Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (review)

In Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World, Giles Gunn examines pragmatism in four sections that both resituate it within scholarship and review its history in the United States, focusing on Henry and William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty. The initial, and most notable, section, entitled “Rethinking Solidarity” consists of two chapters, “Multiculturalism, Mourning, and the Colonial Legacy of the Americas: Towards a New Pragmatics of Cross- and Intercultural Criticism” and “Rethinking Human Solidarity in an Age of Globalism.” The first chapter explores the rhetorical invention and reinvention of America while positing difference as a type of inclusion that explodes traditional colonial and postcolonial rhetoric. Gunn argues that “. . . as the ‘other’ becomes more visible ‘as other’ to the ethnographer, the ethnographer becomes less visible ‘as other’ to him or herself” and “Thus, what the ‘other’ acquires by virtue of being brought into ethnographic focus, namely cultural distinctiveness or ‘difference,’ the ethnographer loses by becoming ‘culturally invisible.’” Working from otherness as inclusiveness, both culturally and within the self, Gunn sets out to establish the framework of pragmatism and alterity through John Dewey and psychoanalysis. Gunn posits that the mourning process replaces lost identity, which both colonized and colonizer experience together in relationship rather than as binary opposites in a complex power system.

Gunn’s subsequent chapter on globalism explores current American multiculturalism as a reductive stance formulated by a liberal democracy, which he believes limits any reconception of pragmatism. He discusses Todd Gitlin and David Hollinger’s criticism of “multiculturalism’s inability to balance the centrifugal pressures for cultural diversity against the centripetal pressures for some kind of shared, or sharable, sense of cultural identity.” Through numerous critical examples, Gunn redefines human solidarity as the unrealized similarities located precisely within the relationship between “self” and “other.” He then takes this idea into the global community, which is marked by essential differences where “antagonism, ‘self,’ and ‘other’ remain constructs that are at once implicated in one another’s fabrication and necessary to each other’s moral constitution.” It is with this in mind that he examines Henry and William James, the history of pragmatism, and postmodern solidarity.

In “Jamesian Matters” Gunn chronicles the confusion which ultimately drew William James to a pragmatist worldview, “an intellectual correction and deepening of some of postmodernism’s own preoccupations with the . . . undecidability of experience,” and what he identifies as Henry James’s global implementation of pragmatism through literature. Moving on to “Pragmatist Rereadings,” Gunn examines Richard Rorty’s recuperation of religion and pragmatism and its “secular coming-of-age story,” the difficult placement of pragmatism within historicity, and pragmatism’s problematic connection to the aesthetic. He concludes with a seminal last section entitled “Beyond Solidarity,” which leads the reader to “cultural sites where a move beyond solidarity has been achieved.” He lists these sites and their lack of determinancy: postcolonialism as a stable relationship bereft of any certain power, where self and other become blurred, the terribleness of holocaust literature, and its descriptions of concentration camp hierarchies, and, finally, revisionist African American literature that shows the refashioning of silent characters engulfed by slavery and oppression.