February 15, 2007
I've just come off of a week of discussions with Bruno Latour, (more on that over
here) who was a "distinguished visitor" for a week. In particular, I roped him into teaching in my class on the topic of Dewey's
The Public and its Problems and Lippman's
The Phantom Public. The discussion was electrifying, not least because Latour has recently read both books extremely carefully. His current work, which is increasingly in the domain of metaphysics, takes the Dewey-Lippman debate as an occasion for theorizing "political truth"--or the possibility of achieving a distinctive form of truth in politics. The diagnosis and critique from which PP proceeds is the debate with Lippmann on the status of publics and public opinion. Contrary to the wikipedia version of things, it's clear that there is more agreement than disagreement between these two, and the Lippmann is almost as radical a thinker (perhaps more) than Dewey. Lippmann is usually branded as a conservative, a theorist of elitist democracy--but he was as much a pragmatist as Dewey, it was only his solutions that differed. Latour gave a fantastic lecture on the debate.
Reading it apropos of ARC, Dewey's book contains a prescription of something not unlike the "concepts" and concept labor discussed by ARC. Here is a salient quote that gives a sense of how familiar the language is: "Our central need [is] to possess conceptions which are used as tools of directed inquiry and which are tested, rectified and caused to grow in actual use."(168) Lifted from context such a claim can sound exactly as postivistic and methodologically narrow as the worst kind of naive realism. As with most of Dewey, however, there is subtlety everywhere. In the case of PP, the question of "concepts" is not the center--rather the practice of "inquiry" is, especially what he calls "social inquiry." Dewey's logical theory, his experience-based system also referenced by the term "inquiry" (as in
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry) is extended in PP to include a range of forms of "social inquiry"--journalism, social science, and expertise more generally. It's purpose however is more than just the scholastic test-and-refine version of concepts familiar to most economists and political scientists--it's purpose is the production of political truth that leads to the discovery of the state, necessitated by the empirical fact of our complex entanglements with each other, and the unintended consequences thereof.
Social inquiry proceeds amidst a broken system of media reporting and propaganda--the news media cannot turn "sensations" into "perceptions", so this is the task of social inquiry. The practical prescriptions that attend to this are akin to current demands for "open access": "There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on public affairs (166)." Without that baseline publicity, there is every reason for individuals and collectives to take advantage of the differential access to the results of social inquiry. A social inquiry that is available only to experts in DC, for instance, is useless, regardless of how accurate or correct or scientifically sophisticated it is.
The fact that Dewey suggests that inquiry lead to cocenpts that "grow in actual use" is also a kind of radical departure from our contemporary status quo: concepts are not "critques" of practice, they do not undermine, unmask, reveal or deconstruct. Rather they are fundamentally meant to be like tools ('equipment' in Paul's sense) which connect the ceaseless production of sensations related to a particular issue (stem cells, for instance) into meaningful perceptions that allow a public to attach meanings to events, and to form attachments that are good rather than bad, with respect to contemporary events.
The down side of Dewey's public, however, is that it is so eerily familiar. My students all agreed that his descriptions of the "Great Society" (read, globalization avant le lettre) sound exactly like the present--except that things today are much worse, much more entangled, much less amenable to an optimistic faith in "social inquiry." Nonetheless, there is a germ of a possible renewal of pragmatism here--or rather, more specifically, a renewal of Dewey's theory of logical inquiry or James' radical empiricism (in order to avoid dead-ends like Rorty), that might be brought into productive engagement with the questions raised in ARC. Is social inquiry similar to collaborative conceptual labor? Is "inquiry" a better term for what ties these collaborations together than "research" or "fieldwork" or "ethnography?" especially if it is given the force that dewey gives it as a version of experience-based logical inquiry? Dewey's attentiveness to experience as a necessary feature of thinking seems to share much with the "contemporary"...
Obviously, I think Dewey is just dreamy. What about you?