Religion, it must be said, has not played a very significant role, except perhaps negatively, in the recent renewal of pragmatism. There are no doubt many reasons for this, but none is more important than the responsibility that Richard Rorty deservedly bears for helping to promote this revival and the connection he has made between the development of pragmatism and liberalism’s project of disenchanting the world religiously.
Giles Gunn, “Religion and the Recent Revival of Pragmatism”
Especially in the United States, the revival of pragmatism in the form of neopragmatism has presented itself as the only tenable alternative to theory.
Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence
IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER I argue that one way of telling the story of pragmatism is as a gendered rhetoric of mediation. James’s construction of pragmatism as a feminine-gendered “mediator” and “reconciler” between opposing “attitudes” such as religion and science and between philosophical positions such as rationalism and empiricism was conditioned and circumscribed by contestations over race, gender, and class occurring in his late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century cultural context. I now extend my analysis of gender and religion in the pragmatist tradition into the present to discuss the ways that some neopragmatist formulations evidenced a similar construction of pragmatism as mediator. Though the feminist debates covered here have been treated in other works, my aim is to demonstrate that the pragmatist rhetoric of mediation can also be seen in the late twentieth-century neopragmatist turn in feminist theory and theology. In the examples discussed, pragmatism is invoked in the desire to produce consensus or convergence, either to bridge the theory/practice divide or to forestall an either/or choice in a particular theoretical debate by carving out a middle position that incorporates the best qualities of each side.
I also engage the problematic of the omission of critical analyses of religion in many contemporary feminist theoretical engagements with pragmatism. This omission is unfortunate because it enacts a rather wide gulf between feminist theorists and feminist theologians who might otherwise have interesting things to say to one another about the possible contributions of pragmatism to feminist theories and practice. It also apparently replicates a liberal philosophical narrative of the decline of religion in Western culture that is actually at odds with the history and ideas of the pragmatist tradition. Such a position is not unique to specifically pragmatist forms of feminist theory, of course, but it is somewhat surprising in that classical pragmatism in the writings of James and Dewey occupies a rather unique place in the Western philosophical tradition precisely by taking religion seriously as a source of individual and cultural meaning and action. Further, James explicitly constructs pragmatism in relation to the category of religion as a “mediating way of thinking” that can satisfy the felt need for religious faith with the compelling evidence of modern science. Thus, one way of understanding Jamesian pragmatism is as a rhetorical construction that gains its affective resonance from cultural debates over gender and religion in his context. In this chapter I jump forward to the present neopragmatist revival to show how the rhetoric of mediation appeared in neopragmatist-feminist discourse.
I have discussed the multiple pragmatist narratives and counter-narratives that construct the tradition and our understanding of its own self-identification as simultaneously the philosophy of the future and the history of the philosophy of the future. Here I consider another, very influential attempt to tell the story of pragmatism, one that understands the history of pragmatism as a “secular coming-of-age story” in which pragmatism is the culmination of a long process of the “de-divinization of the world.”1 As Giles Gunn points out, two different formulations of this story can be found in Richard Rorty’s work. The first is taken from Consequences of Pragmatism, where Rorty argues that “literature has now displaced religion, science, and philosophy as the presiding discipline of our culture.” How this came to be is explained thus:
Metaphysical idealism was a momentary, though important, stage in the emergence of romanticism. The notion that philosophy might replace science as a secular substitute for religion was a momentary, though important, stage in the replacement of science by literature as the presiding cultural discipline. Romanticism was aufgehoben in pragmatism, the claim that the significance of new vocabularies was not their ability to decode but their mere utility. Pragmatism is the philosophical counterpart of literary modernism, the kind of literature which prides itself on its autonomy and novelty rather than its truthfulness to experience or its discovery of pre-existing significance.2
This genealogy in some ways repeats the familiar narrative of the Enlightenment as ushering in a process of secularization that gradually displaced religion with science and then philosophy as the dominant explanatory discourse in Western culture. However, in Rorty’s view literature or “literary culture” has now replaced philosophy in this role. The rise of pragmatism, then, a process he traces from James and Dewey through Quine, Goodman, and Davidson and culminating in his own work, implies not only the decline of religion but the decline of philosophy in the sense of the Platonic quest for truth. A “thorough-going pragmatism” is his attempt to think through this new state of things, which amounts to a “thorough-going abandonment of the notion of discovering the truth which is common to theology and science.”3
Rorty’s second genealogy of pragmatism comes from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:
Once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity.
[The pragmatist] line of thought . . . suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance.4
In this account, all truths are bound by language, which is always contingent; there are no universals, foundations, or means of achieving consensus to which we can appeal for notions of justice or truth; and all we have are evolving self-descriptions, which are themselves the “product of time and chance.” The only possibility for creation of new forms of solidarity and community is the role of imagination, idealized for Rorty in the figure of the Bloomian “strong poet” who is the “maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, [and] the vanguard of the species.” “Ironism” is his name for the new attitude needed to accommodate oneself to the current situation, an ironist being an individual who has “radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she uses,” a realization that “argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve those doubts,” and a belief that no one vocabulary “is closer to reality than others.”5
Rorty characterized these accounts as two manifestations of the same master “redemption” narrative of philosophy’s role in Western culture that he told in various forms since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.6 As he recounts this now “tediously familiar up-from-representationalism story,” Western intellectuals have for the past five hundred years been engaged in the search for “redemptive truth,” a quest that has moved through three successive stages: “they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature.”7 Now that religion and philosophy have proven themselves unable to provide this sort of redemption, and the whole notion of redemptive truth itself has been called into question, intellectuals turn to literature and the imagination—or more precisely, to a recognition of its finitude and limitations—as sources of redemption. From this vantage point the proper way to view religion and philosophy is as “primitive” “stages in a process of maturation” and attainment of greater self-reliance.8 However, it is interesting to note that for Rorty, religion in its “pure,” “uncontaminated” sense—meaning in its mythic, pre-Platonic, pre-philosophical mode—is more like literature and hence more acceptable.9
