concept of pluralism is severe rather than limited.

Dewey writes, “There are too many publics and too much of public concern for our existing resources to cope with” (126).  Internal pluralism (or “too much” public) refers to the way in which publics are internally differentiated or composed of units which are themselves not all of the same stuff—the persons composing publics are not all alike in every salient political aspect (cf. Dewey 126 and 146 on the “manifold” public).  External pluralism (or “too many publics”) refers to the way in which the public is scattered into many publics such that we always find ourselves midst multiple publics which are not always easily reconcilable—the publics in which we participate are many (cf. Dewey 126 and 137 on “scattered” publics).  Every public is itself composed of a complexity of lower-order units at a lower level (internal pluralism) and is also itself composable into a higher-order unit that shows it to be one of many publics at its level (external pluralism).  [I realize that a diagram would be helpful here.]

These conditions of severe dual-form pluralism pose a challenge to democracy just insofar as they make plain how much democracy finds itself confronting an immense organizational challenge.  Conflict proves itself relentless under such conditions, and in multiple ways.  Democracy, as a method of managing conflict, seems to have its work cut out for it.  Lippmann would take this is an irremediable insult to democracy.  Dewey would take it insulting, but would respond by taking it in stride as a remediable challenge to democracy.

Next week: Dewey on communication and community (about which there is, rightly, much confusion).

First, Dewey is clear that he favors philosophical empiricism over against philosophical rationalism.  He writes of a “gap between facts and doctrines” (1927, 3) where the latter clearly show up short.  Throughout the book, Dewey will criticize the concept of “The State” for being an abstraction, just as he did in RIP.

Second, Dewey favors an approach that he identifies as empirical social science in contrast from empirical natural science (1927, 7).  This, of course, makes sense given that his object of study is political society.  That said, it is worth noting that Dewey explicitly contrasts the methods of social science with those of natural science, a distinction that not all philosophers have been careful to make.  Of course, among those who do make the distinction, various terms have been proposed.  Dewey’s argument in part is that the objects of empirical social science exhibit what Ian Hacking would later call “looping effects” in a way that the objects of the latter do not.  This is to say that when we study social objects (e.g., people) the objects of our study interact with the results of our study (e.g., concepts for people) in a way that is not the case with the objects of empirical natural science.  For instance, you can call a horse or a computer cable “male” but that is not going to matter to the horse, even if it’s a female horse.  But if you call a person “male”, this is probably going to matter to them, especially if they do not identify as male, and even if they do, before long they are going to come back at you and tell you just what they think it means to be a “male”.  Or, to shift the example, when the psychiatrist tells their patient that they have “ADHD” this influences the way in which the patient comes to perceive themselves—they take up the label and transform themselves in its light, thus feeding back into the application of the label, in a process that soon gets “loopy”.

Third, Dewey is clear that his approach to empirical social science is at once descriptive and normative (1927, 9).  The methodological decision here, in short, is a refusal of the fact/value dichotomy that pervades too much of philosophy, and which pragmatism finds inimical to productive inquiry (cf. Hilary Putnam’s “The Fact/Value Dichotomy”).

Fourth, and finally, Dewey claims that his approach to a descriptive-plus-normative empirical social science will involve a methodological focus on consequences rather than causes as its primary objects of concern (1927, 12ff.).  Dewey makes a big deal of this methodological decision and is eager to show how it involves a criticism of a whole raft of standard assumptions in political theory, most notably the basic assumptions of contractarianism, which Dewey decidedly rejects.

Having stated briefly Dewey’s four methodological decisions, it is worth being explicit that there is a great deal at stake in taking the foregoing elements as methodological decisions rather than metaphysical commitments.  This, of course, is a matter of debate.  My own view is that we need not see Dewey as insisting upon a metaphysical privilege of consequences over causes, for instances, if instead we can see Dewey as more humbly making a methodological decision to focus on results rather than origins.  This is in keeping, I think, with the way that James saw pragmatism, namely as a methodological approach to resolving practical and philosophical disputes, rather than a philosophical metaphysics which would irrevocably settle such disputes by submitting them to the tribunal of an intellect grasping the way things really are.

