One of the ways of approaching pragmatism in general is to begin from our everyday relation to things, or our necessary relation to the world, and then read the commitment to these practical grounds as post-Kantian or post-metaphysical. Pragmatism is at once a recognition of the finitude that follows from our existing in relation to things, and a diagnostic assessment of how philosophy fell away from, and then returned to, the world. Not only does our finitude mean we exist in relation to the world, but the world is given as a world of things (not blank matter or nature but always our world for us). Our experience is temporal, spatial, and (more importantly) bound up with the connectedness of causes and relations and ultimately conditioned by some horizon of assumed (but never justifiable) meaning. Not only is our condition relational and oriented to things, but the things we know are always things for us. If Kant establishes once and for all that our finitude deprives of us of any absolute knowledge, and therefore precludes any transition from the world as it is known to the moral law (or the world as we imagine it ought to be), our relational being nevertheless entails that we are always already ethical—always existing in a world of meanings, desires, projects, and intentions. Finitude has two sides; it takes away moral knowledge or foundationalism, but then it places us in a necessary relation to a world of others. Morality becomes impossible and unavoidable. Pragmatism seems to have this conflicting tendency, at least in its genealogical trajectory: it is at once oriented to the world from which it also is necessarily distanced. If pragmatism means anything at all, then it must (at the very least) abandon the idea of a view from nowhere; there can be no knowledge of the absolute, and if there is anything like morality—or what one would choose for all regardless of one’s own point of view—then it is not something one might know, intuit, or prove. “Oughts,” even in their imagined universality, emerge from a world where so much already appears to be just as it is. What is is already inflected with desires and values, but those desires are in turn inflected by what is—the world into which we are necessarily thrown. Even so, it is just this abandonment of knowing anything nonfinite (or anything truly and necessarily universal) that places the located subject in a position of having to choose what to do. It is the very finitude of knowledge—the absence of an ethical foundation—that ties us to a world of others, in which we must negotiate rather than know or prove what to do.
On the one hand, our located and concerned relation to things seems to deprive us of anything like lawfulness. (In the tradition of the Kantian critique of reflective judgment, one might say that we must presuppose or assume a lawfulness of appearances, but such a universality is required practically rather than known theoretically. It is this same tradition that yields both Quentin Meillassoux’s insistence on a contingency that in theory would be able to destroy any natural lawfulness, and Deleuze’s frequent references to a genuinely philosophical thought liberated from the common sense of practical coherence. Such a radical contingency would liberate thought not only from absolute foundations, but also from Kant’s practical requirement that one act as if one were a law-constituting being.) On the other hand, it is just this absence of any absolute or ideal foundation that opens the problem of choice. Practical reason must formulate its own principles and do so from a position of ignorance and formal deliberation. If we read pragmatism as a commitment to being always oriented to a world of things, unable to know anything other than things, then the morality that follows is one of negating and abandoning anything other than what might be justified or deliberated from one’s own world (even if one might reflect upon the very having of “a” world). This is what carries us from the sense of pragmatism that follows from ta pragmata (or things), to the sense of pragmatism as bound to praxis.
There is something inherently practical about an ethical and political philosophy that begins from a world of finitude, relations, and locatedness among things. One might think of John Rawls’s commitment to fairness, where a just society would be one that I would choose if I were not able to select just where I am to be in the social order (Rawls 1972). A fair society is one that I would reasonably agree to if I could not choose or know just what position I would occupy. Alternatively, one might—in a manner that is also post-metaphysical and post-Kantian—imagine that we speak, deliberate, and act with a resignation that we are always within the world (our world), but that we do so with an ideal of consensus (Habermas 1998, 325). We abandon Kant’s ideal of the moral law that imagines a pure will that is able to act as if one were not a being of this world; we nevertheless retain the practical ideal of thinking in terms of a universally reasonable normativity, even if that ideal can never arrive. Thus it is from Rawls and liberalism that we maintain the idea of thinking as if we could be self-legislating, while pragmatism—especially in its critical mode—acknowledges that this “as if” could never be pure, and is necessarily part of an ongoing and ideal conversation oriented to maximum (but never final) consensus. This is a pragmatism of an open and infinite conversation, generated from the condition of finitude.
