Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
Is "Against Theory" a Pragmatism?
by Paul Grimstad | ns 70
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels' "Against Theory" (1982) might be thought of as marking a tipping point in the literary humanities, when an enthusiasm for citing chapter and verse from murky translations of European thinkers was getting cultish, and poststructuralist terms of art were starting to become clichés. The overtly polemical title alone would have tapped into a whole reservoir of prejudices about the deleterious (and increasingly routinized) effects of "theory" on the study and teaching of literature in North America. If, as the headnote for the entry on Knapp and Michaels in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism tells us, "a significant feature of 'Against Theory' [was] the forcefulness and clarity of its writing...which seemed implicitly to reproach the sometimes difficult prose of much of poststructuralist theorizing" (2459), then we should understand this "implicit reproach" as part of a politics of style bound up with such prejudices. "Against Theory," then, would be a local instance of the larger ideology pitting Anglo-American common sense against Continental abstraction, and one in which the polemic staged in the essay—an earnest advocacy for one approach to literary interpretation over another—is really the continuation of a war over scholarly idiom.
All of this becomes more symptomatic when we consider that the grounds on which literary theory is attacked in the essay—as making falsely generalizing claims about language in abstracto—is exactly the kind of argument Knapp and Michaels put forth in their "pragmatic" plea for the identity of meaning and intention. Their essay asks one question—Are there such things as intentionless meanings?—and gives one answer—no. The reason there can never be intentionless meanings, they tell us, is because for something "even to be recognizable as a sentence, we must already have posited a speaker, and hence an intention" (Knapp and Michaels 14). To look for meaning—to interpret—is thus always simultaneously to acknowledge a prior intending agent. Such an argument turns intention into a transcendental condition of possibility for interpretation in general, and in this way "Against Theory" inveighs against generalist abstraction in the same breath that it presents a universal and necessary ultimatum. This basic contradiction at the center of "Against Theory" ought to provoke us to look in places other than the authors' stated aims for the source of its animus against theory.
It is not enough, though, to point out that "Against Theory" is generalist even as it warns against generalism; this has been said many times, beginning with the initial responses to the essay in the volume in which it was re-published in 1985 and up to the headnote in the Norton Anthology (see Shusterman). We should also remember that pragmatism, in some of its classic articulations, comes close to the positions "Against Theory" attacks. In his 1907 book Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking, William James wrote, "truth happens to an idea" (574). James meant by this memorable phrase that, rather than a ready-made essence waiting to be discovered, truth is the consequence of our ongoing experience and practice. This is an early version of the anti-foundationalism we find in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but also (in perhaps less recognizable form) in the post-Nietzschean genealogies of much of the French philosophy that served as a Rosetta stone for North American high theory. And we should remember that James' formulation was itself already the echo of an earlier (less memorable) aphorism of Charles Peirce's: "Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects" (132). When Peirce attacked the Cartesian dogma of the clear and distinct with the insight that the truth of an idea is the same thing as its sensible consequences, he attacked epistemology itself. Instead of treating "sensible effects" as leading either to a total skepticism (which Descartes attempts to escape through the cogito argument), or as caused by an inaccessible thing-in-itself (Kant's noumena), Peirce tells us that experienced effects—and the way such effects go on to shape the way we believe and act in the world—just are the truth of the experienced object. The upshot of this kind of thinking, carried over from Peirce's "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" to James' more accessible Pragmatism, is to abandon altogether the subject/object split (and other ossified philosophical habits) as a piece of cumbersome metaphysical baggage.
Pragmatism's proposal that old metaphysical categories be abandoned led to a fork in the road of twentieth-century philosophy. Exemplary of this split is Vienna emigré Rudolph Carnap's well-known analysis of certain statements from Martin Heidegger's 1929 lecture "What is Metaphysics?" as meaningless (see Gottfried and Friedman). According to Carnap, if metaphysics is capable of generating the kinds of statements found in Heidegger's lecture, then metaphysics is a language of total non-sense. But both Carnap (in his logical empiricist way) and Heidegger (in his ontological existentialist way) wanted to do the pragmatic thing of getting rid of the bad categories and questions of metaphysics. Pragmatism's injunction to abandon metaphysics might then be thought of as setting the stage for the radically different idioms of Heidegger's ontology and Carnap's logicism, or what is sometimes called the Continental/analytic divide (see Follesdal and Friedman).
