Memedog 1 Pragmatism: So What?
Major General dubdobdee gave me the following five subjects/things he associates with me, instructing me to elaborate:
pragmatism! r. meltzer! red dark sweet! call-and-response! the rolling stones!
Never have been asked about pragmatism before, so I will give it its own long post, and do the other four some other day.
If it makes sense to call me a "pragmatist," what does my "pragmatism" consist of? (I'm not going to keep repeating the scare quotes; just remember it's my pragmatism we're talking about, not that of Dewey or that of Rorty etc., so don't project someone else's ideas onto me.)
My basic pragmatic maneuver is to ask "What's at stake?" in regard to some situation or event or syndrome or social practice or idea or contention or conflict. I divide the question into two: (a) What do they, the participants, think is at stake? (b) What do I think is at stake? Of course, the participants won't necessarily all think the same thing is at stake, and I may or may not be a participant myself. And whether or not I am, I can ask, "What can I do with the idea, practice, etc. Can I use it straight up or do I need to modify it for my own purposes?"
A good way to focus our questioning is to ask, "What would be different if this situation didn't exist, or if they or I weren't engaging in this practice or having this conflict, or if this person weren't putting forth this idea? What would he or she or they or I be doing instead?" And more minutely, "Why did she use this word? What would be different if she'd used some other?" And "What do they think they're taking care of by doing this instead of that? What do they think they gain by doing this instead of that? Are they right? And if they're wrong, do they nonetheless gain something else from it? What can I gain from it?" Even when a behavior is self-defeating, we can ask, "What is the short-term benefit of this dysfunctional behavior?" Without some benefit, it's not going to maintain itself.
An example is the seemingly retarded complaint that "The Backstreet Boys don't even write their own music" or "The Jonas Brothers didn't write 'The Year 3000'" ad nauseum. The thing is, the people who say these things don't know why they dislike the Backstreet Boys or the Jonas Brothers and they're using the complaint as a stand-in or shortcut in lieu of working out what might really be at issue. But our recognizing this should stimulate us to greater thought: why this shortcut rather than some or other? See Rules Of The Game #5, where I explore further. My partial conclusion in regard to my friend Nathan - a conclusion true for many other people as well, I'm sure, but not necessarily for everyone who makes such complaints - was that the stand-in complaint allows smart people like Nathan to feel that they're dealing with class and gender issues without actually engaging the issues, since if they did engage, they'd recognize that their position was untenable.
As you might expect, my pragmatism tends to arise when something appears amiss. One result of our explorations could be that something that at first glance seems ridiculous or dysfunctional turns out reasonable and effective. E.g., right at the start of my book I ask what people like me gain by defining ourselves as phony and contaminated, and what a society gains by producing people like me. Or in my discussing James Brown and the Stones ("Death Rock 2000") or with my ongoing riff about Superwords I talk about how maintaining conflicts can sometimes be better than resolving them. (The Superwords chapters in Real Punks aren't online, but you can find something about my idea by going to this old ILM thread ("Key to deconstructing C. Eddy/S. Reynolds") and searching "superword." By not coming to agreement on the meaning of words like "punk" and "hip-hop" and "pop" we get to differentiate from each other and create variety and movement in our music.)
What I've been describing as "my pragmatism" is no more than trying to understand the life we're leading and the world we lead it in, rather than a doctrine or method or "ism" that would attract adherents. I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. (I wrote a bit more here.) Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy. After all, how necessary is an antitank device when - as the weapon itself shows - tanks are not a force in the world?
(I'm curious what dubdobdee and byebyepride think of the previous paragraph, since as far as I know they've never addressed its argument.)
But even in relation to philosophy, this doesn't end the pragmatic questions, since I can ask the same questions of it I ask of anything else. E.g., "Well, here's a philosopher engaging in something that appears to be a filibuster. What does he think he's taking care of? What does he gain by it?" The answer won't be the same in regard to every philosopher, and won't necessarily be, "He gains the illusion of dealing with the world without having to actually deal with the world." E.g., I don't buy Descartes' mind-body dualism, but one of its features - that we not take at face value what we seemingly know through our senses - would be quite useful for a Copernican like Descartes' who believed that, despite immediate appearances, the earth moves, heavy objects don't necessarily fall "down," and therefore bodies in the heavens are as material as the ones on earth. And to the question, "Why didn't he just do that, simply decide not to take sensory impressions at face value, rather than try to ground his practice metaphysically?" my response would be, "Well, let's take a look at his historical situation and at whom he might have wanted to justify himself to, and what he was trying to counteract."
R. Meltzer: An influence on Chuck Eddy and (indirectly) on Tom Ewing.
Red Dark Sweet: Band influenced by the Velvet Underground and the Fall.
Call-And-Response: An influence on the Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones: "The Rolling Stones had influences but no predecessors," wrote Frank Kogan in his notebook, 1976. He was influenced by Greil Marcus in saying this.
pragmatism! r. meltzer! red dark sweet! call-and-response! the rolling stones!
Never have been asked about pragmatism before, so I will give it its own long post, and do the other four some other day.
If it makes sense to call me a "pragmatist," what does my "pragmatism" consist of? (I'm not going to keep repeating the scare quotes; just remember it's my pragmatism we're talking about, not that of Dewey or that of Rorty etc., so don't project someone else's ideas onto me.)