With this four-part methodology informing his discussion, there is one further central methodological claim that remains more or less implicit in Dewey’s text.  This is Dewey’s methodological focus on problems and responses as the key elements of his inquiry.  While this is only implicit in PIP, an account of inquiry in terms of “problematizations” and “reconstructions” is of course an explicit component of Dewey’s conception of the work of inquiry itself (cf. Logic [1938], Chapter 6).

The structure of Dewey’s text clearly reveals this implicit methodological commitment to what McKeon, under Dewey’s influence, would later come to call “problematic method”.  After laying out his methodological in Chapter One and explicating his core conceptual apparatus in Chapter Two, Dewey spends Chapters Three and Four developing an historical account of the “problem” of the public in his day, and then in Chapters Five and Six offers a future-oriented outline of how we might reconstruct the problematic situation just specified.

Dewey’s approach here, it is worth pointing out, resembles in many ways that of Michel Foucault.  Like Foucault, Dewey thought of inquiry as structured not around a quest for eternal truth, but rather as the melioration of a fraught situation — in other words, both Dewey and Foucault were ‘problem-and-response’ thinkers (cf. Rabinow [2011]).  Also like Foucault, Dewey agreed that part of melioration is a specification of the problem (or ‘fraught-ness’) we find ourselves within.  Also like Foucault, Dewey thought that the best way of specifying a problem was to give its history.  Also like Foucault, Dewey is clear that the best way to give a history of a problem is to detail its emergence in terms of its contingency and its complexity.  That Dewey’s histories are like Foucault’s genealogies in being stories about the contingent and complex emergence of present problems is as manifest in his texts as it is in Foucault’s: “The development of political democracy represents the convergence of a great number [complexity] of social movements, no one of which owed either its origin or its impetus to inspiration of democratic ideals or to planning for the eventual outcome [contingency]” (1927, 85; cf. also resonances to Hayek’s method in political theory as I argue in Koopman [2009]).  There are, of course, differences.  Dewey’s histories remain sweeping histories of ideas whereas Foucault’s were exquisitely detailed histories of practices.  But at a broader level, there is much methodological overlap, and that’s worth taking note of.

Next week: the problematization of the public according to Dewey (namely, severe pluralism) and what to do about it (namely, find a way to embrace pluralism).

Dewey on Social Unity in 1888

In his early 1888 article “The Ethics of Democracy” we witness a young Dewey still in the capture of a certain strain of Hegelian idealism.  Dewey’s arguments in that article are indeed on behalf of a conception of democracy that extends beyond a merely state-confined conception of democracy as “only a form of government” (EW1.229).  Despite these early hesitations about statism, Dewey’s conception of democracy has yet to absorb the pluralism that would be necessary for a full repudiation of statism.  For Dewey is in this piece still explicitly anti-pluralist in his conception of democracy, urging as he does a “social organism” conception in which “society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case” (EW1.232).  Democracy, for the young Dewey, is directed toward the coordination of government and governed according to the unity of society through which both have meaning.

The result is a substantive conception of democracy as a strongly moral notion fitting of a unified conception of the social that stands in need of democratic organization: “Democracy is a form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual association” (EW1.240).

While this moral conception of democracy as a way of life broader in scope than mere government would remain at the center of Dewey’s democratic theory throughout his life, he would later call into question the premise of this early formulation that a way of life is always a unified way of life.  This amounts to calling into question democracy as a substantive ideal in favor of a more proceduralist conception of democracy.  This tension between proceduralism and substantivism in Dewey’s democratic theory has been discussed before, most notably by Axel Honneth (cf. his two 1998 articles in Political Theory and the Peirce Transactions journals).  What is worth noting at this point is, first, that Dewey’s shift from substantive to procedural democracy was correlative with a shift from monistic to pluralistic social theory, and second, that Dewey’s democratic theory would never finally resolve the tension at work between these two conceptions.

