Toward a Pragmatist Theory of Action

Toward a Pragmatist Theory of ActionAuthor(s): John McGowanSource: Sociological Theory, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Nov., 1998), pp. 292-297Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202186 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 18:06

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toSociological Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 18:06:11 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asa

http://www.jstor.org/stable/202186?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Toward a Pragmatist Theory of Action

JOHN MCGOWAN

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

"The central theme in this book is the claim that a third model of action should be added to the two predominant models of action, namely rational action and normatively oriented action. What I have in mind is a model that emphasizes the creative character of human action" (p. 4). This programmatic statement from the Preface of Hans Joas's The Creativ- ity of Action indicates both the strengths and weaknesses of his book. What Joas has to say about creativity is both suggestive and promising, but his overall discussion is so oriented toward explicating, supplementing, and (at times) refuting the other two models of action that his own model must be inferred from all too fragmentary hints. Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and Jiirgen Habermas are the most cited figures in the book, not John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, the major sources of Joas's pragmatist theory of action. Jeffrey Alexander is discussed more thoroughly and frequently than William James.

What I will attempt here, then, is to offer a distilled version of that pragmatist theory. I have been inspired both by Joas and the pragmatists, so my version is not exactly his, but I assume he would mostly endorse it. Our differences are very likely disciplinary. Joas's model is shaped in relation to the Weber-Parsons line in classic sociological theory (with prolonged nods toward Durkheim and Marx) and in relation to Niklas Luhmann and Haber- mas among contemporary theorists. My own model is more oriented toward problems of agency that stem from the Nietzsche-Foucault axis which yields poststructuralism and the Western Marxist tradition which leads to cultural studies. Put bluntly, poststructuralism and cultural studies focus more particularly than does classic sociological theory on ideology as unconscious determinant of agents' orientation in the world and on power as maintaining systemic relations of epistemological, economic, and political inequality. Clas- sic sociological theory articulates the elements of social determinism rather differently; however, it is far closer in its analyses and its concerns to poststructuralism and cultural studies than it is to rational choice theories.

Joas's goal is to bring pragmatism's insights to bear on action theory. He brilliantly- and I think convincingly-shows that creativity only shows up in continental thought of the twentieth century (from Weber, Durkheim, Horkheimer, and the existentialists to the poststructuralists) in garments inherited from turn-of-the-century "philosophies of life," the vitalism of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson. His argument is that pragmatism was the alternative turn-of-the-century philosophy of creativity, but that its vision never made an impact on European thought. Joas devotes some time here (and more time in his Pragmatism and Social Theory) to considering the European failure to grasp pragmatism. There were the usual associations of pragmatism with expediency and American boorish- ness, but the primary explanation is undoubtedly the fact that pragmatism (especially in William James's work) can look awfully similar to the positivism, empiricism, and rational choice accounts that European theorizing rejects. One key question, then, is the extent to which pragmatism is committed to methodological individualism.

Certainly the pragmatist model of action starts with an individual in a situation. This individual acts habitually, minimally conscious of her routine responses within an environment. Matters only get interesting with the routine fails to achieve its usual (expected) results. The individual is pulled up short. An element of doubt has been introduced by the

Sociological Theory 16:3 November 1998 ? American Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW Washington, DC 20036



SYMPOSIUM ON THE CREATIVITY OF ACTION

recalcitrance of the world (world here encompasses other people, objects, and institutional arrangements/relations. Joas helpfully emphasizes that it also includes the agent's body, which does not always function automatically or in sync with intention.). The agent must reconsider her options. She performs an "inquiry" (Peirce's and [sometimes] Dewey's word) or "reconstruction" (Dewey) that leads to a reassessment of the situation and thus an altered relation to it. What was habitual, routine, unconscious becomes considered, reflec- tive, conscious. Joas calls this process "situated creativity" (p. 133), the re-vision of possibilities and strategies in relation to the demands of novel situations.