Writing on Foucault, Deleuze defines a pre-Kantian mode of thought, where human knowledge is a fragment of a godlike infinite understanding: “the forces within man enter into a relation with those forces that raise things to infinity. The latter are indeed forces from the outside, since man is limited and cannot himself account for this more perfect power which passes through him” (Deleuze 1988, 125). This passage from man’s finitude to an infinity that he might know by extending the passage of thought to an infinite outside shifts radically with Kantianism: now the world toward which knowledge is directed is a world that does not extend to the infinite, but is only given in relations of things—finite things—that are limited and framed by what can be known: “The force within man must begin by confronting and seizing hold of the forces of finitude as if they were forces from outside: it is outside oneself that force must come up against finitude…, where its knowledge of finitude necessarily brings it to its own finitude” (Deleuze 1988, 127).
I want to suggest that we take pragmatism quite seriously in its commitment to things, and also to a world that is always a world of things—with things never given as such or in themselves, but always encountered by way of relations. It is this attention to things that allows us to intertwine (but also open a tension between) the two senses of pragmatism’s etymology. Pragmatism is human (or so it seems) because it is connected with doing, but is also inhuman (potentially) because it has to do with things (ta pragmata). Pragmatism is at once practical, to do with praxis (and therefore irreducibly located within desires, intentions, and actions); but pragmatism is also finite not just because our world is given through specific projects, but because the world is composed of relations. Here is where I would draw upon Deleuze’s concept of unlimited finity: that is, it is because the world is composed of things (because the world is not one continuous and seamless connected whole) that the relation any one thing bears to another is accompanied by an unlimited number of other possible relations. Yes, we only know the world as unfolded from our point of view, and it is because of this that we cannot see the finite human self (the fold) as something that might unfold to infinity. This is Kant’s objection to Leibniz, which generates a certain pragmatism of the fold: we act as if the world might, by way of our actions, be in accord with our desires. But for Deleuze it is not only human finitude that generates folds, for there are unlimited folds—each thing in the world relating to other things in its own way. Deleuze describes a monadology that differs from Leibniz’s world where each monad is a different perspective on the same infinite:
It would no longer involve raising to infinity or finitude but an unlimited finity, thereby invoking every situation of force in which a finite number of components yields a practically unlimited diversity of combinations. It would be neither the fold nor the unfold that would constitute the active mechanism, but something like the Superfold, as borne out by the foldings proper to the chains of the genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature “merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity.”…
The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or agrammaticalities which supersede the signifier. (Deleuze 1988, 131–132)
There is the relation of the human being to the world (the practical relation of a living being) and the relations among things, but these do not generate one interfolded world; rather, they yield a superfold, unlimited finity, or multiple finitude. From finitude we cannot pass to a pragmatism of knowledge for us, or even a praxis of our own locatedness. Instead, the forces or folds of things are what generate and limit knowledge and action. Relations among things may in some cases be bound to human knowing but may also be thought or imagined outside human relations. On at least one reading of pragmatism the thought of relations among things beyond human knowing would count as a form of illegitimate speculation, a philosophically irresponsible flight of fancy, and it is this strand of practical, embodied, and located pragmatism that accounts for one uptake of the work of Heidegger (and, after that, a certain materialist reading of Deleuze such as offered by John Protevi and Manuel DeLanda).
Discussing modern science, mathematics, and metaphysics, Heidegger suggests that mathematics needs to be understood in relation to our concern with things, but then he also hints that something has been lost or occluded in the “mathematical” conception of the thing (Heidegger 1968, 250). One way of reading Heidegger, especially a seemingly pragmatic reading such as Rorty’s, would be that philosophy erred in its adoption of a mathematical comportment, seeking a logic that would be true beyond all forms of practice (Rorty 1982, 49). For Rorty, we should return all modes of knowing, including the sciences, to the life-world from which they emerged. There is, however, another pragmatism that one might find by reading Heidegger’s mathematical comportment to things positively: what relations, worlds, or “doings” unfold from things when they are not the things of our care or creation?
Both Heidegger and Deleuze wrote at length about Leibniz, the Leibniz for whom finitude was neither uniquely human nor destructive of metaphysical speculation: the world is composed of relations, with each being defined uniquely by its relation to all other relations (Heidegger 1991, 36; Deleuze 2006). If everything is finite (and not just humans), then one might add the thought of the relations among things to the thought of the relations humans bear to things. For Leibniz any monad is the being it is because of the proximity and clarity of some perceptions, while the infinite of which it is a part is perceived only dimly. The relation between human knowledge and absolute knowledge, or any “knowledge” and absolute knowledge, is one of degree. For Deleuze it is this monadic conception of the infinite, and the attribution of a perception of the infinite to every thing (and not just humans) that opens a pragmatism of multiple finitudes, or an unlimited finity. When Heidegger chooses the word Da-Sein he, too, opens a way to think of the world not as given to humans, but as a givenness that produces a “there.”