For evidence of the first point, Dewey’s monism, we need only consult this overblown statement of the final paragraph: “Democracy and the one, the ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonyms” (EW1.248).  There is more assertion than argumentation in this claim.  As such it assumes all the familiar trappings of idealism (including, by the way, Dewey’s colloquial, but presumably unintentional, claim that these are synonyms “to [his] mind’).  Dewey is aware of the concern: “But this, you will say, is idealism”.  Aware but apparently not sensitive: “It is indeed idealism” (EW1.249).  This idealistic monism gradually gave way in Dewey’s philosophical thinking and democratic theory alike to a more sensitive empiricism in virtue of which he came to recognize pluralism.  That the early trappings of monistic substantivism would always haunt Dewey’s democratic theory, my second point, can be seen by observing those texts.  This unresolved tension between procedural and republican theory, of course, should not be thought of as Dewey’s burden—it is the burden of democratic theory itself in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Dewey on Society in 1916

In Dewey’s more mature contributions to democratic theory we find a different kind of emphasis on the quality of democracy as a way of life.  To begin, in chapter seven of his 1916 Democracy and Education Dewey addresses “The Democratic Conception in Education.”  One central focus here is to get right the conception of social relations such that it can be made clear how education can inform and enrich specifically democratic social relations.  A central idea for Dewey, writing midst the centralizing tendencies of the American Progressive Era and the European Great War, is that, “Society is one word, but many things” (81).  Although “society is conceived as one by its very nature,” we can gain distance from this idealist abstraction and affirm as good empiricists the reality that when we actually look “we find not unity, but a plurality of societies, good and bad” (82).  Dewey affirms that gangs of thieves form a society as much as do those combined in political organizations.  What Dewey is here criticizing is the idealist tendency to think of society as an inherently normative term, such that some forms of society evince real society whilst others are parasitic corruptions of the ideal.  Rather than idealize society itself, Dewey suggests inquiry into the qualities of any given society as a means of determining its normative valence.  Thus, says Dewey, “The problem is to extract the desirable trains of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvements” (83).  This is immanent critique, just in the sense that it involves the critique of some aspects of society on the basis of other aspects.

Social critique in any form requires some kind of standard for distinguishing better from worse forms of society.  Interestingly, in invoking a standard for critique, Dewey proves himself to be only half-hearted in his commitment to immanent critique.  For Dewey does not so much articulate a standard that is already up and running in really-existing social practices as he imports a standard from outside which he takes to be constitutive of social practice as such.  In this, Dewey’s approach still bears evidence of the kind of moral substantivism characteristic of his approach in the 1888 “Ethics of Democracy” article.  This opens up a difficult tension in Dewey’s approach at this juncture—for he appears to want to combine pluralism (which seems incompatible with substantivism) with substantivism (which seems to depend on monism).  Dewey’s way of resolving this tension is surprising: he invokes pluralism itself as the standard!

Dewey, in other words, explicitly affirms pluralism as normative in Democracy and Education.  Of particular interest here is the way in which pluralism is specified: “How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared?  How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association?” (83).  Dewey’s standard here speaks explicitly to both aspects of pluralism, namely the internal pluralism of a diversity of differentiated interests within a society, and the external pluralism of a multiplicity of social forms in relation to one another.  Dewey uses this as a basis for endorsing democracy, insofar as democratic forms of society better meet this two-form pluralist standard (cf. 86-88).