This model, so far, is hardly at odds with rational choice models, although the pragmatist does posit large domains of what could be deemed prerational action. We will do many things habitually in life-and that's a blessing. When we think consciously about breath- ing, we usually muck it up. But habit, while always present and perhaps necessary, is never sufficient. And it is when pragmatism turns its attention to the formation of habits, to their insufficiency, and to the processes of their reconstruction that it departs significantly from the individualistic models of rational choice theory. For starters, habits themselves are not individually generated. To a certain extent, habits respond to the world's regularities. Nature is lawlike because various configurations and events recur. Social arrangements also attain relative stability (relative because no social arrangement lasts forever and because the stability in question may only manifest itself in some circumstances, while not in others). Habits are mapped onto these stabilities and repetitions. Routine action generates the expected results because the situation of today is not very novel in relation to yester- day's situation. Habits, then, are an interactional product of the encounter of agent with situation. Actions that have gained the desired end will be repeated until they fail. The world is such that many repeated actions do not fail, so many actions become habitual.

If our definition of "world" and of "situation" is not limited to an individual facing a nonhuman environment, but also encompasses others and social arrangements, the interactional model cannot be dual (self facing nature) or even triangular (self facing nature and other selves), but quadrilateral (self facing nature, others, and social arrangements). The environments within which we act are (not always, but most of the time) humanmade as well as natural, and the results at which we aim include the desired response (approbation, love, obedience, cooperation, to name just a few) of others and (sometimes) the mainte- nance, reform, or contestation of the social arrangements that structure our relation to others and to nature. In other words, pragmatism (especially in Dewey and Mead) understands habits as socially produced, understands the relations in which agents stand to the other elements of a situation as socially mediated. Habits are not simply individualistic responses to the world; they are also socially instituted, reinforced, and transmitted. For human action, at least, many habits are acquired through a slow process of education. We reach here the place where habits become fuzzily related to norms or ideologies. The unconscious routines of individual agents are acquired through experiences that are not solely individual but are, at least to some extent, social. With Mead we get a pragmatism fully committed to the insistence that the individual herself, the self as the unit of action and organized experience, is socially constituted.

From methodological individualism to the socially constituted self, pragmatism may seem condemned to swing from the fears of fragmentation and anomie that characterize subjectivist interpretations of modernity to the visions of lock-step conformity and social engineering that mark distopian visions from Huxley and Orwell to critiques of totalitar- ian, mass, or disciplinary society. Joas is absolutely right to identify "situated creativity" as the pragmatist talisman that allows an escape from these unpalatable choices, but I think he doesn't make enough of the accounts of temporality and interaction that make this talisman more than magical thinking. The analysis of habit is crucial because it avoids any

293



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

presentist model of the individual encounter with the situation. The individual enters the situation with a set of habits, beliefs, predispositions, established relations to self and others. The individual is, in a word, experienced-and carries the way of being in the world that experience has forged. The individual is not the blank slate that both rational choice theories and the more extreme Nietzschean versions of action often describe in their accounts of the momentous instant of action. The pragmatist self has a past-and is oriented toward a future. Action in the present is deeply informed by that past and that future.

Furthermore, the situation itself has a past; it, too, is not simply present. Joas, unfortu- nately, does not recognize that Peirce's semiotics are indispensable to pragmatism's model of action. The individual cannot act in, respond to, a situation unless that situation is named. In other words, action for the pragmatist is absolutely conditional on a judgment about what situation I find myself in. And judgment is not purely perceptual (and thus presentist: what I see, hear, feel now), but also linguistic, conceptual, categorical (Peirce took the word pragmatism from Kant). My judgment takes the raw data and raw feels of the present and names them. I decide to take this action because I deem this situation to be of this kind. It is the generalizing, categorizing, classifying property of names that is crucial. The novelty of situations, the newness of the present, is tempered by this judgment.

Crucially, there is no claim to infallibility or to the singularly proper here. There is a tension between the novelty of what is here now and these generalizing categories carried in our language. We can and do make errors of judgment all the time. We deem a situation this type and it wasn't at all. It was another type or even no type, something radically novel. But the Peircean point is that we could not act at all if we did not take the judg- mental step of assimilating (through an imaginative leap that processes similarities, anal- ogies, and formal symmetries/asymmetries) this singular present to situations already experienced. The pragmatist emphasis on experiment, on trial and error, acknowledges the highly problematic nature of our judgments. We should always consider these judgments fallible. They are preliminary hypotheses, the first guides to action, but always tentative, always to be revised in relation to action's results. Peirce's semiotic, in other words, factors in the social mediation that informs all human encounters with the world without simply locking us into the prison house of language. While past experience and preexisting social categories are crucial to our forming judgments in the present, such judgments do not preclude our processing feedback from the real. The expected results of action can fail to occur; we can register the fact of that failure, and we can revise our judgments, beliefs, and habits in relation to that failure.