According to Heidegger, ta pragmata are things “insofar as we have to do with them at all, whether we work on them, use them, transform them, or only look at and examine them, pragmata being related to praxis… praxis is all doing, pursuing and sustaining” (Heidegger 1968, 250). Heidegger includes all forms of doing in praxis, and this is why praxis is tied to pragmata, which is the broadest sense of the “thing” and neither confined to things we make (ta poiumena) nor to self-originating things (ta physica) nor to the things at our use and disposal (ta chremata). Whether pragmata and praxis are distinct from ta mathemata (or “things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance”) is one of Heidegger’s primary questions.
There is a pragmatist tendency to Heidegger’s thought. His claim that the mathematical or logical comportment that knows things “in advance” is dependent upon and emergent from being-in-the-world, is akin to the avowed pragmatist claim that knowing a thing is having a sense of its effects or what it will do (C. S. Peirce, quoted in Putnam 1995, 291). But there is another tendency in Heidegger’s project, and one that is intensified in what I will refer to as Deleuze’s mathematical pragmatism. Here we grant that ta pragmata includes all senses of the thing (including the mathematical) and all senses of doing or praxis (and not just ethical action or action oriented to what we would choose to make of ourselves). A tension seems to present itself: we could begin from ta pragmata as things of concern, which would seem to take us back to some comportment of care and being-in-the-world, and would then allow us to criticize a certain notion of mathematics and technology that would set certain systems of truth and logic outside the frame of human doing and meaning. Alternatively, and this is the path that I will pursue here, pragmatism has to do with things and their practical effects (or what things do). This does not allow us to derive the mathematical from what we narrowly take praxis to be. Rather, there is a world of things. The thing may not “have a world” in the sense of a Lebenswelt or horizon of projects, moods, and meanings, but the thing may have a world in the mathematical sense: to be a thing is to be placed in relation, with relations having little to do with wanting or desiring. Things—all things, not just the things that we make or notice—have a “doing” (and elicit effects) well beyond the doing and concern of humans. Regardless of what we or things “want,” there are relations, effects, and doings that are not exhausted by what we do or what affects us. Despite some ways of characterizing classical pragmatism as only concerned with what something means in terms of practical effects for us, I would hold that it is true to pragmatism to think of our praxis as but one relation in a broader terrain of things, and that this terrain should be considered as mathematical and technical. There are relations that are not of our making, and even if those relations are only disclosed to us from our own constituted world and point of view, this does not preclude us from thinking about their distinction and the effects such relations may have outside human practices.
Does this broader conception of things and doings destroy pragmatism in its usual sense? I would suggest not, for what is significant about pragmatism is not human finitude but finitude as such. A commitment to solely human finitude or even subjective finitude gives us a limited and highly parochial pragmatism, in which our not- knowing anything other than what is given to us, what has practical effects for us, yields nothing more than an ethics in which we are obliged to give a law to ourselves, with the only limit that we cannot claim to know the good for the other self-legislators with whom we must communicate. Heidegger already suggests in his book on Leibniz that for Leibniz there are relations (or a reason and logic) for things that are other than human, even if those relations are not known:
Humans live so differently from the rose that, as they go about doing things in their world, they glance sidelong at what the world makes and requires of them. But even where such sidelong glancing is absent, we humans cannot come to be who we are without attending to the world that determines us—an attending in which we at the same time attend to ourselves. The rose has no need of this. Thought from the point of view of Leibniz, this means that in order for the rose to bloom, it does not need reasons rendered in which its blooming is grounded. The rose is a rose without a reddere rationem, a rendering of reasons, having to belong to its rose-being. Nevertheless the rose is never without a ground (Heidegger 1991, 37)
Insofar as pragmatism is concerned with things and effects, it is necessarily a philosophy of relations. Yet we might ask whether those relations need be those of our world, or whether relations might not take another unworldly form that would be the relations of a thing (such as a stone or a rose) that for Heidegger “has no world.” If we define “world” as that which unfolds from care, concern, or a series of projects in which the future is always the future of this intentional being who must choose, then we might say—as Heidegger does—that the stone has no world, and that animals are poor in world (Heidegger 1995, 185). But what might worldless things (or relations that are not worldly) entail for a different mode of pragmatism and finitude? What if there were not only multiple worlds, but relations that were not worldly relations (not unfolding from a site of care, concern, sense, or an ongoing future of ownness)? Such relations would be technical or mathematical, and would unfold from forces without intention, will, desire, or sense. By “mathematical” here I want to refer to what Heidegger deemed to be parasitic and almost fallen in modern science: ta mathemata is that which can be determined in advance, or that which appears as some type of logic or set of relations that presents itself as prior to human practice and encounters. (And here is the strange nature of the mathematical; it is known from some point of view but presents itself as that which would be true regardless of point of view.)