In the narrative that Rorty offers, the growth of pragmatism is linked with the decline of (philosophically inflected) religion and religion’s replacement by science, philosophy, and ultimately literature and ironism. In Rorty’s genealogy of pragmatism, the Enlightenment can be said to be the birthplace, liberalism the progenitor, and the development and maturing of pragmatism a kind of Oedipal drama where each new “usurping discipline” must depose the one that came before it, not by virtue of argument but by demonstrating “its ability to put the other disciplines in their places.”10 This is not a teleological process but a “product of time and chance,” so the issue that concerns Rorty is not how to ultimately replace religion’s role in our culture but how to come to terms with the absence of what it once represented. Rorty seeks to “replace both religious and philosophical accounts of a suprahistorical ground or an end-of-history convergence with a historical narrative about the rise of liberal institutions and customs.” He is critical of those who would seek to create a liberal substitute for the traditional function of religion. For example, in critiquing Habermas’s notion of communicative reason, he notes that “we do not need to replace religion with a philosophical account of a healing and unifying power which will do the work once done by God.” “What binds societies together are common vocabularies and common hopes,” not shared philosophical beliefs or religious convictions. In particular there is the “social hope” of modern liberal societies that “life will eventually be freer, less cruel, more leisured, richer in goods and experiences, not just for our descendants but for everybody’s descendants.”11
In this context, those who seek to do philosophy in the traditional sense of a quest for truth are both outdated and irrelevant.12 What contemporary philosophers should see as their task instead is developing multiple new forms of redescription until they “have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing them to look for appropriate new forms of nonlinguistic behavior, for example, the adoption of new scientific equipment or new social institutions.” Philosophers develop new vocabularies, but their enterprise is essentially a private one. Whether rising generations actually adopt the new redescriptions they have created is out of their control and ultimately not their concern. They do not and cannot offer arguments for their redescriptions; “there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription.” Rorty understands pragmatism to be the antithesis of traditional philosophy (what he calls philosophy with a capital “P”). It marks the way forward for this new conceptualization of philosophy that he is advocating. The centerpiece of this understanding is a “firm distinction between the private and the public,” where individuals can be both “private self-creator[s]” and “public liberal[s],” just not at the same time. Or as he puts it another way in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, “my ‘poeticized’ culture is one which has given up the attempt to unite one’s private ways of dealing with one’s finitude and one’s sense of obligation to other human beings.”13
Many critiques have been made of Rorty’s public/private split, or what Bernstein has called his “logic of apartheid” with its “violent” consequences. Bernstein has also observed the curious fact that “Rorty, who shows us that most distinctions are fuzzy, vague, and subject to historical contingencies, should rely on such a fixed, rigid, ahistorical dichotomy.”14 Nancy Fraser and Joan Williams have both critiqued Rorty’s separation of public and private on feminist grounds. Fraser finds a strong inclination toward Romanticism, defined loosely as the “valorization of individual invention understood as self-fashioning,” to be at odds in Rorty’s work with his commitment to pragmatism, understood (also loosely) as “an impatience with differences that do not make a difference.”15
Fraser finds Rorty employing a “partition position” between these two strands of his thought in Contingency, one that “stands or falls with the possibility of drawing a sharp boundary between public and private life.” It is summarized in this way: “On one side will be public life, the preserve of pragmatism, the sphere where utility and solidarity predominate. On the other side will be private life, the preserve of Romanticism, the sphere of self-discovery, sublimity, and irony.”16 For Fraser, this attempt to hold competing commitments to Romanticism and pragmatism together through the bifurcation of public and private ultimately fails. By making politics and theory “obverses of each other,” that is, by making theory “hyperindividualized and depoliticized” and practice “hyper-communalized and detheoreticized,” Rorty “cuts out the ground for the possibility of democratic radical politics.”17
Joan Williams takes a different line of critique on Rorty’s division of the world “into a small public and a large private sphere.” Like Fraser, Williams finds the roots of this distinction in Rorty’s commitment to Romanticism, but she focuses on the gender implications of the Romantic ideal. Williams notes that “while Rorty attempts to distance himself from the masculinist and elitist elements in Romantic thought, he fails to appreciate how his model of self-creation subtly but systematically deflects his gaze away from his egalitarian aspirations.” This is the case because Rorty’s ideal is bound up with the ideal of the Romantic male poet, the “strong poet,” whose emphasis on masculinity and virility resulted from the Romantic project of “celebrat[ing] the emotions—an arena traditionally the province of women.”18
Rorty’s reasons for invoking the strong poet ideal, according to Williams, result from the fact that “he is fighting a battle for masculine authority that originated with the Romantics: the battle between the poet and the scientist.” In his attempt to “decenter the scientist,” Rorty “adopts the Romantic strategy of associating poets with traditionally male attributes as a way of supporting their claim to cultural authority.”19 This strategy, with its masculinist and elitist overtones, “leads to a particular, and undesirable, construction of the political” in which the overarching goal of the public sphere is “to make the world safe for strong poets.”20 As Rorty puts it, “An ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except . . . to make life easier for poets and revolutionaries. . . . It is a society whose hero is the strong poet and the revolutionary because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, speaks the language it does, . . . because certain poets and revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did.” In constructing a world in which the strong poet and the revolutionary are our cultural heroes, we must accept a state of affairs in which “our responsibilities to others constitute only the public side of our lives, a side which competes with our private affections and our private attempts at self-creation, and which has no automatic priority over such private motives.”21
In his later work Rorty appeared to modify and soften the public/private distinction somewhat. In Achieving Our Country Rorty advocates a renewed commitment by the academic left to stop “prefer[ring] knowledge over hope” and to end its “retreat from secularism and pragmatism to theory.” Instead, the Left should return to a pre–Vietnam War “reformist Left” model and focus on addressing issues of “social justice within the system,” such as poverty and labor issues.22 As Kloppenberg noted, these concessions were striking, and as a result Rorty has “effectively bridged the gap that divided the private from the public spheres in his earlier writings.” However, at the same time, “another gap—that separating those he considers enlightened secularists from narrow-minded religious believers—seems to have widened in his work.”23 Indeed, Rorty described this split between secularists like himself and religious believers as the “biggest gap between the typical intellectual and the typical non-intellectual,” where the typical intellectual thinks of religion “at its best” as, to quote process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “what we do with our solitude.”24
In the essay “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” Rorty offered a (controversial) reading of James’s “Will to Believe” in an attempt to construct a “suitably private form of religious belief,” one that will “dictate neither one’s scientific beliefs nor anybody’s moral choices save one’s own.” To do so, he argued, it is necessary to give up the assumption that the quest for happiness and the quest for truth are two separate enterprises and instead accept the notion that religion and science are just two different ways of attempting to “gratify human needs.” In this view, according to Rorty, “both scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are private projects which have gotten out of hand,” on the mistaken belief that “one’s own private way of giving meaning to one’s life . . . [should be] obligatory for the general public.” Criticizing James for allowing for the possibility of justified religious belief in a way that “partially betrayed his own pragmatism,” Rorty concluded that the most adequate kind of religious faith in our time is something he calls “romance”: “a faith in the future possibilities of mortal humans, a faith that is hard to distinguish from love for, and hope for, the human community.”25
