Experiences or Vocabularies?

Abstract

Recently, there has been a revival of interest in pragmatism throughout the humanities, including literary theory. But a number of competing “neopragmatisms” have emerged, and the competition has largely become polarized into two rival camps, which I will designate as “experientialist” and “textualist.” In a book called Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (1992), Richard Shusterman makes a truly heroic attempt to rehabilitate the aesthetic theory John Dewey based on his notion of “experience.” This latter notion was Dewey’s attempt to dismantle what he called the “epistemology industry” by bridging the supposed gap between subject and object, mind and world, but it quickly became eclipsed by the language-centered philosophy of logical positivism and the analytic tradition. In his preface, Shusterman declares his intention to recuperate Dewey’s experientialist philosophy in opposition to the “textualism” he finds dominant in contemporary pragmatist thought. He has in mind particularly the work of Richard Rorty, who has advocated renewed attention to Dewey’s pragmatism but has suggested substituting a post-Wittgensteinian conception of language for Dewey’s notion of experience as a more effective means of putting the epistemology industry out of business. Rorty’s textualism offers its own account of the value of literature and other kinds of art, and Shusterman’s work has made it clear how opposed this textualist aesthetic is to Dewey’s experientialism. So if pragmatism is to furnish the post-Darwinian aesthetic that accounts for the particular mode of survival of literary texts in our culture, then which pragmatist aesthetic will it be?