It is possible for the mathematical to be revealed through praxis because of the force of things. When Heidegger says that the stone “has no world,” we should either redefine “world” (to include relations that are radically material and have nothing to do with consciousness or projects or a human-future-oriented timeline) or we should say that there are relations that are unworldly but pragmatic (relations of things, and not practices). Consider, to take just one example, the stone that has no world: not only does this thing enable humans to read a world that they did not make or experience; it also has a force and capacity to produce effects beyond our time and imagination. Such is the force of Jan Zalasiewicz’s The Planet in a Pebble (2010), which reads the earth’s history and compositional force from a single stone. Seeing the world in a grain of sand is only possible because the grain is not simply a fragment of a whole that can be recomposed, but it is multiply finite; its molecular structure is distinct and carves out a distinct network of relations and forces that can be read, but not exhausted by any single reader. What makes this reading multiply finite is that every quality or matter bears the potential—because of its finitude—to open out the thought of other worlds (such as what the pebble might have been like had the world not evolved to produce oxygen-breathing organisms). The granting of relational force to this stone is still a mode of pragmatism insofar as it precludes any form of moral foundationalism: the relations or world unfolded by the “reading” of the stone, or the forces held in the stone that will “act” despite what we do or perceive in the stone, do not yield any form of rule of action; nor do they preclude the composition of other worlds that would proceed from the relations generated from other things.
Such forces should chasten the self-legislating delusions of a uniquely human finitude. Here, then, we can mark a difference between two modes of pragmatism. The first would enclose the world within human syntheses: in the absence of a knowable moral law or absolute foundation, humans would be obliged to give a law and world to themselves. The second mode would concede that the human imbrication in relations precludes foundationalism but such finitude also precludes self-legislation, for there are relations that are pragmatic (emergent from things).
This emphasis on a pragmatism of things rather than a pragmatism of human practices can be found in Deleuze’s work and in the early articulation of pragmatism in John Dewey’s criticism of the precedence granted to the intellect and ideas. For Dewey pragmatism is a genetic enterprise that allows us to see both the intellect and emotions as abstractions from complicated response networks; humans emerge from a contraction of habits, which are stabilized from “unthinking” networks of relations. There is one sense in which we can tie both Deleuze and Dewey to a broad Nietzschean approach to thinking about all aspects of life in terms of forces, such that what one believes and what one does make sense only as an aspect of a plane of relations that goes beyond the self. For Dewey, “the mode of behavior is the primary thing… the idea and the emotional excitation are constituted at one and the same time… they represent the tension of stimulus and response within the coordination which makes up the mode of behavior” (Dewey 1895, 18–19). In this respect arguing that pragmatism is about assessing the meaning of a claim in terms of the commitments to actions it would entail (or its future-oriented practical effects) is far too narrow an account of the pragmatism enabled by Deleuze’s and Dewey’s philosophy. Not only is the plane of forces multiple and dispersed, and not entirely focused on a future, but there is also something like a pure or virtual past that accompanies forces. In terms of human beliefs, statements, meanings, actions, and intentions, this means that anything one says—such as a philosophical commitment to justice—is not reducible to what one would do in an unfolding future, but also harbors an ideal plane of emergence. Let us say, for example, that believing in justice may entail that one makes a certain decision when one is called for jury duty; but that a relation between forces (of belief and action), in turn, is possible because of institutions of justice and human relations, themselves made possible because of archival histories, imperial expansion, revolutions, education systems. Going back further one would need to think about the emergence of urban human life, and its dependence on agriculture and geological forces. This is the sense of pragmatics that is given in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which locates the strata of language within a broader geology (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 97); but it is also suggested by Dewey’s location of the self and its habits within a broader evolutionary plane of stimulus and response. Let us imagine, for example, that my sense of justice and what I ought to do is bound up with my desires to live in a democratic, peaceful and postracial America, and that my actions are at once emotional and are felt as impulses but are also intellectual, and can be spelled out as propositions. I feel that my sense of justice follows from what I understand and what I would do. I then find myself responding in a certain way that I subsequently understand to be racist, as though the forces that composed me were not quite my own. This is how Malcolm Gladwell found himself responding to a psychological test that resulted in him discovering that he had “a moderate automatic preference for whites” (Gladwell 2005). Despite his own ideas and despite his own racial identity, Gladwell accorded greater worth to faces of white individuals. Only a “thingly” pragmatism can account for a racism that is not generated by beliefs and practices but emerges from pre-individual forces. Gladwell’s response could be described as habit, where an action occurs without idea or feeling, as though it came from elsewhere. This is in keeping with the Darwinian and impersonal forces of pragmatism, and not just a pragmatism oriented to human praxis; this is a pragmatism in which the self is composed from forces not of its own design, and this because it exists in a world of inhuman forces:
When we say that habit is a contraction we are speaking not of an instantaneous action which combines with another to form an element of repetition, but rather of the fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind. A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit. This is no mystical or barbarous hypothesis. On the contrary, habit here manifests its full generality: it concerns not only the sensory-motor habits that we have (psychologically), but also, before these, the primary habits that we are; the thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed. (Deleuze 2004, 95)
There are forces in us that act but are neither felt nor cognized—and such forces may indeed be who “we” are. The bounds of the self do not stop at a single finite individual, but are multiply finite. Not only are we composed of conflicts—such as the desire to live coupled with counter-vital habits, or an attachment to one’s family coupled with visceral negative responses to one’s own race—those conflicts emerge from specific relational histories that we can never fully own. When Gladwell experiences his own actions as if they were those of another, we might say that the self that he thought he was— the self of beliefs and desires that would entail certain actions—is disclosed as having a quite different compositional force.
