Todd May “A new neo-pragmatism”

May, Todd 2011. A new neo-pragmatism: From James and Dewey to Foucault. Foucault Studies 11: 54–62.

[…] a truth is to be conceived as a belief that helps us navigate the world more efficiently to our purposes. Rorty writes, ‚James’ point *when defining truth as ‘what is good in the way of belief’+ was that there is nothing deeper to be said: truth is not the sort of thing which has an essence.‛9 We discover truths when we recognize that certain beliefs are better to have than others, because they fit better with our attempt to live. (56)

[…] there is nothing in particular to be said about truth, but instead only about particular truths. As Dewey puts the point, ‚Truth is a collection of truths; and these constituent truths are in the keeping of the best available methods of inquiry and testing as to matters-of-fact; methods which are, when collected under a single name, science. As to truth, then, philosophy has no pre-eminent status; it is a recipient, not a donor.‛ (56)

It is in this intertwining of truth, inferential structure, and living we find the relation of Foucault to pragmatism. There is a deep bond, but also a certain critique that is at play here. Let us start with the bond, since it will lead us to the critique. Foucault writes that, ‚Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.‛ As with the pragmatist approach to truth, one might quibble with Foucault’s wording here. I have argued elsewhere that what Foucault is getting at is not truth per se but instead beliefs that are justified within a particular political and epistemic structure. (57)

For Foucault, as for James, truth happens to an idea. Rather, his intervention consists in asking about the political character of practices, especially in their particular historical dimension. Once this political character is recognized, the idea of successful navigation of the world will seem more complicated. To anticipate, the questions that his investigations allow us to ask, concern the character of successful world engagement. (59)

The claim is not that all practices have the same level of depth or influence when it comes to relations of power and knowledge. If that were the case, then it would have been just as expedient for Foucault to study baseball as psychotherapeutic practice. Rather, the idea is that, to one extent or another, power and knowledge, and particularly their relationship, arises within practices. (60)

What Foucault offers in focusing on the level of practices as his unit of historical and genealogical inquiry is not a specialized or narrow analytic, but instead a way of understanding ourselves and how we got to be who we are through the most common and pervasive ways in which we engage with the world. (60)

The addition I have made to Foucault’s own claim about practices is that it is in the practices that the power/knowledge relationships are to be found. Even this is not an addition so much as a clarification that allows us to see more straightforwardly the relationship between his work and pragmatism. (60–61)

What is the implication of all this for pragmatism? It lies in introducing a complexity that appears to have escaped James and, to a lesser extent, Dewey, for whom the success of a practice lay in its ability to help us navigate the world. If Foucault’s genealogical approach is helpful, the concept of success must itself be investigated rather than being a sort of ‚unexplained explainer.‛  Successful navigation of the world seems to be a matter of accomplishing one’s goals better or more efficiently or more meaningfully. This being said, we might ask, what are the self-understandings tied up with particular senses of success? If, for instance, we are produced to one extent or another to be psychological beings with personalities of the type that psychotherapy promotes, then success will be defined in psychotherapeutic terms. (61)

We cannot, then, take the notion of success or the idea of navigating the world more successfully at face value. We must see it as the name of a problem to be investigated rather than a solution to be attained. This, it seems to me, is a point that would deepen pragmatism without violating any of its central commitments. It would, instead, offer a historical dimension to pragmatist thought. (61)

We might, from another angle, locate the difference between Foucault and the pragmatists and neo-pragmatists this way. For the latter, pragmatism is a matter of what is practical; while for Foucault, pragmatism is a matter of taking our practices as the unit of analysis. What gives Foucault’s work its force, and what makes it relevant for pragmatism, is that it is through our practices what is considered practical arises for us. We cannot take the practical, or successful within it, as a given. That is the lesson of his genealogies. (61)