In the essay “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” Rorty undertakes a creative reading of Nietzsche, James, and Dewey to more specifically focus his critique of religion. “Monotheistic” forms of religion, philosophy, or science, as discourses that purport to “unify all our beliefs into a single worldview,” are antithetical to modern liberal democracies, but religion “disconnected from both science and morals” and understood “polytheistically” as a romantic, private enterprise of “individual self-development,” like art, may win some private purchase in Rorty’s secular utopia.26 In making this argument Rorty relies on a “plausible inference” from a belief in a variety of competing ends and ideals to the commitment to a form of democracy in which all participate in “the process of achieving democratic consensus about how to achieve happiness.” Once again this construction relies on a form of the public/private distinction, this time between “projects of social cooperation” like science and law, on which public consensus is required, and “projects of individual self-development” like literature, which require no such justification.27
In the oft-critiqued “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” Rorty takes on Stephen Carter’s argument that “privatizing religion trivializes it.”28 Rorty argues instead that the “Jeffersonian compromise” at the heart of liberal democratic societies requires that “religious believers remain willing to trade privatization for a guarantee of religious liberty.” Privatizing religion amounts to “keeping it out of . . . ‘the public square,’ making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy.” Rorty argues that religious belief is just another form of the pursuit of “private perfection,” like writing poetry or reading great works of literature. As such, it has no place in discussions of public policy. But the primary reason for the relegation of religion to the private sphere, according to Rorty, is that “in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper.” Giving religious reasons in support of one’s political convictions is akin to making statements such as “‘I would never have an abortion’ or, ‘Reading pornography is about the only pleasure I get out of life these days.’” In Rorty’s view, the only possible response to such statements is “silence,” which “masks the group’s inclination to say, ‘So what? We weren’t discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don’t bother us with matters that are not our concern.’”29
Jeffrey Stout and Nicholas Wolterstorff, among others, have criticized the view of religion’s role in public debate that Rorty expressed in essays like “Conversation-Stopper.” Stout points out that Rorty’s understanding of religion is too sweeping and universalizing: Stout reminds us that, in a pragmatist view, “religion is not essentially anything.” He further argues that many people are unable to give reasons for their deep nonreligious commitments in a persuasive way, so if we follow Rorty in requiring that unshared religious reasons for holding political commitments be excluded from public debate, we will have to rule out of bounds “the expression of many nonreligious commitments, as well.” But this would result in a situation in which Rorty’s “proposed policy of restraint, if adopted, would cause too much silence at precisely the points where more discussion is most badly needed,” so the “policy would itself be a conversation-stopper.”30 Stout concludes that “conversation,” understood in the sense of “ad hoc immanent criticism,” is in fact “the very thing that is not stopped when religious premises are introduced in a political argument. It is only the normal discourse of straightforward argument on the basis of commonly held premises that is stopped.” From there we are invited to depart the text and work together to carry the conversation further in the hope of potentially discovering common ground. Such modes of discourse are indispensable for modern democracies characterized by diversity and pluralism. For Stout, the “political discourse of a pluralistic democracy, as it turns out, needs to be a mixture of normal discourse and conversational improvisation.”31
Like Stout, Wolterstorff finds Rorty’s argument that religious reasons are to be excluded from public debate on the presumption that debate should be “limited” to reasons held in common to all disputants to be inconsistent with other elements of Rorty’s thought. Whereas elsewhere Rorty advocates “imagination, openness, re-description, self-creation,” when it comes to religion’s role in democratic society, “the talk is all about limits.”32 Wolterstorff observes further that there already exists a well-established procedure for what to do when public debate reaches its limits: take a vote. In this view, “stopped conversation is an all-pervasive feature of political debate in a democracy,” not something specific to the holding of religious beliefs.33 Finally, Wolterstorff suggests that what is really at stake in the debate over giving religious reasons in public debate is the type of democracy being presupposed and advocated. Rorty opposes religion’s presence in the public sphere because certain forms of religion are opposed to his own commitment to the “American sublime”: a vision of democracy as that which best promotes individual projects of self-creation and fulfillment.34 Wolterstorff argues that Rorty’s commitment to this ideal is itself a quasi-religious one and is just as potentially threatening to religious believers like himself as Rorty seems to think religious views are to his democratic ideal.
The criticisms of Wolterstorff and Stout prompted Rorty to prepare a “chastened,” “more cautious” reformulation of his views in which he attempted to finesse the religious/secular distinction further by differentiating between “ecclesiastical organizations” and religion as practiced at the “parish level.”35 The former he regarded as a threat to liberal democracies, a fear at the root of his “anticlericalism,” while the latter he was willing to tolerate as a kind of benighted, relatively harmless artifact of a past era.36 In his narrative of social progress, religion is primarily a coping mechanism for dealing with unjust social conditions, and as those wither away, so will the need for religion:
As social justice increases, we hope there will be less temptation for the poor to murder the rich, and consequently less need for religion as a device for diminishing social unrest, and less temptation to hope for pie in the sky. So the only role left for religious belief will be to help individuals find meaning in their lives, and to serve as a help to individuals in their times of trouble. Religion will, in this secularist utopia, be pruned back to the parish level.37
Because “leftist politics . . . is strengthened insofar as belief in a private deity who will provide pie in the sky is weakened,” Rorty continues, “we secularists have come to think that the best society would be one in which political action conducted in the name of religious belief is treated as a ladder up which our ancestors climbed, but one that now should be thrown away.”38 While Rorty now granted Wolterstorff’s point that neither law nor custom ought to legitimately prevent citizens from appealing to religious convictions in public debate, any more than they should prevent Rorty from citing passages from Mill for his deepest convictions, he still found religious reasons given in support of opposition to same-sex marriage, for example, to be in “bad taste” and even to constitute hate speech. Yet Rorty felt unable to develop a procedural principle for ruling such utterances out of bounds in public debate.39 He believed, however, that religiously based anti-liberal views are primarily a product of authoritarian ecclesiastical organizations. This perception caused him to reach the conclusion that “liberal Protestantism [is] the form of Christian religious life most congenial to a liberal democracy.” In matters of public debate, he concluded that “mere appeal to authority” should be discouraged and “citizens of a democracy should try to put off invoking conversation-stoppers as long as possible.”40
These arguments of Rorty’s, and of his critics, over the public/private distinction and the role of religion in public debate are by now well rehearsed. I reiterate them here to provide context for my argument. Because Rorty’s work has been the primary conduit through which neopragmatism’s engagement with feminist theory and theology has been enacted, a general understanding of his views is helpful as background for the influential proposal he offered about pragmatism’s contributions to feminism. The public/private distinction was central both to Rorty’s thought more generally and to his constructive approach to the topic of pragmatism and feminism, and the role of religion and its relationship to the public and private spheres is a key part of this distinction.