I would suggest that this pragmatism, not oriented to future outcomes, but one that is mindful of an eternal but also shifting plane—such that we think about all the forces that compose any event—has direct pertinence for the present. Today we find ourselves at one and the same time addicted and habituated to a series of counter-vital attachments (overconsumption on various levels), at the same time as we seem to be experiencing a preliminary mourning and panic at the thought of the end of the human species. It is only a consideration of the inert or inhuman forces (or the thing-like nature) of what we take to be human that would allow us to open pragmatism to consider not just the grounding of all knowledge and belief in action, but of all action in a broader plane. I would suggest that the seeds of this inhuman pragmatism of multiple finitudes—not just the space of human reasons— can be found in Dewey’s work, where he wants to locate all human beliefs in a plane of tension, where part of the force is directed toward completing an action—and this because of a long species history—and part of the action is inhibited by ideal content, or the evolution of the intellect (Dewey 1895).
Here, Dewey’s work is in direct accord with Deleuze’s work on the self and habits. The pertinence of thingliness or reification for this Deleuzian/Deweyan pragmatism of habits can be seen if we make some distinctions. (It is common to speak lamentably of reification, as though the proper fluidity of life fell into detached powers that were then subject to contingent relations. For Deleuze, though, it is the fracture and fragmentation of powers— a certain “stand-alone” quality that allows us to think of the world less as a continuum of “life” and more as a stratified, articulated, and multiply finite plane of distinct and divergent forces. This is what Dewey brings to the fore in his use of evolution where the past operates in the present as a disjunct fragment rather than coherent origin.)
First, this Deleuzian/Deweyan pragmatism is not one of thinking but one of habits (or, more accurately, it is a nervous rather than cerebral pragmatism). It has less to do with assessing truth and meaning in terms of the actions and success it yields, and more to do with counter-actualizing the forces of actions. Thinking occurs as an abstraction from action, and action may have had its origin in some purpose, but that purpose is not that of the individual human body. It is for this reason that one can think of action well beyond humans—including the actions things have upon each other (and this would certainly be worth thinking about when some of our most “human” things, such as the environment and the archive operate and interact in ways that have nothing to do with human intentionality.) For both Dewey and Deleuze whatever occurs at the level of practical decisions emerges from a far more complex and unthought network of forces, of which the idea or decision is but one late abstracted component. The task of philosophy would be primarily genetic and to do with multiple finitudes: the self who responds to the world is not the medium through which the world is given but is already the result of a composition, only some aspects of which can be deemed to be subjective or human.
Unlike some versions of contemporary pragmatism, such as the work of Joseph Margolis or Robert Brandom, that focus on pragmatism as a historical-philosophical project of thinking about knowledge and, even more importantly, knowledge’s contingency and ultimately human-dependent nature, we can see both Deleuze and Dewey situating human knowledge and contingency within a broader terrain or plane of forces. It is true that both Brandom and Margolis see pragmatism as amenable to situating philosophy and its history within Darwinian life, but the framework is still that of purposive organic life, and has its final horizon in philosophical reflection. Thus, in his most recent work, Margolis has insisted that pragmatism extends the Hegelian insight that knowledge is historical and always located within some human endeavor, and that this position cannot be called idealist because just what counts as objective and as subjective is also historically contingent and undecidable (Margolis 2012, 20). The upshot, for Margolis, is that we accept some Hegelian notion of the historical journey of knowledge, with possibly some goal of increasing and expansive self-reflection, but with an abandonment of any notion that we might know just who or what is doing the knowing. The enterprise of philosophy is therefore primarily reflexive, naturalizing, and—here is Margolis’s criticism of scientific realism—attendant to the human relations to the world that allow “us” to have any real world. The real is not reducible to the human but is inextricably human.