What remains unresolved in this early text, however, is the justification of this dual-form pluralism as a standard.  While Dewey is right that democracy perhaps better meets the requirements of internal and external pluralism than do other modes of association, there is no compelling reason why this form of pluralism is itself a good thing.  Again, we seem to have assertion in favor of argumentation, or better yet, examination and experimentation (i.e., “inquiry” in Dewey’s honorific sense).  Dewey’s immanent critique thus fails to meet its own requirements, in large part because Dewey insists on introducing pluralism as a non-immanent standard that could provide the justification for social critique.  Dewey, in other words, is half-hearted here in his commitment to immanence.  In later texts, Dewey would back off from this position in positioning pluralism more modestly as a condition of possibility of political life in modernity.  This is to conceive of pluralism as a conditioning historical fact moreso than as a conditioning transcendental norm.

Despite this shortcoming, it is worth taking clear note of how Dewey’s specification of a dual-form or dual-perspective pluralism anticipates Dewey’s later discussions of pluralism in Public and Its Problems, even if that later text is much more content to remain ambiguous about the normative status of pluralism itself.  In later work, Dewey would be much more thoroughgoing a pragmatist in taking immanent critique all the way down: the standards for social critique are to be found within society, understood as a plurality, rather than installed from without.  Dewey would then finally shift from a conception of democracy as a substantive norm to a democratic theory looking to invest democratic practice with thoroughly procedural norms which gain their substantive content only in the course of democratic practice itself.

Note this post is the second in a series of posts on “Dewey on Publics” (read the first: Dewey on Publics and States).  Next week: The Public and Its Problems.

One of John Dewey’s lifelong obsessions with respect to political theory concerned issues of the democratic qualities in virtue of which some publics become capable of self-regulation or, to put it differently, become capable of growth (which for Dewey is always a self-directed process).  This theme emerges most clearly in his 1927 The Public and Its Problems, a text that has obsessed many commentators.  Another location where we find anticipations of that discussion is in chapter 8 of his 1920 Reconstruction In Philosophy.  One can follow the thread of that text through three themes in order to shed some light on Dewey’s conception of the democratic organization of publics, a conception which arguably is the very center of his entire philosophic vision.

I. Relation between Individual and Social.  Dewey starts Chapter 8 Reconstruction by recounting three bad concepts of individual-social relations.  The first is individualism.  The second is a kind of communitarianism or collectivism.  The third is a kind of organicism (and here he is thinking of certain strains of social thought emerging in the context of 19^th. c. German Idealism, for instance certain prominent interpretations of Hegel, though it is debatable whether or not these ideas were actually Hegel’s).  Each of these has been subjected to severe criticism.  Dewey, too, rejects all three, in favor of a conception of democracy that he will work up to by the end of the chapter.

The central problem with all three of these conceptions, for Dewey, is that they rely on abstractions.  This is pernicious in the context of social inquiry because it takes us away from the particulars of social life.  In other words, abstractions take us away from social reality, and presumably that is what we want to address if we are going to address social problems.

Dewey’s critique here might appear blunt, and so it deserves some comment.  Dewey is not saying that abstractions are bad, but rather that abstractionism is bad.  Dewey is saying that we ought to be able to trace a path from any abstract concept we employ to the specific social problems or remedies that it serves to illuminate.  (Consider this an application of the pragmatic method for tracing consequences for actual life.)  If we cannot trace that path, then we are abstractionist in that we are trading wholly in abstractions without sufficient concern for the pragmatic cash-value that these abstract concepts have.  This has much to do with metaphilosophical issues of philosophical methodology—these issues were recently addressed by Philip Kitcher in an important article in the April, 2011 issue of Metaphilosophy that deserves our attention.  More on this in a week or two (I hope).

II. Empirical-Historical Method.  This brings us to the second moment in the text.  Dewey offers his historical-empirical method as an alternative to the speculative, intuition-focused, armchair methods of abstractionism, or what William James liked to call “intellectualism”.  We need to focus on “special historic phenomena” (189 [Beacon edition with apologies to Dewey Works team]) and employ abstractions only if they can be traced to these.  If we can’t trace them, we shouldn’t use them.  There are a number of places in the text at this point where Dewey reiterates this (cf., 193, 197, 198, 200).