While feminist theorists have been quite astute and perceptive in critiquing on both feminist and pragmatist grounds Rorty’s separation of public and private and its implications, they have not done so with respect to Rorty’s conception of religion. The result is that religion remains a feature of the private sphere under Rorty’s schema, feminized and privatized as “pie in the sky” escapism and intellectual primitivism. Despite Rorty’s pretensions to herald the “end of philosophy” and traditional Western metaphysics, he continued to maintain a quite traditional and conservative stance in constructing religion as the other of philosophical discourse. As long as feminist engagements with neopragmatism in its Rortian lineage leave unaddressed the gendered privatization of religion, indeed continue to replicate it, these critiques will remain incomplete.
Rorty wrote passionately and often about the originality and relevance of a (neo) pragmatist perspective for addressing contemporary philosophical and social problems and issues. In 1990 he was invited to give the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan, and he chose as his subject pragmatism and feminism.41 In the lecture, Rorty attempted to demonstrate how “pragmatist philosophy might be useful to feminist politics.”42 Rorty’s choice of topic marked the first time he had spoken publicly on feminism, and it was also purportedly the first occasion on which “a renowned male philosopher has elected to address the subject of feminism and indeed to make it the subject of a major philosophical address.”43 While some feminist scholars had for several years been integrating pragmatist philosophy into their own work, still the event was a watershed moment in feminist-pragmatist dialogue, because male pragmatist philosophers like Rorty were now beginning to engage with feminist work as feminists had already done with pragmatism.44 In her response to Rorty’s lecture, given at a symposium held the following day, feminist social-political theorist Nancy Fraser began by noting that Rorty is “breaking new ground as a male philosopher lecturing on this subject” and thus struggling to find a proper means of addressing feminists who are both the subject and intended audience of his remarks:
When I first read his lecture I had the impression that he was addressing us as a suitor with a marriage proposal; much of his paper is devoted to trying to persuade us that we’d be much better off with him than with his universalist and realist rivals. This reading of Rorty’s lecture in terms of the generic conventions of heterosexual courtship had its pleasurable elements, to be sure—the pleasure that comes from being wooed—but it could not but be troubling to a feminist sensibility that, as Rorty himself notes, is in the process of constructing itself as the independent variable instead of always defining itself in relation to a man.45
Fraser identifies a central problematic in thinking about feminist engagements with pragmatism: whether and how feminism can engage critically with other theoretical models and philosophical traditions like pragmatism and still remain the “independent variable”—without compromising fundamental political commitments.
Before I move to investigate exactly what kind of proposal Rorty’s is, and how Fraser in turn constructs her response to his “wooing,” I highlight this metaphor of heterosexual marriage proposal and the related language of independence/dependence that Fraser names as an example of the gendered rhetoric that underlies much recent feminist-pragmatist exchange. While it may be rather easy to see James’s positioning of pragmatism as a mediator between competing philosophical positions as gendered, and easier still to dismiss such positioning as a quaint relic of offhand turn-of-the-century rhetorical flourishes and outdated Victorian cultural sensibilities, the rhetoric of pragmatism as feminine mediator still carries a great deal of philosophical and cultural cachet in the current context.
Like many feminist pragmatists before and since have done, Rorty locates his discussion of feminism and pragmatism in the terrain of the ongoing philosophical debate of universalism versus historicism. He understands feminist theorists such as Catherine MacKinnon and Marilyn Frye to share a common commitment with pragmatists to a historicist rather than universalist conception of social change. Whereas universalists and moral realists tend to view the feminist movement “as a matter of rights which are already recognizable and describable, although not yet granted,” a historicist perspective understands feminism on the model of evolutionary struggle, in which different sets of beliefs, each with different understandings of the good, compete with one another for available discursive space. Thus, the task of social movements like feminism, understood from a historicist perspective, is to develop new, alternative ways of speaking about particular practices and situations. If or when those new descriptions gain adequate cultural purchase as a result of their members having attained a kind of critical mass, they can work to “extend logical space” and thus create room for eventual social change; the development of new language is thus the sine qua non for the possibility of changing actual social practices.46
Rorty’s proposal argues that pragmatism can contribute to the feminist cause in two ways. First, “pragmatism redescribes both intellectual and moral progress by substituting metaphors of evolutionary development for metaphors of progressively less distorted perception,” thus providing a more theoretically satisfactory account of the development of feminism than universalism and moral realism.47 Second, and following from the first point, Rorty understands feminism to have a “prophetic” quality that comports better with pragmatism’s “utopianism” than does a Marxist “radicalism,” which still bears traces of realism. Unlike radicalism, utopianism eschews “the contrast between superficial appearance and deep reality” and instead focuses on “the contrast between a painful present and a possibly less painful, dimly-seen, future.”48 In Rorty’s view, feminists would do better to critique unjust existing practices and social arrangements not through invoking ostensibly universal standards of justice, women’s experience, or human flourishing, but by contrasting existing practices with alternative imagined constructions of community.
When Rorty states that contemporary feminism possesses a prophetic quality, he does not just mean that it critiques present arrangements with reference to imagined alternatives. He deliberately intends to invoke the biblical notion of the prophet as the solitary voice crying out in the wilderness. Prophetic movements, in Rorty’s view, are fringe movements, enclaves formed in opposition to dominant social, political, cultural, and religious norms, existing on the margins of society and engaged in a struggle for what Frye terms “semantic authority.”49 Thus, Rorty says,
I am suggesting that we see the contemporary feminist movement as playing the same role in intellectual and moral progress as was played by, for example, Plato’s Academy, the early Christians meeting in the catacombs, the invisible Copernican colleges of the seventeenth century, groups of workingmen gathering to discuss Tom Paine’s pamphlets, and lots of other clubs which were formed to try out new ways of speaking and to gather the moral strength to go out and change the world.50
This notion of the feminist movement as composed of prophets, poets, and other assorted people regarded as “crazies” (Rorty’s term) by the wider public may seem a bit off-putting initially, but it’s important to note that for Rorty the formation of such “clubs” is the only way that social change ever actually occurs and that new ideals, such as his Romantic strong poet, develop. In Rorty’s progressive model of evolutionary development, new forms of language and alternative practices play a role in human history analogous to the role of genes in evolutionary biology. When a particular set of goods carried by a particular social group or movement achieves prominence, it is due to chance and luck rather than to any kind of teleology or a supposedly better correspondence with “reality.” In such an understanding of history, giving and exchanging reasons in public debate to persuade others to adopt one’s views can be both inadequate and actually reinforce the status quo.
Rorty says that “prophecy . . . is all that non-violent political movements can fall back on when argument fails. Argument for the rights of the oppressed will fail just insofar as the only language in which to state relevant premises is one in which the relevant emancipatory premises sound crazy.”51 Thus, the development of new language is important for any social movement, for without new language, it will continue to appear crazy to those who do not share its underlying premises.
