BOOK REVIEW OF: Thinking Across the American Grain

Matthew Mancini

Department of History
Southwest Missouri State University
<mjm225f@smsvma>

 

Gunn, Giles. Thinking Across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. xii/272 pp.

 

Giles Gunn has emerged as a major voice in that cacophonous semi-discipline known as American Studies. Every time the American Studies Association meets, it seems to be seized by a new collective enthusiasm. One year it might be Victor Turner, the next it’s Annette Kolodny, or John Stilgoe, or Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Nina Baym. Such commotions are in part symptomatic of the Association’s puppy-like eagerness to be identified with changing intellectual fashions. But they also represent a remarkable record of committed intellectual openness and daring. I anticipate that everyone will be discussing Giles Gunn this year.

 

Thinking that is “aslant” or “cross-hatched,” or that runs “across the grain” or “on the bias” is Gunn’s preferred mode of critical practice. He sees it as a means, if not of escape, then at least of fragmentary and fitful release from the worst constraints of that prison house of language and culture that an assortment of poststructuralists, ideology critics, new historicists, deconstructionists, and neopragmatists from Michel Foucault to Richard Rorty have contended is all that is left of what used to be called the human condition.

 

Postmodernism’s antifoundationalism has rendered an independent critical perspective unattainable and thrown into question the very possibility of a critique of culture that is not implicated in that culture’s own repressive practices. By thinking across postmodernism, what Gunn seeks to achieve is not a new “grounding,” but something more akin to a fingernail-hold somewhere in the rough, uneven, scratchy grain of cultural experience. For he argues that, contrary to the impression, and often the explicit arguments, made by many of our most compelling contemporary critics, the web of culture, of ideology, of power, is not seamless or monolithic; that “The grain of cultural experience is . . . interwoven and cross-hatched in ways that make it possible for the predications of which it is composed not only to confront but also, as it were, to address one another” (38).

 

Gunn’s aim, then, is to “complement” rather than to “contest” the recent tide of thought from the Continent (3). And his instrument for doing so is Pragmatism, a method of approaching problems whose formulation at the hands of William James and John Dewey not only anticipates, but, he argues, also addresses directly, precisely those predicaments raised by the postmodern thinkers. Gunn misses no opportunity to reveal the “convertibility . . . of pragmatist motifs into postmodernist preoccupations” (7). Accordingly, he divides his book into two parts, the first concerned with rethinking the pragmatist heritage in light of contemporary cultural critiques, and the second with shedding a pragmatist light on certain vexing, contemporary critical problems.

 

Quite literally occupying the center of the book is the formidable figure of Richard Rorty. The last chapter of Part One and the first chapter of Part Two can be seen as an extended critique by which Gunn seeks first to challenge, and then perhaps even to some degree to displace, Rorty as the leading contemporary pragmatist theorist of liberal society.

 

The central issue, for American as for Continental critics, is the Enlightenment and its heritage of liberalism. But for Americans the problem has a somewhat different resonance than it would have for, say, Bataille, Foucault, or Habermas. Gunn thus characterizes Rorty’s project as “the most important political attempt since John Dewey to resituate the tradition of American pragmatism within the broader framework of modern Western liberalism” (96). This effort is noteworthy because

 

pragmatism, or neopragmatism as it is now called, has come to be associated with cultural currents that are thought to be postliberal, if not antiliberal, in some very specific ways. It aligns itself . . . with the postmodernist and poststructuralist repudiation of culture as an expression of individual consciousness woven into patterns of consensus and dissent, of conformity and conflict, and it prefers to view culture as an intertextual system of signs that can be infinitely redescribed. (96)

 

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP, 1989), Rorty’s elucidation of the role of contingency in the formation and reception of language and of selfhood, Gunn believes, is masterly. But a third contingent conception, that of community, seems in Rorty’s account to be curiously resistant to the rediscription that Rorty sees as the only remaining object of speculative thought. Thus the project of social restructuring is but poorly served by the thinkers who have shown “how the languages of moral responsibility and social purpose are always contingent” (102). For Rorty, the end of liberal society is to tear us away from the blandishments of metaphysics; to have convictions, to be sure, but to realize at the same time that such convictions cannot be defended with arguments that persons from other communities are constrained to accept.

 

In the last chapter of Part One, Gunn mounts a Jamesian critique of what he sees as Rorty’s tendency toward the absolutization of opposites when he addresses such questions–what Richard J. Bernstein calls “ethical-political” questions in his recent, exceptionally useful study, The New Constellation (Polity Press, 1991). Rortian oppositions like “justice and love, or irony and common sense, or force and persuasion,” Gunn argues, themselves cry out for deconstruction. Yet Rorty “rarely entertains the possibility that their opposition may itself be a product of contingency” (111). According to Gunn, William James knew better. “In his later thought, experience transcends language by virtue of a conjunctive process of which language itself reminds us” (113).

 

Starting from this Jamesian perspective Gunn elaborates a different view from Rorty’s about the possibilities of liberal society, and in the strongly argued chapter that opens Part Two, which is the only chapter in the book that has not been published in some form previously (although an unfortunate typo in the Acknowledgements misidentifies it as having appeared elsewhere), he undertakes a reevaluation of the American Enlightenment.