We should see "Against Theory" as a literary-critical avatar of this agon of intellectual temperament, but one in which the different sides of the divide are conflated through a complex (and in some ways unconscious) inheriting of pragmatism's role in setting twentieth-century philosophy down these peculiarly incompatible paths. If the "theory" they attack is the offspring of a certain strain of French Heideggerianism—a Derridean inheritance, referenced in "Against Theory" in an Americanized, New Critically-inflected Paul de Man—then the language they adopt to attack it might be traced back to the analytic philosophy exemplified in Carnap (or perhaps the early Wittgenstein). Considering this set of inheritances, the essay's target should not be seen as the tendency in literary criticism toward theoretic generalization, for as we have already pointed out the very premise of "Against Theory" is itself a colossal generalization about the identity of meaning and intention. Rather, the essay should be read as a (complexly equivocal) attack on a whole ideology of theory as "non-sense," in which the bitingly direct sentence is designed to replace Continental wooliness.
In calling their transcendental argument about intention a "new pragmatism" (or in the editors of the later Against Theory volume calling it that), Knapp and Michaels exchange the very premises of that pragmatism—ditching metaphysics in favor of consequences—for an intervention into the politics of idiom. At this point, the oft-made assertion that Knapp and Michaels are as abstractly theoretical as the positions they attack takes on new meaning: it now means that the authors must covertly borrow from the position they purport to be critiquing, but in an effort to strike a balance between two radically different idioms, and so unsettle habits of thought that would unwittingly perpetuate and police their separation.
You could say, then, that "Against Theory" adopts the razor-sharp analytical language of those twentieth century thinkers who both inherited classical pragmatism's call to abandon metaphysics by making philosophy into the logical analysis of statements, only to redeploy its terse, propositional directness within the specific disciplinary context of the English department at the moment it is making an orthodoxy of a different attempt at abandoning metaphysics (Heidegger, Derrida, and the explicitly targeted de Man). But if you ignore the paradox of a transcendental intentionalism parading as a warning against abstraction and focus instead on the deliberate use of an argumentative idiom that communicates (before any specific content) "clarity" over "non-sense," then you get something that starts ironically to look like pragmatism. In this way, to put it in William James' language, truth "begins to happen" to "Against Theory."
If what is pragmatic about "Against Theory" are the specific consequences which arise from a polemic over conflicting intellectual idioms, then its pragmatism is not consistent with the way the authors (or the editors of Against Theory) tell us it is: as an argument about why we should stop doing something called theory, and replace it with something more pragmatic. Whether they were to acknowledge or deny the link between their argument and pragmatism (for example, if the authors were to claim that the University of Chicago Press' decision to package the essay along with its critical responses as a "new pragmatism" was just a marketing device, that their argument does not really have anything to do with pragmatism, and so on) is beside the point. The real consequences of their essay have less to do with the role of meaning and intention in interpretation, than they do with the way an effect of refreshing clarity serves as a device in a polemic about how we should think, write, and talk in the literary humanities.
In this circuitous way, then, we arrive at the issue the authors claim is the subject of their essay—intention—and their necessitarianism about intention becomes irrelevant at exactly the moment the issue of theory versus pragmatism comes up. It is here that we should become skeptical about the stated aims of the essay—the absolute identity of meaning and intention, the treatment of that identity as the condition of possibility for interpretation—and we should treat this skepticism as itself another of the essay's consequences, and thus another example of its (unintended) pragmatism.
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If the long twentieth century of Anglo-American and Continental styles of thinking has sometimes been a story of mutual incomprehension, then part of what I am saying here is that "Against Theory" both experiments with bridging the gap and treats it as a premise for a specific kind of disciplinary button-pushing. But in Michaels' work immediately prior to the essay, there is evidence of a more explicit engagement with this history, though one in which the claims of "Against Theory" seem to be refuted. In his 1977 article "The Interpreter's Self: Peirce and the Cartesian Subject," a piece dealing with the relation of classical pragmatism to interpretation, Michaels looks at the way Peirce turned Descartes' rationalist cogito into an effect of external signs. After running through the well-known example of the child who learns not to touch a hot stove through the "ignorance and error" of an experiential encounter, whereby a memorable pain etches a rule for future action, Michaels, following Peirce, considers this situation when the question of language is introduced:
The intervention of language is if anything even more crucial in our attempt to make sense of what kind of thing the self is for Peirce. For one of the next questions he asks [...] is "whether we can think without signs," and since, he says, the only argument that we can is the unproven assertion "that thought must precede every sign" he concludes that we can't. If then, we can have in the first place no direct knowledge of the self, that is to say, if we can know it only as an inference or thought, and if, in the second place all our thoughts are signs, it follows in the third place that we can only know the self as a sign...for Peirce the self is a sign [and] it is itself "external," like all signs.1 (194)