For Brandom, philosophy is not merely reflective, but is also abstractive— giving some articulated and propositional form to the norms of our world. If there is an ethics to philosophy, it lies in the norms already inhering in life, which philosophy then translates into propositional form:
The topic of philosophy is normativity in all its guises, and inference in all its forms. And its task is an explicative, expressive one. So it is the job of practitioners of the various philosophical subfields to design and produce specialized expressive tools, and to hone and shape them with use. At the most general level, inferential connections are made explicit by conditionals, and their normative force is made explicit by deontic vocabulary. Different branches of philosophy can be distinguished by the different sorts of inference and normativity they address and explicate, the various special senses of “if… then___” or of “ought” for which they care. Thus philosophers of science, for instance, develop and deploy conditions codifying causal, functional, teleological, and other explanatory inferential relations, value theorists sharpen our appreciation of the significance of the differences in the endorsements expressed by prudential, legal, ethical, and aesthetic “oughts,” and so on. (Bran-dom 2009, 126)
By contrast, both Dewey and Deleuze propose a philosophy that is ethical, not in its management of norms or propositions, but in its confrontation with the multiple forces from which we are composed. This is not an ethics of self-legislation, where a self that—in its finitude—must create its own (ever-revised) norms. It is an ethics of multiply intertwined and bifurcating forces in which the events that compose us take the form of habits. The key point about habits for both Dewey and Deleuze is their thing-like nature, which is not to say that they are not dynamic. There is something inhuman in the human agent, such that habitual action occurs without the inhibiting tension of emotions or the speculative abstraction of ideas. Returning to the Gladwell example, we can say that in the case of such unthinking responses, there is neither the visceral reaction of fear or loathing, nor a belief in white supremacy, and yet one finds oneself acting and choosing in a certain manner. Dewey is quite clear on this: action minus emotional charge equals habit (Dewey 1895, 26–27). What would follow from such an acknowledgment would be a pragmatism that attended as much to inaction as it did to action. What if most of what counted as action did not follow from emotional charge or the pursuit of ideas, but occurred in the absence of feeling and thinking? Pragmatism would then be oriented less to the consequences of ideas and the entailments of beliefs, and more to the genealogies or geneses of inaction, not so much what we choose or decide to do, but what occurs in the absence of decision.
Second: this yields a pragmatism that not only extends the notion of forces beyond human practices and desires, but also asks about the effects or “doings” of things—where things might be thought of as habits, as patterns of repetition that no longer possess the tension of delay. Writing on the emotions Dewey notes two cases of stimulus-response (or two instances of the encounter and composition of forces) that cannot be called emotions because they lack the tensional urgency between discharge and inhibition. The first is “sheer spasm” (17), while the second is habit. Emotions occur as purposive responses to some feeling that would have been originally teleological insofar as it was oriented to some doing that would discharge tension. The feeling of the emotion is inextricably bound up with what (later) we may abstract as the idea or object. An emotion is the feeling of a complex multiplicity of forces; an emotion has an object and a subject even if the two are only extricable after the event.
Much today is written about the politics of emotion and affect, but perhaps what is more interesting are the two instances that Dewey distinguishes from emotion. If there were no object—if the body were simply fleeing, screaming, convulsing—then this, according to Dewey, is not an emotion but “sheer spasm.” And if there were an object but nothing even remotely like a spasm, then we have habit. Why I think this is worth pointing out is for a number of reasons. First, such a spectrum anticipates Deleuze’s later conception both of habit (as that which composes the world), and also (beyond Dewey, but akin to his pragmatics of genesis) an apprehension of the loss of the world that occurs in the nonrelational present:
The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.… The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link (Deleuze 2005, 166)
Rather than a pragmatism in which our world is given from our concerns, both Dewey and Deleuze see the habit-composed world as dependent on a prior prehuman synthesis, and both also see the possibility of that habituated world falling away into “sheer spasm.”