But even this model of an agent judging a situation in the vocabulary afforded by social categories is still too simple. We must also recognize that situations come to us already named and that we judge them in relation to future goals. Here the pragmatist vision of temporality shades into its persistent interactionism and pluralism. As William James mem- orably put it, "the trail of the human serpent is over all." A situation and the elements of which it is composed are not pure percepts because they come to us bearing the histories of their previous relations to humans. Things-and, more generally, the world in the fullest sense of that word-bear the traces of their previous encounters with agents. If one man- ifestation of culture is transmitted habit, another is this overlaying of history and meaning (carried within language) that accompanies things. Human action alters the world and our relation to that world now is mediated through these prior alterations. Situated creativity, then, involves an individual agent in a situation, but with an individual and a situation that are both deeply embedded in cultural codings that carry the experiences of the past and motivational/normative orientations toward a desired future. Since the actions of the past and possible orientations toward the future are multiple, there is no single right judgment about a present situation. The present situation affords various possibilities (although it

294



SYMPOSIUM ON THE CREATIVITY OF ACTION

makes some things impossible). Plural judgments leading to different courses of action are possible. Success is most likely (although there is no guarantee; the world can be, and sometimes is, perverse) when a judgment attentively responds to the various elements in the situation. But few actions will work upon all those elements, while different purposes may be successfully pursued in the same situation. Both the complexity of present situations and the very different pasts that experienced selves carry into situations lead the pragmatist theorist of action to expect multiple judgments and actions in the present and to expect that more than one judgment/action will prove adequately responsive to present possibilities.

This pluralism of response and possibility is meant to counter models that court social (or any other kind of) determinism. Pragmatist interactionism is another plank-the most basic, ontological plank-in this refutation of determinism. Pragmatism identifies four elements (the agent, other people, the things of the world, and social meanings/arrangements) in any situation. The keys to the pragmatist model are the insistence that none of these elements is determinant and that each of these elements has no independent standing, but is an interactional product of the encounters among all four. In other words, the identifi- cation of the four elements is an ex post facto result of theoretical analysis that rather falsely suggests an independent existence for each one. The ontological claim is that the four only exist (for humans, at least) in interaction with each other. The dynamic, ongoing, and inescapable intertwining of the four through time is the environment in which humans find themselves. The human organism thus embedded is continuously adapting to the circumstances of being in the world. Attempts to indicate the causal contribution of any of the four elements to the creation of a situation belie their mutual dependence on each other, the fact that each can only ever act in conjunction. We do not encounter or know of any of these four elements in isolation from the rest or even in some nondynamic moment of inaction. The pushes and pulls of their coexistence are constant. The world just is (this is the ontological claim) the interaction of these four-and no one of the four is predominant, gets to call the shots.

From this pragmatist perspective, almost all theories of action are reductive, taking one or another of the four elements as determinative, thus reducing all action to areflection of individual temperament, social/cultural coding, natural reality, or the pressure of imme- diate others. (Obviously, the first two are more common reductions than the ast two, although number three is making a comeback with neo-Darwinian theories and NA- based explanations of human behavior.) Each of the elements, the pragmatist insists, under- determines the end result, which is one reason why predictions of action are so unreliable. At the very best, some statistical regularities will be identifiable. But individualized predictions are pretty hit or miss. The variables are just too complex since their limited number (four) is joined to the indeterminacy of just how much weight they carry in any particular interaction. Analysis after the fact can offer plausible accounts of how the variables inter- acted to produce a specific action and specific consequences. But even these analyses will occupy a realm of plausibility, not exactitude, and will be subject to the pluralism that stems from the different possible ways to name a situation and the different possible iden- tifications of its consequences.

Situated creativity, then, calls on us to focus on the unexpected and novel ways that a particular person goes about responding to a particular situation. (Of course, Peirce and Dewey were both interested in communal enterprises; it is not entirely clear how much the basic model of action would have to be modified to account for communal creativity.) Physical possibilities, normative expectations (which carry a range of sanctions if violated), and institutional arrangements all structure the field in which the action will take place. But the wild card of the agent remains just that; there are more ways to skin a cat than

295



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

one-a fact which becomes especially relevant when activity in a field (such as an aca- demic discipline) is most lauded when not (fully) routine or predictable. (It is a nice question just what combination of the routine and the highly original wins most praise within a discipline. Full novelty, I suspect, is as likely to lead to ignoble failure as pure predictability.)