So Rorty admires the contemporary feminist movement for being one of the groups on the front lines of this struggle for semantic change and seeks to think about how he, as a pragmatist philosopher, might contribute to the “gathering of moral strength” required if feminists are “to go out and change the world.” He finds his answer in the conclusion that the role of a philosopher is “to clear the road for prophets and poets, to make intellectual life a bit simpler and safer for those who have visions of new communities.”52 Pragmatism, as Rorty defines it—“a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language”—is “neutral between masculinism and feminism” and does not provide “specifically feminist doctrines.” But if feminists are willing to see it not as a “powerful and indispensable ally” but as “something to be picked up and laid down as occasion demands,” and something that may provide “occasional bits of ad hoc advice,” then they will find pragmatism to be congenial to their political goals.53
We see Rorty rhetorically constructing two identities here, the pragmatist and the feminist, with distinct functions. The pragmatist philosopher, implicitly gendered as male and the figure with which Rorty identifies, does not actively participate in social movements but can contribute indirectly to them by providing a few “clarifying” and “simplifying” conceptual tools, to be used if or as needed.54 The feminist’s domain is the realm of prophecy and politics, where marginalized individuals and groups engage in active redescription of existing social practices and the envisioning of new forms of community. To risk oversimplifying, the pragmatist’s realm is theory and the private; the feminist’s, practice and the public. Pragmatism itself is “neutral” between them.
While prophecy and poetry have long been feminized and regarded as the domain of women and “crazies,” it’s important to note that for Rorty this is not the case.55 His understanding of the prophet may be said to have more in common with West’s notion of the prophet as cultural critic, although West is careful to avoid separating prophecy from philosophy and hence practice from theory as Rorty does. Rorty’s understanding of the poet, the subject of his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is more developed. For Rorty, the poet is a solitary individual, detached from community, who has the aesthetic strength and insight to envision a new identity for himself through transgressive speech. This notion of the “strong poet” does have obvious masculinist subtexts, as Fraser notes in her response.56 As we have seen, Williams has also criticized Rorty’s work in Contingency for its reliance on “the Romantic ideal, which associates self-creation with mastery, autonomy, and masculinity” in a Whitmanesque mode.57 So what is surprising about the positioning of pragmatism in relation to feminism in Rorty’s overture is that, by minimizing the importance of philosophy and celebrating the crucial roles of prophets and poets as the true “world-changers,” he is in a sense feminizing pragmatism as “mere philosophizing” while at the same time mapping feminism onto his previous construction of the strong, masculinized prophet-poet ideal.
Rorty is passionate in making his case to feminists that pragmatists will make better partners for their aims than will universalists and moral realists. This results from his perception of contemporary feminism as already sharing more in common theoretically with pragmatism, specifically an outlook that is more historicist and utopian than universalist and moral realist, and his awareness of debates within feminist theory over the problematic categories of “woman” and “women’s experience”—problems he sees as due mostly to the conceptualizing of these categories in non-historicist terms. The tenor of Rorty’s proposal is simultaneously confident at points where he sees theoretical congruencies between pragmatism and feminism yet tentative when thinking about what such a partnership might hope to accomplish in practice. The tentativeness comes through not in a lack of passion about pragmatism’s better “fit” for feminism, for on this point Rorty is confident, but in doubt about what philosophy in general can ever hope to contribute to social change:
I want to insert a cautionary remark about the relative insignificance of philosophical movements as compared to social-political movements. Yoking feminism with pragmatism is like yoking Christianity with Platonism, or socialism with dialectical materialism. In each case, something big and important, a vast social hope, is being yoked with something comparatively small and unimportant, a set of answers to philosophical questions—questions which arise only for people who find philosophical topics intriguing rather than silly. Universalists . . . often claim that such questions are in fact urgent, for political movements need philosophical foundations. But we pragmatists cannot say this. We are not in the foundations business. All we can do is to offer feminists a few pieces of special-purpose ammunition—for example, some additional replies to charges that their aims are unnatural, their demands irrational, or their claims hyperbolic.58
Pragmatism’s “relative insignificance” with respect to feminism—its status as a “small and unimportant . . . set of answers to philosophical questions,” which are useful only for those few people who actually care about such matters—means that for Rorty, pragmatism’s potential contributions to feminism may turn out to be quite minuscule. The “yoking” he has in mind is most definitely an unequal one. As he puts it elsewhere, philosophy is “parasitic on prophecy rather than a substitute for it.”59 Rather than pragmatism exerting authority over feminism, as one might expect given the traditional gendered hierarchy of philosophy/theory and practice, Rorty’s rhetoric seems to deliberately construct the male philosopher, with his neutral set of theoretical tools, as the weaker party in relation to the stronger figure of the feminist prophet-poet, who is free to “pick up or lay down” the tools of pragmatism “as occasion demands.”
Such a move continues the pragmatist emphasis on instrumentalizing theories and putting them to work, of course. But this configuration of pragmatism also, more subtly, continues the Jamesian move of rhetorically constructing gendered opposing positions and then posing pragmatism as a flexible middle way between them. In this particular case, one can read Rorty as wishing to use pragmatism to effect a series of mediations: between masculinism and feminism, philosophy and politics, and private and public. Pragmatism becomes a way to conceptualize, given Rorty’s rather stark distinctions between these notions, how men might contribute to feminism, how philosophers might bridge the academy and politics and hence impact social change, and how private enterprises of self-creation may work to extend public space.
Such a deployment of pragmatism is subtle yet compelling. Thus, Fraser, continuing her opening comments about the pleasures and troubles of being wooed by her pragmatist suitor, reflects further:
Just as I was brooding over how a feminist should respond to a proposal from a powerful male philosopher, it occurred to me that there was another possible way to read his lecture. Perhaps what is being proposed is not at all a traditional heterosexual relationship but precisely the reverse. After all, isn’t Rorty . . . suggesting that he, the pragmatist philosopher, will be the junior partner in the alliance . . . while we feminists will be out on the main stage of history, doing the truly important work . . . ? On this reading Rorty is in fact offering to do the housework so that we can be freed for world-historical activity in the public sphere.60
Fraser finds this proposition attractive yet is suspicious of Rorty’s motives, observing that “many of us have learned the hard way that when men offer to help with housework there are frequently hidden costs.” The hidden cost she identifies here is the implied construction of feminist and philosopher as two distinct, oppositional identities in Rorty’s schema, and she fears that the proposed “division of labor between pragmatism and feminism . . . is yet another way of putting women on a pedestal.”61 The remainder of Fraser’s response is devoted to arguing against the split between private and public spheres, theory and practice, which she takes Rorty to have (re)enacted with his descriptions of pragmatism and feminism.