Despite its mere mention by Dewey, it is worth thinking about the “sheer spasm” of responses or actions without object—as charges that are not emotional because they are not feelings directed to doing anything. Such a thought would open the question of pragmatism well beyond the human-world orientation. Not only is the world composed, capable of falling apart without the composition of habits; the composition of this world emerges less through meaning and intentionality and more through cinematographic illusion. It is habit as composition without emotional charge and worldless spasm from which the image of the world emerges that provides pragmatism with multiple dimensions. By considering these two dimensions, we get a pragmatism that, like the work Deleuze completes with Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, places the decision-making individual within a plane of forces, habits, archaisms, and charges that is multiply finite. No single register, whether it be language, institutions, human desire, or cultural practice, can provide an adequate genealogy for what later appear as our reasons. Pragmatism becomes truly antifoundational not just when we are deprived of moral knowledge and absolutes, but when the law we give to ourselves in the absence of foundations is bound up with the forces that emanate from a world of habits that have the force of things, and things that have the complexity of habits. Pragmatism would then shift from being a complacent resignation to the world as it is for us, and become a way of thinking the extra-human composition that becomes stabilized and quieted by habit.
Who, today, would assert pragmatism’s contrary, and what might such a contrary be? Whereas pragmatism must begin with our relation to things, a counter-pragmatism would assert a truth that would pertain regardless of the things with which we are concerned. Perhaps the definitive model of truth as counter-pragmatist would be the pure truth of mathematics that has a force regardless of our expression or actualization. If one accepted that there were something like the pure truth of mathematics, then all other forms of truth would be found wanting against that imagined “third realm” (to use Frege’s phrase) of a truth that lies in wait to be revealed if only we could overcome the messy interference of our relation with things. As I have already suggested, what needs to be considered is a mathematical pragmatism that accepts the inhuman transcendence of ta mathemata. The key lies in the notion of transcendence in immanence: yes, the world is always a world given to us, but it is given as not ours, and as possessing a force of resistance that is not ours. Here is where we might think of transcendental empiricism, or a plane of forces and relations (rather than some substantial absolute) that is nevertheless not a human plane.
Perhaps the Deleuzian twist to a generally accepted, unremarkable, and commonsense pragmatism would lie in two inflections: the relation to things that generates truth is not necessarily the human relation to things. Further, there would be virtual or unactualized relations, and virtual or unactualized things. If there is some imperative, from immanence, or from our world of things, to intuit the things and relations not yet actualized, then this opening to the real force of the virtual is not some abstraction from the present but the more differentiated force that generates the present. If the mathematical is something like a process of formalization that begins with the messiness of things but does so to uncover relations as such, then perhaps the feature of Deleuze’s pragmatism is that far from being opposed to mathematical truth—a truth that insists and persists beyond the actual—it ties the actual and its real being to something like mathematical potentiality, or the relations of differential forces that every actuality has come to solve.
To be concerned with things entails that any of the doings or practices we have in this world are not fully ours; our action and inaction open out to relations beyond those of any logic, or—for that matter—any logos (unless we think of logos as a speaking about that is never in command of itself precisely because of its “aboutness”). Living with or being concerned with a thing requires that the thing be distant from us, possessing a force that is not already present or graspable.
Here is where I would like to raise the much-delayed question of what difference Deleuze makes. Every event, every proper name, every thing, every body, every tendency has two sides, one opening outward to deter-ritorialization (and this because every relative stability is the outcome of a relation of forces that can always be recomposed), and another side pulling back to reterritorialization or relatively stabilized identity. Reading strati-graphically entails that any historical sequence of texts (such as Heidegger coming after and curing us from Descartes, or Deleuze allowing for a rereading of Dewey) is also akin to geological strata in which Heidegger sits on top of and is enabled by (while concealing) other layers with which he coexists. It is Heidegger who seems to have cured us of the great Cartesian divide, returning us to a world of things of concern, and yet it might also be Heidegger who would tear Deleuze away from an all too easy pragmatism of human and practical immanence, opening something like a Leibnizian infinite, in which the thought of the thing opens an infinite not of our own making. Heidegger touches upon a past to which he can always be returned, and this past is also a series of layers, which we can cleave at various points. Yet another dimension of Heidegger touches upon a future that was not present when he wrote, and that remains virtual. Heidegger comes to have a quite different force once “being-in-the-world” is read with a sense of the increasingly fragile material limits of the world. This is also to say that Heidegger at once reterritorializes the relation to things that he encounters; he reads Descartes’s mathematical world as possible only because of a prior disclosure. Cartesian subjectivism is best understood not as the retreat into doubt and the discovery of “the subject” but as one more way of reducing being to what is present. For Heidegger, even Descartes’s subject is always already connected and in conversation with being. Descartes’s subject is, on this reading, the outcome of a certain way of living in the world, with the mathematical comportment being parasitic upon the lived. We would then read all “logics” and technologies as emerging from a primary “doing.” But there is also necessarily deterritorialization at work in Heidegger’s account of the emergence of the mathematical, so that those very maneuvers that draw us closer to things, and that open the enclosed subject to always being in relation, also fragment any wholeness or any world. If there can be a world, or horizon of projects, doings, things, and concerns, this is because we are never simply ourselves and are opened to what we are not. That necessary opening and relation comes with an unbridgeable gap.