III. States and Publics. This sets up the crucial discussion of the chapter, at least for the purposes of anticipating Dewey’s discussion of publics in his 1927 book.  Dewey tours through a number of examples of the results of applying the new method (193ff.).  The most prolonged of these is a discussion of the abstraction of the state vis-à-vis the social reality of association (200ff.).  This is a central problem that will occupy Dewey after the publication of this book, and it is at the heart of The Public and Its Problems.  A proper understanding of the 1927 book is facilitated by gaining a sense of what is going on here in 1920.

Dewey’s argument in 1920. Dewey, employing his method, traces the emergence of the state form of governance as a historical phenomena in order to counterbalance abstractionist conceptions of The State.  Historical inquiry suggests that the state helped to bring coherence to various social forms that were otherwise rivalrous and dogmatic (see Madison on faction for an instructive discussion).  This raises the question as to whether or not the state is an “end in itself” (203) or “just an instrumentality for promoting and protecting other and more voluntary forms of association” (202; why the ‘just’?).  Dewey prefers the latter of course.  The unifying and inclusionary functions of the state, Dewey suggests, have also brought us into conditions of pluralism: both internal pluralism within any given social grouping (such that, for example, it is clear that every individual is a member of a plurality of different social groupings, from which we can safely infer that every social grouping is not internally homogenous with respect to its members) and also external pluralism among a variety of (kinds of) social groupings.  These groupings, for Dewey, “have become the real social units” (204) such that the state itself is no longer primary (Dewey’s object of critique here, of course, is the organicist conception which presumably does not loom so large for us any longer, but noting that Dewey was writing in the midst of the great European Wars one can see why he would be concerned about this).  On Dewey’s view, the job of the state is to, in a secondary sense, “foster and coordinate the activities of voluntary groupings” (204) as a conductor coordinates an orchestra (203).

Dewey’s conclusion in 1920.  Dewey concludes that, “Society, as was said, is many associations not a single organization” (205).  Herein is registered a massive shift in social and political formation which much political theory, Dewey thought, has failed to take into account.  Dewey was right and indeed the situation is worse today insofar as a majority of contemporary political philosophy still proceeds as if its object of analysis is a singular monistic object (such as the state or the public or the society) that need not be internally differentiated according to contextual requirements as revealed by empirical-historical inquiry.  This sets up a problem for democratic association insofar as it creates conditions of fragmentation.  This will be the key problem that Dewey will address in The Public and Its Problems half a decade later.

It is notable that the response Dewey gives to this problem in 1920 is the same he offers in 1927: namely, communicative practice.  Dewey says, “The situation in which a good is consciously realized is not one of transient sensations or private appetites but one of sharing and communication—public, social” (206).  Communication, for Dewey, holds the key to linking together (or what I call ‘articulating’ in order to exploit both senses of that word) otherwise fragmented publics.  There is more to be said about all this of course.  Is communication for Dewey purely or even primarily linguistic?  Are all forms of communication on a level?  If not, when is communication more rather than less democratic?  How does communicative practice help us to manage power (to pose a question addressed by Melvin Rogers)?

I (again). Democratic Relations. This brings us, back, finally to the theme with which Dewey opened the chapter, namely the relation between individual and social.  In favor of the three bad conceptions Dewey is now in a good position to put forward his own alternative democratic understanding of this relation.  Dewey here all but defines democracy in terms of “the fact that human nature is developed only when its elements take part in directing things which are common, things for the sake of which men and women form groups—families, industrial companies, governments, churches, scientific associations and so on.  The principles holds as much of one form of association, say in industry and commerce, as it does in government” (209).  Dewey then proceeds to critique purely political conceptions of democracy according to which democracy is only a form of government.

