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

One of the most intriguing aspects of the recent surge of attention paid to pragmatist philosophy is the claims often made in its name. Part of what is interesting about these claims is their unpredictable oscillation. They range from the nonchalance and provocation of Stanley Fish, who insists that no consequences follow from pragmatism, to the interpretative specificity of individual legal cases among judges like Richard Posner and professors of law like Thomas Grey, who write and argue about pragmatism as it relates to legal adjudication. ¹ And maybe this is as it should be, given pragmatism's adaptability and applicability, as well as its self-description as mostly a "method for more work," to use a well-known Jamesian formulation. But at times the difference between a "method for more work" and simply a "specious and verbal difference," to use another Jamesian phrase, can be stretched too thin. Or to put the issue differently, I am specifically concerned about these claims because it seems to me that, at times, pragmatism's wide range of applicability can be easily turned against pragmatism itself, and such turning can transform what is undoubtedly America's most important contribution to the history of philosophical and social thought into something that does not make any difference whatsoever.

In Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World, Giles Gunn attempts to apply pragmatism to issues involving relationships among nations; more specifically the book argues for an extended concept of "solidarity" in a world that has become increasingly globalized. Gunn's paradigmatic example is the Americas. Pointing out that the word "America" has been almost exclusively—and provincially—used to refer to the United States, Gunn claims that we should de-provincialize that word to include what he calls "New World societies." And insofar as what all of the Americas share is a common history of rhetorical invention, it therefore follows that one way to "create a mutually interrogative and genuinely critical cultural criticism of the Americas" (24) is to apply an interpretive method to this rhetorical creation. For Gunn, such method is pragmatism. Given its Deweyan emphasis on transactionality, pragmatism is well-suited, Gunn thinks, to do the kind of interpretive work that will help these cultures understand themselves better and thus construct a future with more solidarity.

One of the ways in which this is likely to happen is, for instance, by understanding "the appeal of dictatorships in South America" (4). This example is not random, given that the history of the relationship among the various "Americas" is indeed full of atrocities. Gunn mentions some of them: "U.S. imperialism, Western Capitalism, institutional Eurocentrism, Spanish-American Chauvisim" (4). But insofar as South American societies (as people in South America used to be called, rather than Gunn's new-fangled "New World societies") have this history of atrocity, bloodshed, and economic as well as physical suffering, it is not precisely clear what the understanding that Gunn proposes aims to accomplish. Is such understanding, for instance, supposed to help stop these atrocities? And if so, it is clearly not working, since as I write, South America is plagued once again with devastating economic crises, civil strife, and violence and hunger. Neither is it clear why pragmatism is the favored lens through which these issues can be understood. Gunn, for instance, goes to great lengths to try to link pragmatism to narrow topics—like transference and mourning—in psychoanalytic theory. Thus an immediate question is why pragmatism and not psychoanalysis as a way of understanding these complex problems? But for me, being a South American myself, the larger question is what is at stake in claiming that because a culture is rhetorically constructed some episodes in its history can be interpreted philosophically, with the expectation that...