William James famously shook off years of depression when he put the specter of determinism behind him with an act of sheer assertion. An arbitrary and gratuitous action, by virtue of its occurrence, disproved determinism. Appeals to the wild card of agency can look similarly ungrounded. Joas does a good job of showing how other theories of action omit its creative dimension. But he doesn't-and perhaps it is impossible to-explain or theorize creativity very well within the pragmatist model. To a large extent, the argument rests on empirical observation. Humans continually do unexpected, unpredicted things, and humans also demonstrably alter established routines in response to altered circumstances or altered goals. Any detailed explanation of just how we manage to be creative courts making creativity determinate. Hannah Arendt, a theorist of action whom Joas sur- prisingly ignores, faces this aporia between assertions of creativity and the explanations of theory directly when she calls action "miraculous" (see the essay "What Is Freedom?" in Between Past and Future).

Joas comes closest to explaining creativity when he emphasizes Dewey's portrait of the embedded agent who redefines the situation in response to encountered obstacles. Dewey calls this process "reconstruction," or, sometimes, simply "intelligence." The human being is always already acting; humans are always in the process of maintaining and adjusting their relationship to the world. Creativity names the ability to develop new ways of maintaining and adjusting that relationship. "Anchoring creativity in action allows the pragmatist to conceive of creativity precisely as the liberation of the capacity for new actions" (p. 133).

Joas is not so clear as he could be that this understanding of situated creativity assumes agents capable of monitoring the world and of reflexively processing the information received. In other words, a theory of creative action entails a (however minimal) bottom- line individualism. There must be a point, even in a fully interactionist theory, where the self cannot be reduced to a function of forces external to it (or even of forces "internalized" through some process of socialization). That point in pragmatism focuses on the self's ability to read (to judge) situations. The pragmatist model cannot survive an "error theory," that is, any account of behavior which places the self's ability to know what it is doing into radical question. Pragmatism depends on the fundamental trustworthiness of conscious- ness (perhaps not immediately, but at some level and/or some point of reflexive processes of intelligence). Any theory which posits unconscious processes as more constitutive of action than conscious choices cannot be compatible with the pragmatist outlook.

Although he fails to make this connection explicit, I think this conscious/unconscious divide explains Joas's need to take on Luhmann and Habermas. Adherents of "systems theory" often postulate inevitable-or, at least, frequent-patches of ignorance on the part of agents. Situations are structured by systemic relations that remain unperceived by agents. These deep structures are determinate apart from their conscious recognition or conscious creation/affirmation. They (almost literally) have a life of their own. Joas makes it clear that it is precisely to the systems side of Habermas that he objects, to the "dualism" of what Habermas calls "the uncoupling of system and lifeworld" in The Theory of Communicative Action (see Joas, pp. 216-20). Ideology theories obviously describe the unconscious determinants of thought and action rather differently than do system theories. We might say, very roughly, that system theories point to an ignorance that renders agents' actions unlikely to achieve their consciously projected results, whereas ideology theories argue that con-

296



SYMPOSIUM ON THE CREATIVITY OF ACTION 297

scious intentions and motivations are unlikely to be the actual determinants of an act. But both system and ideology theories are equally fatal to a pragmatist model that depends on

agents who can, for the most part, know what they are doing. The pragmatist need not deny systemic relations and/or effects, but must deny that agents are systematically unable to

perceive and take into account these relations and effects.

Pragmatists do not just want creativity and the unpredictable as the random byproducts of processes and/or emotions outside of agents' ken. They want a creativity that walks hand in hand with a guiding intelligence which takes in and works through and on a steady stream of information from the world in which we are situated. Hans Joas goes a long way toward articulating that vision of creativity in his book. He goes even further toward

showing us how persistent an embarrassment creativity has been to social theory in our

century. Surely our inability to account for creativity (and our continual effort to sweep it under the carpet) says more about the limitations of our theories of action than it doe about the actual capacities of human agents.



Toward a Pragmatist Theory of Action

Documents

Transcript of Toward a Pragmatist Theory of Action