More Thinking in Search of a Language
Doubled(d) Consciousness, or, What Is Called Thinking When You're Talking, and Vice Versa?
In the course of my long and unstoried career as a historian, I’ve often been told that I don’t really do history. My response has been to ask, OK, what is it that I’ve been doing? The answers have varied, according to how friendly the interlocutor is, and how historiographically minded. One variation on the theme is, “I have no idea, but it isn’t history.” Another goes like this: “I don’t know, maybe philosophy of history?” And another, usually offered with an appropriate sneer: “Isn’t it obvious? You do Theory.”
I’ve also been told that I write badly, or obscurely: the sentences are too long, the ideas are too, what, Germanic, and the references are too arcane (why would anyone read Schelling?). Now, the people who have said these things about my prose have sometimes asked, “Why don’t you write the way you talk?” To this question, I offer in evidence various blogs or websites I’ve started since 2003, including POLITICS/LETTERS, the online magazine now run much better by Bruce Robbins, and the three books I’ve written since Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (2001)—all of them vernacular sites verging on colloquial, even slangy forms of address. This answer has had no effect.
And now it seems that the way I talk may also an issue. Recently I’ve been told that my everyday utterance might be a problem—that is, an impediment to understanding the content of my thinking rather than a serviceable conveyance. In other words, it could be that profanity-punctuated plain speech is not my strong suit, after all, indeed that I may well be guilty of (gasp!) repeated mansplanation. Two nights ago, for example, I visited a friend who is a writer, not an academic, and who has long harbored doubts about my ability to communicate with other members of my species.
The exasperation showed almost immediately, as I tried to explain how John Dewey had been involved, in 1891-92, with a radical syndicalist when he was teaching at the University of Michigan, about to be “called up” to the new University of Chicago—and why that involvement mattered to his argument in Outlines of a Theory of Ethics (1891), his first big book. (The syndicalist, Franklin Ford, a wild and crazy guy, is thanked in the acknowledgements.)
There was much eye-rolling and sidelong glances toward the waiting take-out food (sushi rolls), until I strategically switched gears and complimented the friend on how clean the apartment looked. But that only added anger to impatience. The evening went downhill from there.
Here’s what I wrote to the friend next morning, in belated defense of my way of being in conversation if not in the world as such, slightly edited and redacted.
__________
I'm troubled by your reactions to my ordinary observations. I was trying to explain what I was up to with that pitch to _______ last night, for example, and you got impatient with me; meanwhile you were offended when I suggested that your admirable tidiness was a product of seeing yourself through others' eyes.
I was pissed at first, but then, in keeping with my AA-induced equanimity, I thought, "ah, just let it go." I did, but I thought it might be worth rehearsing the moment, to clarify what's at stake.
OK. Look, I think (and talk) the way you say you want to write, with a direction but no destination in mind, as in the manner perfected by Montesquieu. So I'm collecting thoughts as they come to me, trying to assemble them in such a way that they are internally consistent and externally coherent—legible to others and so to myself. That sequence is significant. The conclusions don't come first, as finished propositions to which I attach the appropriate proofs, they come later, and gradually if at all. And those others aren't an afterthought, they're already present, on stage, when I start speaking my lines. I have them in mind, always already.
This procedure offends you, often enough, because you perceive it as a waste of your time. But please note how it works. It's a function of double(d) consciousness, which is not a way of being specific to black folk, as per Du Bois's specification—it's just human nature, to try to see ourselves as we understand them to be seen by others. It is in the search for this kind of legibility in the eyes of others that we find verification of our own being, agency, subjectivity, call it what you will.
So of course you want your apartment to look tidy, and of course that's your desire, not somebody else's (that is, a command imposed from without). But it's also merely true that your way of seeing your very own apartment is a result of that ongoing, continuous refraction of a doubled consciousness.
It's also merely true that my way of thinking my very own thoughts is a result of a similar refraction. The difference between us is that I footnote the body doubles who complicate my point of view. I'm having a conversation with them as well as you.
I appreciate your impatience. It's a reminder that you're more interested in results than in methods, in ends more than means. You're an ur-pragmatist, in this sense. I'm not. I'm much more likely to be piecing together the unstated assumptions of any utterance than to be commenting on its manifest meaning or consequences. And that goes for my own utterance. I want to know why I think what I think, as I’m thinking it.
Is that epistemology? Not quite, not if you say that epistemology begins with the question of how do we know what we know, and proceeds from there to evaluate the rules and the results of knowing. My way of thinking, also talking, is more like phenomenology, which might be characterized as epistemology without justification—the question here is, what have we said we have known, and why did we say it then and there, under those circumstances, and no judgment is attached on whether the knowledge so produced or deployed is warranted by the procedures, formalized or not, that enabled it. (Husserl put it this way: “the real being of the world thereby remains unconsidered, unquestioned, and its validity left out of account,” not that I think he got it altogether right. Goethe was the blueprint, according to William James, because he had a “pitiless manner of taking seriously everything that came along.”)
Epistemology deals in what is true for “the” subject, conceived as a transcendental ego without historical markings or experience; phenomenology deals with particular subjects at particular moments in time and space, knowers who, as a dimension of the known, have produced many versions of the truth. It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but it makes for one. It defines the disciplinary divide between philosophy and history, just for starters—practitioners in and of the latter, like me, doubt that there is any truth that can be eternal, infallible, or final. The other guys seek that kind of truth.
Ah, but how is it, then, that I can be accused, rightly, of doing philosophy of history? (Most historians think their authenticity derives from an adherence to archives and “extensive” research rather than thinking about what makes the discipline internally coherent and externally viable, thus re-examining existing archives and opening new ones, which amounts to “intensive” research, that is, doing things with words, as literary critics do.)
I think it’s kind of simple—being a Marxist situates you within a discipline, any discipline, as someone who is necessarily attuned to methodological differences and their consequences. Marx invites you to inhabit the same intersection of German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) and British Empiricism (Locke, Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Mill) which he mapped according to the measurements Hegel left him. So you begin to read as he did, in a very pragmatic spirit, as someone who needs the intellectual equipment provided by both continental rigor and Anglo-American pluralism. Not Either/Or, and not Both/And. Instead, you try to find where these traditions actually overlap, and move beyond them by completing their agendas.
But doing that means you’re always retracing the steps of writers you agree with, and correcting the missteps of writers you disagree with, like the old carbuncled mole himself did. You’re constantly citing both traditions, not to mention their deviant offspring. It’s a painstaking process, and it’s got to be boring to people uninterested in the unfolding story of what and how we think. But by now it comes naturally to me, it’s just the way I am. No wonder we have . . . failure to communicate.
I think you communicate perfectly well. I've enjoyed out chats at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History and during your Zoom course on historiography. (Uh, maybe the guy has a point.)
Not bad...