The major critique Fraser makes of Rorty’s argument is that his “attempt to pragmatize feminism ends up individualizing and depoliticizing it.” By characterizing feminism as “an exclusive club of prophets” and “a small, elite affair,” Rorty effectively substitutes a particular radical-separatist feminist understanding of feminism for the movement as a whole, which, as Fraser argues, is far more accurately and productively characterized as a “mass democratic social movement” or a “counterpublic sphere.” While the former two conceptions have the effect of severely circumscribing the scope of feminism and rendering it the province of the elite “prophet and outcast, the solitary eccentric or member of a small embattled separatist club, huddled together spinning a web of words as a charm to keep from going crazy,” the latter two descriptions capture the complexity, diversity, and participation in public life that characterize the feminist movement today.62
Fraser’s points are well taken. Yet she claims to be critiquing Rorty not so much on feminist grounds but on pragmatist ones:
For my disagreement with [Rorty] is a disagreement within pragmatism. I, too, reject moral realism and universalism in favor of the historicist view that feminists are engaged in creating new moral identities and sensibilities rather than in realizing or discovering latent or pre-existing ones. And I, too, see the remaking of language as central to this enterprise.
So my difference with Rorty boils down to my wanting to put a more sociological, institutional, and collective spin on these ideas and to divest his account of its individualistic, aestheticizing, and depoliticizing residues. This . . . is tantamount to achieving a more consistent and thoroughgoing pragmatism.63
Though they disagree on the role pragmatism should play in relation to feminism, both Rorty and Fraser accept and deploy the construction of pragmatism as neutral theoretical terrain. It is other discourses—universalism, moral realism, historicism, and feminism—that are apparently not neutral and find safe space for disagreement and rapprochement within pragmatism. Because pragmatism as mediator is, as James formulated it, “completely genial,” with “no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof,” “she will entertain any hypothesis [and] consider any evidence,” and hence can be considered “neutral” (PM, 44). To return to the marriage metaphor, it appears that while Fraser rejects Rorty’s proposal, she accepts the underlying assumptions on which it is based.
As West has observed, when pragmatism is constructed as a mediator, it actually possesses a kind of disciplinary power. This is the “power to subsume aspects of other contending positions that permits pragmatism to domesticate and dilute for its own purposes.”64 Therefore, while the explicit rhetoric is that of pragmatism occupying a weak, passive, reconciling position, what is implicit is the power to define and demarcate the opposing positions as well as what is “really” at stake. We must ask then whether the rhetorical configuration of pragmatism as a neutral set of theoretical tools continues this subtle framing of pragmatism as mediator.
Rorty’s and Fraser’s positioning of pragmatism as a neutral ground in the preceding exchange highlights the enduring nature of the pragmatist rhetoric of neutrality and mediation. Here I provide more recent examples of the positioning of pragmatism as mediator in feminist theory and theology to demonstrate the continuity of this notion from the classical Jamesian tradition to the neopragmatist era. In the context of the so-called theory wars of the 1980s and 1990s, pragmatism was frequently employed by feminists as a helpful mediator between opposing viewpoints, one that provided an instructive middle way out of seemingly antithetical positions.65 When pragmatism is rhetorically posed as a neutral space of agreement between two contrasting positions, we can see echoes of James’s gendered characterization of pragmatism as a reconciling feminine force in philosophical debate, and of Rorty’s presentation of pragmatism as neutral ground. Much is made, in such instances, of pragmatism’s conciliatory attitude, the ease with which it can successfully serve to mediate between opposing views, and its general overall helpfulness in clarifying that our disagreements are, at bottom, not really disagreements at all—or at least that we have missed the real issue of the underlying disagreement.
Previously I discussed James’s presentation of pragmatism as “a mediator and a reconciler” who “unstiffens our theories.” In applying the same lens to contemporary feminist pragmatist discourse, I highlight how pragmatism came to be seen as the best solution to various aporias of theory in the context of late twentieth-century feminist theory and theology, where it was frequently invoked around the thorny issues of foundationalism versus relativism, essentialism, identity, subjectivity, solidarity, and coalition building.
My first example is the 1995 collection Feminist Contentions, an exchange between Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Drucilla Cornell, and Judith Butler on the topic of feminism and postmodernism and, more broadly, the role of theory in feminist critique. In the exchange, Fraser sought to soften the “firm polarization” between the “Frankfurt-style normative critique” of Benhabib and the “poststructuralist, performative theory of ‘resignification’” proffered by Butler through “the negotiating work of neopragmatism.”66 Fraser accused both positions of being unnecessarily polarizing. Against them she defended her and Linda Nicholson’s earlier version of a “postmodernist, pragmatic, fallibilistic mode of feminist theorizing that would retain social-critical, emancipatory force even as it eschewed philosophical foundations” and that transcended “the false antithesis between Critical Theory and poststructuralism by integrating the best insights of each.”67 In Fraser’s view, pragmatism brings out the best that each theory has to offer. Such a stance reflects the more popular understanding of pragmatism as emphasizing “politics, not principles.” Fraser argued that Benhabib and Butler, “by framing their debate in such dichotomous terms, miss the chance to try another, more promising tack,” which is her own neopragmatist position: “Instead of assuming we must choose between these two approaches, reformulat[e] the claims of each so as to render them mutually compatible.”68
Fraser positions an “eclectic, neopragmatist approach” as the solution to the “false antitheses” posed by the other authors in the collection. After reviewing the relative merits and critiques of the theoretical positions articulated by Benhabib, Butler, and Cornell, Fraser concludes that none of them are adequate on their own, yet she finds value in Butler and Benhabib’s “conceptions of discursive practice” and Cornell’s “profound insights into the ambiguous character of sexuality.” Therefore, she seeks to combine the best insights of all three positions in order to produce an “impure,” “eclectic” alternative:
None of the three gives us everything that we need. . . .
If each of the three pure approaches has some but not all of what we need, then a fourth, impure alternative is called for. We need to cultivate the eclectic spirit I have invoked under the rubric of neopragmatism. This means adopting theoretical conceptions that permit both dereifying critique and normative critique, as well as the generation of new emancipatory significations. These conceptions should also enable us to articulate discourse analysis and political economy; studies of public spheres and of state apparatuses; genealogies of historians’ categories and accounts of contestation “from below.” Most importantly, they should allow us to theorize the intersection of gender, “race”/ ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, and class in every sociological arena.
