Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture, and: Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (review)

John Dewey, arguably most responsible for inspiring the twentieth-century revival of pragmatism, famously contended that the power of experience lay not so much in what one learned from the past as in how one learned to cope with the future ("Education as Growth"). Although Dewey is not a hugely central presence in either of the books here that continue pragmatism's revival into the new millennium, his double-edged view of experience certainly is; and for better or worse, it sharply divides the two authors' points of emphasis. While problematizing the authority of beginnings, origins, and first principles is the Deweyan jumping-off point in both projects, for David Kadlec in Mosaic Modernism, the emphasis clearly lands on the past and on a largely ignored tradition of sociopolitical thinkers and writers (Benjamin Tucker, Max Stirner, Dora Marsden) whose "anarchism in the good sense" in the well-used formulation of William James then spilled over into more prominent modernist (mainly American) literary artists writing in James's wake. Kadlec's meticulous historicist retrieval of the neglected thematic within a pragmatism insistent upon the "anarchist merging of ‘theory' and ‘practice'" (15) in an opening chapter on "Mosaic Modernism" therefore plays itself out in subsequent analyses of, for instance, the dynamic form of nominalism in Pound's Cantos (chap. 2) or of process taken as the measure of identity in William Carlos Williams's Imaginations (chap. 4). In Kadlec's bravura treatment of the "speakerly text," Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (chap. 6) frames much of the foregoing: "‘talkin' don't amount tuh uh hill uh beans . . . You got tuh go there tuh know there'" (in Kadlec, 193).

For Kadlec, that hill of beans could very well stand for the excesses of poststructuralist thinkers in the closing decades of the twentieth century "whose laudable political objectives," as he polemically asserts in a brief afterword, "sometimes cloud their attention to textual and even social historical particulars" (224). His most compelling case in point is Marianne Moore (chap. 5) whose early poems in Observations are less helpfully illuminated by the theories of deconstruction than they are by the practices of anarchist antifoundationalism in James and Dewey, especially as these become further contextualized within the suspect essentialism of the contemporaneous scientific discourses of eugenics and racial engineering. But it's precisely within such obsessive devotion to the past that Kadlec's otherwise persuasive argumentation can falter, noting, for instance, that "Moore must have been particularly intrigued by James's Darwinian polemic against Spencerian environmental determinism in her reading of [James's] The Will to Believe" (168). Until we know for sure, that "must have been" can strike readers as fairly suppositious—as suppositious, perhaps, as a latter-day deployment of critical theory can sometimes appear, with all its "misapplication of ahistorical assumptions" (226).

The animus against contemporary theory in Kadlec's emphasis upon past forms of pragmatist thought might also seem a little out of keeping with the mosaic image foregrounded in the study's title—an image (borrowed from Dewey once again) intended to move readers closer to a more authentic notion of America through the "juxtaposition of alien elements" (255 n. 79). With the word "beyond" boldly blocked out in red on the cover of Giles Gunn's Beyond Solidarity, the emphasis is clearly on future directions for the revival of pragmatism in the United States, and Gunn appears only too delighted to enlist any number of poststructuralist thinkers for this purpose if their ostensibly alien theories might help to forward pragmatism as the "hermeneutic of otherness" (71). Hence, in part 1, "Rethinking Solidarity," Gunn finds Chantal Mouffe's Deconstruction and Pragmatism as useful for pointing out...