All of this suggests that Dewey sees democracy as a form of association.  Associations, or what he would later call publics, are conceptually prior to forms of government, including the nation-state form of government.  On this view, states are one way (a particularly useful way, of course) of giving coherence and organizing our publics.  Dewey certainly emphasizes the importance of states in this respect, in both 1920, and in 1927.  But also often seemed to be of two minds about the role of states.  Sometimes it sounds as if he wants states to be conductors orchestrating the relations amongst all other kinds of publics.  But other times it sounds as if Dewey is willing to be more radical in accepting the view that the state is one form of social organization in which we sometimes find ourselves participant and which often functions to coordinate many (but certainly not all) of the other publics in which we find ourselves.

Regardless of what he actually believed, the important point is that Dewey certainly gives us reason for a radical and severe scrutiny of statism, which is the idea that (in its mildest form; and there are stronger versions) there should be a presumption in favor of organizing publics by states.  Eschewing statism helps us plainly see what I take to be Dewey’s most important insight for political theory: associations assume a democratic quality not in virtue of organizing a state that extends the franchise to all, but rather in virtue of executing the difficult work of being self-regulating, in whatever manner is required to do so effectively and efficiently.  States are sometimes efficacious for this.  But sometimes they are inimical for this.  As such, there should be no presumption in favor of states as forms organizational for publics.  That presumption, which just is what statism is, produces as many problems as it resolves.  Perhaps this helps explicate the meaning of Dewey’s insistence that, in a famous phrase he frequently borrowed from Jane Addams, “democracy is a way of life” (cf. 210).

After a generation or two, nobody remembers why the line was drawn, or what function it serves.  But it is defended as vigorously as ever.  Sometime soon thereafter, newly-indoctrinated apprentices begin asking questions that the old guard can barely comprehend, let alone answer.  “Why don’t we read Deleuze here?  Have you read him?  He’s really interesting to me.  And what about Foucault?”  “Why do you insist that Quine is dry and unimportant?  Have you read him?  He’s really quite interesting to me.  And what about Dewey?”  Soon the old guard abandon their fortifications though of course they continue to talk only to those philosophers in their immediate proximity.

The apprentices, meanwhile, begin building bridges over the lines in the sand.  For even though they are merely lines in a breezeless desert, nobody knows how to cross over them in the familiar manners of walking, and the only way the apprentices can manage to muster a conversation is to carefully artifice direct means of passage from one camp to the other.  These bridges mediate.  They are avenues of conversation, transaction, and mutually-informative intervention.  Eventually, it is hoped, the bridges will begin to seem unnecessary, and philosophers will effortlessly walk across those lines, eventually rubbing them out with their footprints, as they stare up in wonder at the spectacular sculptures above that stand as a memorial to a not-too-distant time when philosophers were afraid to walk paths that are now frequently trod by just about everyone.

This little story describes, in the very rough sense that is the best that can be achieved by such a depiction, the past, current, and possible future state of professional academic philosophy.  The entrenched impasse between ‘Anglo-Analytic’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy is now more worthless than ever.  It is positively inimical to productive philosophical work on the critical problems we face in the present, as a culture and society, as a discipline and profession, and as an ethical challenge which we face in rather intensely personal ways.  Those who continue to insist on the importance of the impasse, including by cause of their unwillingness to satisfy their curiosities about takes place on the other side of the line, are bound to fade into the antiquated furniture of those bridges that shall soon begin to provoke wonder amongst those of us who pass between traditions with all the virtue and intellect requisite for the work of thought.

[This is excerpted from a draft introduction I am writing for a special issue of Foucault Studies I am guest-editing.  The issue title is "Foucault and Pragmatism".  Comments welcome as always.  I always wonder, for instance, if I am being too polemical.  Emphasis on the "draft" in submitting this for critique because I realize my first drafts are almost always too polemical.  This in fact was just written in the Fleet-Foxes-playing-cafe I have been frequenting since the New Year.]