The key is to avoid metaphysical entanglements. We should adopt the pragmatic view that there are a plurality of different angles from which sociocultural phenomena can be understood. Which is best will depend on one’s purposes.69
“In general,” Fraser concludes, “conceptions of discourse, like conceptions of subjectivity, should be treated as tools, not as the property of warring metaphysical sects.” A pragmatist stance makes clear that “discursive phenomena may be fruitfully approached from several different angles, depending on one’s situation and aims.” It is also, insists Fraser, not “Pollyanna-ish” but rather conscious of a “sober appreciation of the magnitude of the tasks we face as feminists and of the insufficiency of any pure approach taken alone.” Fraser defends her invocation of pragmatism against Benhabib’s and Cornell’s critiques, arguing that, far from asserting that “fashioning some new synthesis will be easy,” she has “sought to distinguish false antitheses from genuine contradictions”: for example, those she sees to exist between certain versions of “Lacanian/Derridean feminism” and key feminist commitments. Ultimately, Fraser explains that she invokes pragmatism in the face of “unnecessarily polarizing debate” to “safeguard the conceptual space” within which feminist theoretical work can be done and new understandings be productively worked out and explored. The actual elaboration of an “eclectic, neopragmatist feminist theory,” however, she leaves for future work.70
We can see a similar invocation of pragmatism in Serene Jones’s Feminist Theory and Christian Theology (2000), which is framed as an introduction to the challenges feminist theory poses to traditional Christian theology. In this readable and accessible text, she focuses on the issues of “women’s nature,” “oppression,” and “community” to show how “remapping” feminist theory onto Christian theology reveals new terrain. Her invocation of pragmatism comes through in the discussion of women’s nature and the two sides of that debate: essentialism, which makes universal claims about women’s nature; and constructivism, which, to varying degrees, sees gender as socially/culturally/ linguistically constructed. As an alternative to these positions, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses, Jones proposes an “in-between position” she calls “strategic essentialism”:
Some feminist theorists argue . . . that it is preferable to spend time in both camps [constructivist and essentialist], in a position somewhere in-between, a position known as “strategic essentialism.” The position goes by other names as well: normative constructionism, pragmatic utopianism, and pragmatic universalism.
. . . The strategic essentialist is a “pragmatist” or a “functionalist,” because she uses “practical effect” as the measure of theory . . . instead of relying on rigid principles.71
This “in-between position,” according to Jones, “applauds constructivist critiques of gender but feels nervous about giving up universals (or essences) altogether.” For the strategic essentialist, “practice comes to the fore” as one “makes calculated, ‘strategic’ decisions about which universals or essentials might work in a given context and which might fail.”72 The metaphor of mapping out a space of in-between is one Jones had also used in a previous essay to chart the terrain of the issue of “women’s experience” in feminist theologies, which she characterized as being “between a rock and a hard place.” Positioning the varieties of universalism and essentialism displayed by phenomenological, process/ psychoanalytic, and linguistic/textual analyses as the “rock” and the constructivism of cultural/anthropological and poststructuralist accounts as the “hard place,” Jones sought to map out a “still-uncharted chasm” between both and mark it for future exploration.73
In an article in the 1997 Horizons in Feminist Theology collection, Davaney examines the question of “norms” in feminist theology, arguing that an early set of common theoretical assumptions has given way to “historicist interpretations of subjectivity, identity, and traditions, including religious traditions,” which have supplanted older normative claims.74 Davaney proposes that feminist theologians move toward a “self conscious pragmatism”: a “feminist pragmatic historicism” that would view subjectivity, identity, and traditions as plural, contextual, concrete, local, particular, situated, fallibilistic, and ambiguous and would “weave a middle path” between essentialism and postmodernism. Assessing the “pragmatic repercussions” of our claims, Davaney argues that conclusions should be testable, revisable, and geared to particular situations and locations so that feminist theologians can aspire “not to a solidarity that is given, but one that is hoped and worked for” across differences.75
In the concluding chapter of the same collection, Rebecca Chopp attempted to sum up the volume as an engagement with the implications of current debates in feminist theory for feminist theology. In particular, she located a middle way in the foundationalism/relativism debate emerging under the rubric of “pragmatism,” wherein she grouped those thinkers “seeking to find strategies of truth through either culturally situated communities or culturally complex traditions that can empower human flourishing.” Pragmatism holds open the possibility of “combin[ing] theories for ultimate aims, but precisely because it is resistant to any metatheoretical frame it has difficulty describing specific criteria.” Just as for Rorty pragmatism reshapes “capital P” Philosophy into philosophy, for Chopp, pragmatism’s contribution to feminist theory and theology is to “reform Theory into theories” and to employ them strategically in particular contexts for addressing particular problems. For all of the differences in the essays contained in the Horizons collection, Chopp sees an “interesting agreement emerging in their position on the third option of pragmatism in feminist theory.” Though Chopp is clear that “this is not Richard Rorty’s pragmatism of easy conversation, but more the pragmatism of the classical American tradition,” she does see a “quite productive agreement on evaluative criteria and norms” emerging under the rubric of pragmatism in feminist theology.76
Comparing this emerging consensus toward pragmatism in feminist theology with the contentious state of affairs in feminist theory, a feature she observes through her reading of the Contentions collection, Chopp asks why this is the case. She argues that it is the loss of the meta-narrative or grand theory of the early feminist conception of patriarchy that “has led feminist theorists to consider what can hold feminism together for future political activity and how to construct views of the past in relation to gender.” While feminist theorists have responded to this problem in various ways, from embracing “postfeminism” to relying on discursive models of gender, feminist theologians, according to Chopp, have turned to a focus “on the construct of (T/t)radition.” It is this reconsideration of (T/t)radition as site of the past and as repository of gendered religious symbolism that Chopp surmises may be responsible for the pragmatic turn in feminist theology. The loss of a common meta-narrative has led to a focus on tradition as what is still held in common among feminist theologians and to the turn to pragmatism as a “resource to develop criteria and norms.”77 Chopp’s provocative postulation suggests that it is the Christian (T/t)radition held in common that unites most feminist theologians in their approach to pragmatism as a theoretical resource, even when the foundations underlying that narrative have been so deconstructed that the narrative itself is all that remains. The conflict and contestation surrounding the narrative are what drive the convergence toward pragmatic criteria and norms.
Feminist theorists such as Fraser also turn to pragmatism as the only viable strategy in a world characterized by contingency and the loss of sure foundations. Whether or not they accept in toto Rorty’s meta-narrative of (P/p)hilosophy about the decline of religion, philosophy, and science and their replacement by a literary culture, and even though they are critical of his public/private distinction, feminist theorists find a neopragmatic strategy of neutral space, situated theorizing, and methodological agreement to represent a productive middle way forward. Perhaps feminist theorists and theologians working in the late twentieth century shared, in this sense, a commonly held narrative, one that constructs neopragmatism as the solution to or bridge between polarizing oppositions and advocates the reformulation of “Theories” into “theories.”