My basic pragmatic maneuver is to ask "What's at stake?" in regard to some situation or event or syndrome or social practice or idea or contention or conflict. I divide the question into two: (a) What do they, the participants, think is at stake? (b) What do I think is at stake? Of course, the participants won't necessarily all think the same thing is at stake, and I may or may not be a participant myself. And whether or not I am, I can ask, "What can I do with the idea, practice, etc. Can I use it straight up or do I need to modify it for my own purposes?"
A good way to focus our questioning is to ask, "What would be different if this situation didn't exist, or if they or I weren't engaging in this practice or having this conflict, or if this person weren't putting forth this idea? What would he or she or they or I be doing instead?" And more minutely, "Why did she use this word? What would be different if she'd used some other?" And "What do they think they're taking care of by doing this instead of that? What do they think they gain by doing this instead of that? Are they right? And if they're wrong, do they nonetheless gain something else from it? What can I gain from it?" Even when a behavior is self-defeating, we can ask, "What is the short-term benefit of this dysfunctional behavior?" Without some benefit, it's not going to maintain itself.
An example is the seemingly retarded complaint that "The Backstreet Boys don't even write their own music" or "The Jonas Brothers didn't write 'The Year 3000'" ad nauseum. The thing is, the people who say these things don't know why they dislike the Backstreet Boys or the Jonas Brothers and they're using the complaint as a stand-in or shortcut in lieu of working out what might really be at issue. But our recognizing this should stimulate us to greater thought: why this shortcut rather than some or other? See Rules Of The Game #5, where I explore further. My partial conclusion in regard to my friend Nathan - a conclusion true for many other people as well, I'm sure, but not necessarily for everyone who makes such complaints - was that the stand-in complaint allows smart people like Nathan to feel that they're dealing with class and gender issues without actually engaging the issues, since if they did engage, they'd recognize that their position was untenable.
As you might expect, my pragmatism tends to arise when something appears amiss. One result of our explorations could be that something that at first glance seems ridiculous or dysfunctional turns out reasonable and effective. E.g., right at the start of my book I ask what people like me gain by defining ourselves as phony and contaminated, and what a society gains by producing people like me. Or in my discussing James Brown and the Stones ("Death Rock 2000") or with my ongoing riff about Superwords I talk about how maintaining conflicts can sometimes be better than resolving them. (The Superwords chapters in Real Punks aren't online, but you can find something about my idea by going to this old ILM thread ("Key to deconstructing C. Eddy/S. Reynolds") and searching "superword." By not coming to agreement on the meaning of words like "punk" and "hip-hop" and "pop" we get to differentiate from each other and create variety and movement in our music.)
What I've been describing as "my pragmatism" is no more than trying to understand the life we're leading and the world we lead it in, rather than a doctrine or method or "ism" that would attract adherents. I haven't yet mentioned philosophy, since I think that philosophy is a dead end, and pragmatism is better off liberated from philosophy. Of course the word "pragmatism" is associated with certain philosophers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, maybe Wittgenstein, some aspects of Quine). In any event, my pragmatism when applied to philosophy isn't a way of doing philosophy but just a critique of philosophy, one that attacks philosophy's sense of its own relevance. One form of attack is the sentence, paraphrased from my book, "As a philosopher I can say 'Nothing exists in isolation' and a minute later say 'I grew up in an isolated village' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." And as with isolation, so it is with "autonomy," "independence," "essence," "necessity," "reality," and so forth. (I wrote a bit more here.) Which is to say that philosophy concerns itself with extremes that are rarely in effect but fools itself into thinking that in discussing these extremes it's dealing with the village - i.e., the world - as well. Note that this critique doesn't merely knock down philosophy: it also knocks down deconstructive and pragmatic attacks upon philosophy. After all, how necessary is an antitank device when - as the weapon itself shows - tanks are not a force in the world?
(I'm curious what dubdobdee and byebyepride think of the previous paragraph, since as far as I know they've never addressed its argument.)
But even in relation to philosophy, this doesn't end the pragmatic questions, since I can ask the same questions of it I ask of anything else. E.g., "Well, here's a philosopher engaging in something that appears to be a filibuster. What does he think he's taking care of? What does he gain by it?" The answer won't be the same in regard to every philosopher, and won't necessarily be, "He gains the illusion of dealing with the world without having to actually deal with the world." E.g., I don't buy Descartes' mind-body dualism, but one of its features - that we not take at face value what we seemingly know through our senses - would be quite useful for a Copernican like Descartes' who believed that, despite immediate appearances, the earth moves, heavy objects don't necessarily fall "down," and therefore bodies in the heavens are as material as the ones on earth. And to the question, "Why didn't he just do that, simply decide not to take sensory impressions at face value, rather than try to ground his practice metaphysically?" my response would be, "Well, let's take a look at his historical situation and at whom he might have wanted to justify himself to, and what he was trying to counteract."
R. Meltzer: An influence on Chuck Eddy and (indirectly) on Tom Ewing.
Red Dark Sweet: Band influenced by the Velvet Underground and the Fall.
Call-And-Response: An influence on the Rolling Stones.
The Rolling Stones: "The Rolling Stones had influences but no predecessors," wrote Frank Kogan in his notebook, 1976. He was influenced by Greil Marcus in saying this.