The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking About Things in the Making

283 Pages·2001·3.12 MB·English

by  Joan Ockman

Edited by Joan Ockman
THE PRAGMATIST
IMAGINATION
THINKING ABOUT “THINGS IN THE MAKING”
Temple Hoyne Buell Center Princeton Architectural Press
for the Study of American Architecture
Columbia University

Edited by Joan Ockman
with a general introduction by John Rajchman
and an afterword by Casey Nelson Blake
THE PRAGMATIST
IMAGINATION
THINKING ABOUT “THINGS IN THE MAKING”
a compilation of papers based on the proceedings of a workshop
held at Columbia University on May 1–2, 2000
presented by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
with major funding from the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation
and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
published by Princeton Architectural Press
November 2000
in print and on line
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Copyright © 2000 The Trustees of Columbia University
and Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN 1–56898–287–9
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First Edition
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Printed and bound in the United States

THE FUTURE / THE PAST
032 Introduction ANDERS STEPHANSON
036 Democracy’s Mythmakers NADIA URBINATI
044 Urban Projects and Adjustment to the
Future JEAN-LOUIS COHEN
CONTENTS 052 From Network to Patchwork
DAVID LAPOUJADE
THE PUBLIC
006 General Introduction JOHN RAJCHMAN 062 Introduction GWENDOLYN WRIGHT
016 Pragmatism/Architecture: The Idea 066 For an Agonistic Public Sphere
of the Workshop Project JOAN OCKMAN CHANTAL MOUFFE
024 Glossary 076 Democratic Public Space
ROSALYN DEUTSCHE
082 Public Space/Private Space
GERALD E. FRUG
092 On the Line between Procedures
and Aesthetics HASHIM SARKIS
104 Land Settlement, Architecture,
and the Eclipse of the Public Realm
KENNETH FRAMPTON
AESTHETICS /EXPERIENCE
114 Introduction JOHN RAJCHMAN
116 On Pragmatist Aesthetics
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN
122 Anodyne BERNARD TSCHUMI
128 Repeat/Complete: Notes for a
Digital Agora PAUL MILLER A.K.A. DJ SPOOKY
TECHNOLOGY AND ITS
IMPACT ON PERCEPTION
136 Introduction REINHOLD MARTIN
138 Untitled Remarks JONATHAN CRARY
148 Pragmatism at War PETER GALISON
152 Notes on the Thing ELIZABETH GROSZ
160 The Ether and Your Anger:
Toward a Pragmatics of the Useless
BRIAN MASSUMI
SOCIAL LIFE AND THE PLACE AND CITIZENSHIP
EVERYDAY WORLD 222 Introduction ANDREAS HUYSSEN
170 Introduction MARY MCLEOD 224 The Making and Unmaking of
176 Extraordinary Appetites: A Japan Democratic Spaces TERESA CALDEIRA
Not-at-Home-with-Itself SANDRA BUCKLEY 234 The Place of African Cities
186 Reconsidering Pragmatism and ABDOUMALIQ SIMONE
the Chicago SchoolISAAC JOSEPH 244 (a)way station:A Narrative of Domestic
196 What Do Young Artists Want? Space and Urban Migration MABEL WILSON
MARTHA ROSLER 248 Dialectics of Place and Citizenship
204 Short Presentation on Everyday Life SANDHYA SHUKLA
STANLEY ARONOWITZ 254 The Global City: The Denationalizing
208 It Happens Every Day MARSHALL BERMAN of Time and Space SASKIA SASSEN
266 Afterword: What’s Pragmatism
Got to Do with It? CASEY NELSON BLAKE
274 Notes on Contributors
280 Acknowledgments
JOHN RAJCHMAN
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
The diverse, overlapping, open, unexpected Each of the early pragmatists was an original
series of statements that comprise this thinker whose work goes off on diverse paths,
volume help pose a question: what is it entering into discussion or debate with
today to think or to imagine, to construct many others, confronting the new forces
or to design, in relation not to “things and questions of the day. Taken together
made” but to “things in the making”? From their work forms a sprawling, multiple thing,
this perspective they together broach the not governed by programmatic statements,
possibility of a new pragmatism in theory which we can enter and exit in different
and imagination. ways. Already Peirce could not abide the
pragmatism James had attributed to him.
Pragmatism is of course an old thing. It was
He proposed to rebaptize his philosophy
the name given to the kind of philosophy
“pragmaticism,” a label, he said, unlovely
started in New England by Charles Peirce,
enough that no one would try to steal it.
popularized by William James, extended
Cantankerous and solitary, Peirce wrote
into the 20th century by John Dewey. It
short papers on many topics. He started
remains one of the richest, most singular
many things even if he finished nothing.