The revival narrative of pragmatism is repeated in this specific context as one in which all theoretical roads converge on some form of neopragmatism. The turn to pragmatism as a mediating position is motivated by the same basic theoretical disagreements and opposing commitments in each field: essentialism versus constructivism, foundationalism versus historicism, critical theory versus poststructuralism, and the like. It is also, of course, occasioned by the recent renaissance of pragmatism in the academy, a phenomenon spearheaded by Rorty. To be sure, how these aims are interpreted differs. But whether pragmatism is seen as a solution to false antitheses, a safe conceptual space for working out disagreements, an in-between position, a still uncharted chasm between a rock and a hard place in need of further exploration, a middle path, or an emerging space of agreement, its rhetorical function is much the same: to serve as a means of mediating disagreement, coalition building, and working toward consensus.
In Critique of Violence (2000), Beatrice Hanssen provocatively argued that neopragmatism had become “a new strategy to retain or rescript feminist theory” in an effort both to avoid the negative implications associated with the labels of postmodernism or poststructuralism and to advocate a new, “versatile methodological apparatus that would be reconfigured or retooled as the political cause saw fit.”78 Hanssen situates the appearance of neopragmatism in the context of the “theory wars” within both feminist theory and the wider academy, and in turn places this in the context of a much older debate about the relationship of theory to practice.79 She notes that today,
the word “theory” itself . . . has reached the low level of a slur, made for name calling. In its place have come situated terms that aim to reflect difference, pluralism, and context-dependence, such as praxis, experience, the real, narrativity, performance, body politics, new historicism, pragmatism.80
In this context, critical theory and poststructuralism—which itself, as Hanssen notes, often is the actual target of critique directed toward the more general marker “theory”—do battle, each accusing the other of having inadequate political or practical grounding. Enter pragmatism, completing an increasingly familiar sort of “triangulation” in feminist theory, in which “the ‘contentious’ encounter between the two poles—poststructuralist and critical theory—is mediated by feminist pragmatism or neopragmatism, which becomes an alternative, an exit route out of the deadlock.” In this sense, “the current antitheory movement in feminism is in step with a more general trend, away from theory to new historicism and neopragmatism,” just as within the wider academy “the revival of pragmatism in the form of neopragmatism has presented itself as the only tenable alternative to theory.”81
There are at least two interrelated valences to this exit-route strategy of pragmatism. Pragmatism becomes a way of foreclosing theory in favor of a purportedly exclusive concern with practice, or pragmatism becomes a way of “exchanging labels,” a vehicle for continuing to “do theory” while avoiding the negative implications of “high theory” and accusations of apoliticism that the terms “postmodernism” and “poststructuralism” entail. Hanssen sees the latter strategy as operative in the Feminist Contentions collection. Agreeing with Fraser that the positions in the volume were unnecessarily polarizing, Hanssen argued for convergence in feminist theory so that different positions like Benhabib’s critical theory and Butler’s poststructuralism can be understood as “standing side by side, ready to acknowledge a minimal division of labor, with limited objectives and tasks” and avoiding the kind of “dogmatic positions that must cancel each other out.” Summing up the debate, she said, “In the end, the rigorous principles that underlay, indeed founded, these triangulated conceptual theories—whether poststructuralist, critical, or pragmatic theory—determined the disagreements that preoccupied these feminist theorists.”82 However, she rejected the bifurcation of theory and practice that Fraser’s own position seemed to suggest, calling instead for a neo-Marxist model of immanent critique in feminist theory in which practice is not separable from the theoretical task. Just as not all theory is “bad theory” or “pure theory,” not all politics qua politics can be regarded as good practice; hence she urged further reflection on the categories of politics and theory themselves:
The more pressing question that needs to be raised instead is how we define politics and the political, and whether these categories are broad enough to include multiple feminist programs and agendas, all the way from identity politics that address gay and lesbian claims to equal legal and cultural recognition, to improving the socio-economic condition of so-called “welfare mothers” (to cite that highly problematic term), to exercising remedial solidarity with Third World women, and, in fact, to ensuring that all of us can be subjects of political agency, not just on the receiving end of solidarity. . . . This also means that we need to remain realistic about what single theories can do and that we acknowledge the need for an assemblage of different theories with partial, sometimes small-range objectives, rather than grand totalizing goals.83
So the categories of “theory” and “politics” must be critically interrogated to expose their hidden presumptions and to clarify and assess their agendas and aims. But for Hanssen, it seems that in the end the criteria for good politics and good theory are the same: non-dogmatic, limited-scale, utilitarian. She ends by advocating a “weak, methodological form of pragmatism” for feminist theory, “if only to establish a coalition between different voices across race, class, and sexual orientation,” while also cautioning against adoption of a Rortian version of “strong pragmatism,” which in her view attempts to manufacture consent through the erasure of differences.84
Hanssen’s critique of Rorty falls back on a “weak pragmatism” that also serves a similar, yet scaled-back, mediating function. Why Hanssen continues to want to retain the term “pragmatism” after making her critique and why pragmatism comes to be seen as the best means of coalition building are not entirely clear. More recent feminist-pragmatist exchanges do not rely so heavily on the rhetoric of mediation, instead engaging pragmatism as a resource for thinking about issues of race, embodiment, ethics, and pluralism.85
I have examined Rorty’s neopragmatist narrative of the decline of the Western philosophical tradition, which was linked to the decline of religion and the rise of pragmatism. This is also a narrative about the rise of liberalism, which is predicated on a strong separation between public and private. After discussing various critiques of the public/private split in Rorty’s thought, I analyzed his understanding of religion and its role in liberal democratic society. While Rorty, in his later work, attempted to moderate the sharpness of the public/private distinction that existed in his earlier work, he continued to maintain the view that religion is a private enterprise. I argued that while feminist theorists have ably critiqued Rorty’s separation between public and private for its gendered elements, they have left unaddressed how religion is privatized and feminized in his thought, meaning that the critique of the gendered separation of public and private is incomplete.
I then turned to an exchange between Rorty and Fraser about the relationship between pragmatism and feminism. In this exchange one can see how the public/private split plays a key role. Fraser was critical of many aspects of Rorty’s proposal, yet she accepted the basic grounds on which Rorty staged the debate: the “neutral” space of pragmatism. This led to a consideration of how pragmatism is similarly invoked as a neutral space and mediating position in feminist theory and feminist theology.
The examples discussed illustrated how pragmatism is constructed as a means of negotiating opposing viewpoints in contemporary feminist theory and theology. So conceived, pragmatism provides a way of separating “false” antitheses from “genuine” ones in theoretical debates. It enables a method for navigating successfully between the Scylla of grand narratives and the Charybdis of strong relativism, a means of avoiding the temptation to throw yourself on one or the other horn of a difficult dilemma, by rejecting either/or formulations and embracing a middle path. This neopragmatist narrative of pragmatism is also a triumphalist one in that it presents pragmatism as the culmination of decades of debate in the contemporary academy, “waiting at the end of the road,” as Rorty put it.