 

In so doing, Gunn boldly goes to the heart of recent debates about the nature and fate of modernity. Whenever you see someone alive to postmodern ideas seeking to rescue the Enlightenment to even the slightest degree, there, I believe, you will find one of the leading edges of contemporary critical thought. To defend any part of the Enlightenment after the ravages of Foucault and Derrida, not to mention Nietzsche and Heidegger, is to probe for the outer boundaries of postmodernism’s reach. Somewhat curiously, however, especially in light of his obvious erudition, Gunn neglects to situate himself in a wider circle of recent critics hospitable to postmodern currents of thought who nonetheless seek to recover something of value from the dark ruins of the once-heavenly city of Enlightenment discourse. Chief among them is Jurgen Habermas, whose The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (MIT Press, 1987) is a narrative of the history of Enlightenment philosophy and its deconstruction by postmodernists. Habermas’s solution is not to junk the Enlightenment wholesale, but to begin again–this time, however, not with the philosophy of consciousness, with its pernicious subject-object split, but with intersubjectivity instead. For Habermas, objectivity is a chimera, intersubjectivity is prior to the subject-object opposition, and communication thus prior to cognition.

 

Gunn’s purpose is analogous to Habermas’s. He wishes to argue both for the centrality of the American Enlightenment’s influence–an enormous influence on nineteenth century thought and culture, he contends, which has been obscured by the twentieth century’s focus on Calvinism–and against the notion that such sway as it did enjoy over literary production and criticism was a baneful one. The Great Awakening is the American problem that distorts an assessment of the Enlightenment; because of it “The Enlightenment has become the absent, or at least the forgotten, integer in the American equation of the relationship between faith and knowledge” (131). As Habermas seeks to recover scraps of “the Enlightenment project” from Horkheimer and Adorno and others, so Gunn, facing a peculiarly American version of the same problem, attempts to reclaim the American Enlightenment from those who think the Great Awakening towers over it.

 

Disputing the standard interpretation of Henry F. May The Enlightenment in America [Oxford, 1976]), Gunn argues that the most important strains of Enlightenment thought in America were those May called the Revolutionary and the Skeptical, rather than the Rational and Didactic varieties. These influences, maturing in the nineteenth rather than the eighteenth century, and in the United States rather than Europe, worked toward a “dismantling of virtually all of the religious assumptions on which American literary culture was then based” (138). And–guess what–this is a form of proto-pragmatism, “proleptically present” in Moby-Dick, which turns out to be “a prefiguration of . . . pragmatic consciousness” (138), perceivable in the shift from the “old consciousness,” as D. H. Lawrence put it, of Ahab, to the “new” of Ishmael. Moreover, this skeptical and revolutionary consciousness leads quite directly to modernism.

 

Pragmatism thus turns out to be in Gunn’s narrative the connection between the Enlightenment and the postmodern, as well as between Enlightenment epistemology and Calvinism. And so even postmodern literary culture “has not seen the last of the Enlightenment” (145).

 

In other chapters, on the New Historicism, on interdisciplinarity, and on academic pluralism, Gunn employs his simultaneously rigorous and conversational approach to investigate the “question as to whether the critic can ever escape the ideological contamination of his or her own process of reflection” (168). In the concluding chapter, Gunn observes the ways in which the pragmatists’ concern for further, deeper, richer conversation can be enhanced by careful attention to current critical struggles–struggles that are finally, he writes, over “‘difference,’ politically, socially, sexually, racially, psychologically, religiously” (215). In other words, they are about otherness–“what many people think of as the fundamental problem of our time” (7). The problem is “how to conceive or represent ‘the Other’ without succumbing to the false artificiality of oppositional thinking” (215). The site that should be available for this purpose, space that was or should be public, has been “rendered trivial and vapid” (220) and survives only as a site of self-referential simulacra. The interest in “civil religion,” which seemed for a time to be an attempt to retake that public space, turned out to be “a defense mechanism for shoring up American cultural consensus” (227). And, though such a world that stands “over against the symbolic solipsism of the religion America has made of its own civic celebrations” (230) might still be found in a liminal domain of vulgarity and vernacular humor, Gunn is too unillusioned not to see that domain as an “endangered” one (236).

 

This, then, is a book of many virtues. Yet one of its central objectives remains incompletely fulfilled, and for reasons that I think are somewhat curious. Gunn wishes to show that the genealogy of postmodern thought reveals a strong American, or at least pragmatic, extraction; and, conversely, that the resurgence of pragmatism is more than a local American phenomenon. He makes the argument with elegance, but, in truth, it does not constitute a revelation. American Studies scholars have been acknowledging these cross-currents and actively engaging the new forms of “Continental” criticism for a decade and more.

 

What is curious is that Gunn, in arguing for the compatibility of “American” pragmatic and “Continental” postmodern thought, exaggerates the alleged gap between them, and simultaneously–and contrary to his own stated intention–depreciates the “American Studies” side of the alleged dichotomy he seeks to overcome. One symptom of this undervaluing lies in Gunn’s title, for in the beginning, so to speak, there was In the American Grain, William Carlos Williams’s acute, eccentric recovery and appropriation of American foundational themes. The “grain” of Williams’s title connoted seed, texture, weave, and coarseness at once. The book was published in 1925, and remained obscure until its celebration nearly two generations later by American Studies pioneers.

 

Gunn–like another historian, David Hollinger, who evokes Williams in the title of his 1985 collection, In the American Province–mentions Williams just once, very briefly, in passing. Here is an absence indeed. For critics and scholars seeking to explore the rough texture of the seam between the modern and the postmodern, especially in the United States, might also turn to that poet and physician and contemporary of Gunn’s admired John Dewey. “The American Grain,” in its very multivalence, is made for thinking across. Gunn’s book demonstrates that–but demonstrates it yet again, not for the first time.