If the "unproven assertion" that "thought must precede every sign" is dubious for Peirce, and presumably for this earlier Michaels, then the idea that meaning necessarily presupposes intention (the premise of "Against Theory") starts to look weird. If, like the child's learning not to touch the stove through the trial and error of hazardous experience, the self for Peirce arises from a series of encounters with an external world continually offering up confounding obstacles requiring interpretation, then the line between perception and interpretation—and ultimately intention—starts to become blurred. In this Peircean scenario, interpretation starts to look more like a series of encounters with the contingencies of experience, and intention starts to look more like a continuation of this series. Perhaps the Michaels of "Against Theory" would say that there is a difference between the "hot stove" kind of experience and what we do when we interpret the utterances of a speaker or author. But in the earlier article on Peirce, it is precisely the point to put sensory experience and interpretation on a continuum, to make them part of the same process, and further, to show that what is presumably the locus of intention—the "self"—is just the upshot of the whole process. So instead of asserting the absolute identity of meaning and intention—that odd "new pragmatism" that somehow makes the provisional attunement to consequences into an argument about what interpretation can never do without—we get first an equation of perception and interpretation, and then the appearance, after much groping trial and error, of an intending self. Intention thus appears only after there has been a good deal of bumping into stoves, by which time perceptual signs have become so deeply wired into the speaking or intending subject, that we must start to think of intention as the consequence of interpretation, and not the other way around. It makes sense, then, that the essay is titled "The Interpreter's Self," since it describes the way the self is the contingent after-effect of interpretation (the self "belongs" to the interpreter, as if the interpreter were prior). This is, then, just the sort of processual dynamic which "Against Theory" converts into the project of making intention the condition of possibility for interpretation. But if the "interpreter's self" is already the consequence of perceptual problem solving and of navigating through the hazards of experience, why reify that self's later intentions into a transcendental condition required for every act of interpretation?
The reason the processual self of the earlier essay turns into the transcendental self of the later essay is that the later essay is not really concerned with theoretic generalism versus pragmatism, but rather, as I have been saying, with a politics of intellectual idiom. The earlier Michaels' close attention to Peirce, whose ideas about the self look a lot like the anti-intentionalism of theory, has cooled into the "analytic" Michaels of calling theory's bluff in a language designed to make it look ponderous and misguided. But if the stated intentions of "Against Theory" are incompatible with pragmatism's emphasis on the provisional and the consequential, its way of generating consequences through the strategic use of idiom are not. That so many critics took the bait and argued entirely on the authors' terms is itself a testament to the essay's provocative power to generate such consequences.
If there is a total incompatibility between the transcendental argument of "Against Theory" and the pragmatism expressed in statements like "truth happens to an idea," "our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects," and "we can only know the self as a sign," there is nevertheless a real pragmatics to the way the essay generated the consequences it did. And if these consequences solely constitute the pragmatism of "Against Theory," then it doesn't really matter how the meaning/intention relation works, what it has to do with interpretation, what it may have to do with speaker meaning and sentence meaning, if the authors are consistent with their own arguments across the series of responses to their interlocutors, or indeed if they are ultimately for or against something called theory. What matters is the way the authors exposed and exploited a fault-line in the language of the literary humanities, and one that has perhaps led to many unnecessary misunderstandings and false debates. The most promising consequence of "Against Theory"—though one I am not sure has yet come to fruition—is the way it fused the fearless curiosity of theory at its best (despite the position "against" it) with a taut lucidity of language and argument impatient with needless obscurity.
Note
1. James Hooper has described this Peircean scenario like this: "An infant, inferring no self, knows no distinction from its body and the body of a hot stove. The child may therefore touch the stove. From the resulting feeling (sign), the child arrives at the conclusion (interpretant) that there is such a thing as error and that it inheres in its self (object)" (8). [Return to essay.]
Works Cited
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Dreyfus, Hubert. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.
Follesdal, Dagfinn, and Michael Friedman. "American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century." Daedelus 135.2 (Spring 2006): 116-126.
Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Peterborough, NH: Carus, 2000.
Gottfried, Gabriel. "Carnap's 'Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language': A Retrospective Consideration of the Relationship between Continental and Analytical Philosophy." Logical Empericism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Paolo Parrini, et al. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2003.
Heidegger, Martin. "What Is Metaphysics?" Basic Writings. Ed. David Farell Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1977.
Hoopes, James. "Introduction." Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. James Hoopes. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.
James, William. "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth." 1907. William James: Writings 1902-1910. Ed. Bruce Kucklick. New York: Library of America, 1987.
Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. "Against Theory." 1982. Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.
Leitch, Vincent B., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Criticism and Theory. New York: Norton, 2001.
Michaels, Walter Benn. "The Interpreter's Self: Peirce on the Cartesian 'Subject.'" The Georgia Review 31 (Summer 1977): 383-402.
Peirce, Charles. "How to Make Our Ideas Clear." 1878. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings: Volume One (1867-1893). Ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979.
Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
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