episodes to emerge at the end of the 19th
He invented a semiology still current in art-
century or at a moment Europeans call
critical debates. He was the first philoso-
“modernity”; we may think of Peirce as an
pher actually to conduct experiments and
American contemporary of Nietzsche and
to use randomization techniques in them;
Baudelaire. But today, in much altered cir-
and at one point he proposed to call his
cumstances, does pragmatism still harbor
philosophy “tychism” or the philosophy of
unexpected powers, untapped secrets,
chance. He had a view of reality as vague
allowing it to take off anew, in perhaps
or anexact, beyond the limitations of our
unrecognizable guises? Can it also itself
measurements. He thought that inquiry had
still be a “thing in the making”?
a great advantage over the doctrine of church
or party as a way of “fixing our beliefs”—
it took truth to be what comes out in the
long run. Each of these ideas would assume
new forms in James and Dewey.
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In particular, we find them at work in William in them, and the manner in which they may
James’s talk of “things in intellectualism,” be said to evolve; in this way they complicate
1. William James, first given in 1908.1 His picture of things the relation of pragmatism to questions of
“Bergson and His Critique in the making was directed at once against instrumentality or instrumentalism. Implicitly,
of Intellectualism,”
in A Pluralistic Universe Hegel’s holism and Russell’s atomism and they raise the question of how today prag-
(Lincoln: University of
involved a “critique of the intellectualism” matism might treat the question of the
Nebraska Press, 1996).
that went with each—a critique of “abstrac- digital instruments that take off from a
2. Gilles Deleuze, Essays
Critical and Clinical tions”that says the abstract doesn’t explain; “military-industrial” situation to transform
(Minneapolis: University of
it is, on the contrary, what itself needs to urban and architectural spaces.
Minnesota, 1997), pp. 86ff.
See also his essay on the be explained by reinsertion into the plural,
But this volume includes many contributors
treatment of whole and frag-
divergent space from which it derives. Might
ment in Whitman (pp. 56ff.). with other kinds of links with pragmatism,
The logic of a space or time we then use this cluster of ideas as a point
in which “the whole is not often also unexplicit or unself-conscious.
of entry into the great pragmatist edifice?
given” is a constant theme For the aim of the workshop was not just
in Deleuze, and is found in Might we extract from it a larger picture
his own discussion and use commentary; it was rather to identify new
of Bergson and extends of the space or the time of “things in the
zones where we are now seeing unforeseen
to his understanding of cine- making” and the “pragmatist” relation we
matic signs and images. It “things in the making,” and to pose new
is a logic inseparable from have to it? In effect that is a tack suggested
problems which have antecedents in the
a pragmatism that says that
by Gilles Deleuze2 and pursued in this volume
“the multiple” is something great pragmatist philosophers, but which
we must always make anew. by David Lapoujade3 and Isaac Joseph, who
reappear today in new light that complicates
That is, at least, one connec-
explore the fate of the notion of such a net-
tion I try to present in my them in turn. The proof of the undertaking
book The Deleuze Connections work or patchwork space, first broached by
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT would then lie, in good pragmatist manner,
the Chicago School, especially in the work
Press, 2000). in the outcome: in the ways that such zones
of Robert Park and his notions of public and
3. Lapoujade elaborates this help stimulate new thinking, open up new
principle in the thought of mass spaces in cities. This thread is taken
William James in explicit ideas, shift accustomed boundaries today—
up in another way by Elizabeth Grosz and
contrast to Richard Rorty in other words, in uses rather than interpre-
in his book William James: Brian Massumi in terms of what it might mean
Empiricisme et pragmatisme tations. In that way the present project
(Paris: PUF, 1997). for an approach to technological arrange-
might itself take part in the kind of prag-
ments, and the role of the body or sensation
matism which lies in our relations to those
things still in the making that provoke us
to think, to imagine, and so to act, create,
transform, in new ways.
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