Heidegger could see Descartes and logic as emerging from poeisis and logos, or emerging from disclosure and “speaking about,” because poeisis and logos tend toward distance, articulation, and separation. And it is this tendency that enables a pragmatism of things, of ta pragmata. There is another deterritorializing Heidegger who faces out onto an unhomely strata in which the very concerns that give us our world also distance us from our world. It is this Heidegger, thinkable through a stratigraphic reading, that allows us to think the difference of Deleuze.
Here, also, there are two Deleuzes. We find one Deleuze facing back to a tradition of life and the lived—where the debt to Bergson would have us tracing linguistic systems and art objects back to the tendencies of life toward greater and greater differential complexity, balanced between the intensity of influx and the body’s forward movement, finally arriving at spirit capable of releasing itself from its own self-maintenance in order to intuit duration as such. But there is the other Deleuze who takes seriously the path through which complexity of intuition is achieved, and for whom the technologies through which differential complexity is intuited and managed themselves open paths or lines that are not those of spirit. Here I would cite three examples, the first being the perception of the camera (in both senses of the perception of…). The camera that composes a moving world from fixed shots does not accurately describe the temporality that it pictures, but it does—through this very act of cutting and recomposing— create unlived temporalities that are supplemental, not generated from the lived itself. And it is this finitude of technical objects that opens an infinity: because we are not of this perceptive world, and because the camera is a thing, a matter that can capture our concern, the screen and the lens can function to picture and perceive beyond the eye of the mind. The second example I would cite is from Deleuze’s work on Proust and the art of signs, in which one does not begin with signs that I use to communicate to you, or that I use to order and reduce the complexity of the world. Deleuze writes here and elsewhere of signs being emitted. This means that if there is a speaking about or concern for things, it is always, at least in part, distant from the very things and particles that affect us. The art of these signs is at once a gathering or allowing to be composed by what is emitted, and so art begins with the ready-made that in turn bears a certain stand-alone force. But once that layer of signs is composed and we inhabit a world of relations that we read, we can open other worlds leading to what Deleuze refers to as the signs of art, as though we could detach or disassemble things from their own concerns and connectedness, and from their connectedness to our worlds.
This might seem to pull away from all that has come to be thought of as pragmatism, where we begin with a doing or relatedness that only then falls into abstraction, imagining the separation of things. Pragmatism as reconfigured here might be referred to as shifting from things insofar as they elicit our concern, to things as bearing a stand-alone power, and then to things as if they had their own concerns, their own worlds. This still has the thrust of a pragmatism that abandons the pure point of view without resistance, the pre-Kantian idea that if we could only remove distance and grasp the thing itself then we could really see. Seeing is distance, but there is a pragmatism that resides happily in our own distance, and a pragmatism that wants to consider the distances created by things that are distant—not just distant from us but concerned with their own distances. What is it like to be a color, or an affect? Such questions are not about sensations or feelings for us, but powers that unfold their own worlds.
And this brings me to the final example, which also brings us back to home because our home, our world, is not our world, and is already distancing itself from us, as we speak (and often in spite of all we speak). Writing on Foucault, Deleuze insists that when we think about deterritorialization, we need to include language, and its capacity to operate outside communication, which is to say outside man and his abstractions, but we also need to include life. In the form of silicon we can imagine a living that is not that of life, just as we can imagine a language that is not that of speaking (Deleuze 1988). How might this yield a thought of the concern of things, the concerns that might go beyond Heidegger’s poetic and physical things, to virtual objects?
Brandom, Robert. 2009. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated by Seán Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Dewey, John. 1895. “The Theory of Emotion,” Psychological Review, 2(1): 13–32.
Gladwell, Malcolm. 2005 . Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. New York: Little, Brown and Co.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1998. On the Pragmatics of Communication. Edited by Maeve Cook. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What Is a Thing? Translated by W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch. Chicago: H. Regnery.
Heidegger, Martin. 1991. The Principle of Reason. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1995. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Margolis, Joseph. 2012. Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, a Touch of Prophecy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Putnam, Hilary. 1995. “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 95: 291–306.
Rawls, John. 1972. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Zalasiewicz, J. A. 2010. The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.