Experience and Signs: Towards a Pragmatist Literary Criticism

Correction:
A footnote reference was missing from page 168. Footnote 47 has been added to the online version.

Could there be a pragmatist literary criticism? Richard Rorty doesn't seem to think so.¹ The thinkers lumped under "classical pragmatism" made only passing references to literature, and only William James's magpie delight in gathering quotations from Stevenson, Whitman, Tolstoy, and others even approaches an analysis of texts. Why then turn to pragmatism for a method of reading and interpretation? For calisthenics: "Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work."² This essay seeks to put theories of meaning and representation in literary criticism on the stretching bar by reorienting them towards pragmatist conceptions of process, action, and experience. In particular, it asks "What does a text do?" rather than "What does a text mean?" and then traces the difference that this difference makes.

Understanding literary meaning in terms of the effects literary texts produce requires the aesthetics of John Dewey and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Their related projects emphasize transactive, unfolding experience and suggest that art—through its relation to quality or Firstness—constitutes the means by which immediate experience and its novel possibilities enter into intelligent life. Thus, pragmatist conceptions of art contribute to Deweyan projects of reconstruction: the continual processes of adjusting the elements of an evolving situation towards the creation and realization of meaningful experiences.³ Where Dewey's Art as Experience provides the explicit corrective to aesthetic theories based on the subject or on representation, Peirce's doctrine of signs insists on the distinctness of literary language even as it accounts for its effects in extraliterary procedures. In literary experience or the sign-production event, reader, text, and context enter into a dynamic constellation within which virtual reconstructions of relations are created and pushed forth into future experience. Peirce's artistic signs, Dewey's qualitative binding, George Herbert Mead's "enlarged" personalities, and James's correctives to our "certain blindness" all circulate within the orbit of this conception of literary aesthetics and its connection to life. A pragmatist literary criticism explores these transactive relations and absorbs the effects texts produce in order to generate new concepts, modes of thinking, and ideas that bring the possibilities and affects of literary experience within the reconstructive process of intelligence.

I. Aesthetics, Quality, Possibility

Peirce and Dewey—consummate men of science as they were—both turned to aesthetics late in their careers to investigate that which precedes, surrounds, and regulates logical inquiry. Yet neither concerned himself with formal criteria or with dealing authoritative judgments upon canonical works, and neither accepted the enshrinement of art apart from the everyday. Rather, they considered the aesthetic as a phase or formation of experience and discussed the arts as points at which the "universe of experience" entered into the "universe of discourse." Dewey's aesthetic theory, based on his transactive notion of experience, offers pragmatist strategies for reconstructing our accounts of art. Peirce's semiotic, based on his transactive triadic sign, sets these strategies within the realm of sign-production and interpretation. Combined, these discourses constitute a starting point for a pragmatist literary criticism, one that attends to the effects produced within an aesthetic experience permeated by Deweyan quality and Peircean possibility.

Above all else, Dewey's aesthetic theory disposes of false distinctions between art and everyday life. Even his title speaks this message: Art as Experience. The idea stirs him to rare lyrical images, as in his appropriation of the Romantic trope of the mountain top. "Mountain peaks do not float unsupported," Dewey explains; "they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations." Likewise, the "refined" qualities of aesthetic experience do not hover in an ethereal realm beyond what we commonly call experience; instead, they are experience in one of its forms.⁴ Specifically, the aesthetic denotes "the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to every normally complete experience"; its characteristics are shared by all experience, though in less palpable or less realized manners (LW 10:53...