Floop2

Floop 2: Pragmatism: a Glossary. An Annotation

Premise: The pragmatist approach acknowledges “minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react” Floop 2 aims to thicken the relation between the pragmatism of James and Dewey and the cybernetics of Wiener and Bateson (see ). These converging epistemologies set a trail toward our own moment of ecological disaster, but they also lead to a common ground on which our own agency can be understood and asserted.

Floop 2 is a glossary of terms:

[these words arranged in a loop de loop]

Experience

Esthetic

Adaptation

Consciousness

Drift

Movement

Rhythm

Undergoing

Unity

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Ruth Anna Pulman’s essay Taking Pragmatism Seriously makes a useful distinction between the Pragmaticism of C. S. Pierce (which emphasises a semiotic) and the Pragmatism of experience of William James and John Dewey Floop 2 will address the second.

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William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890) contains a sustained reply to Herbert Spencer’s own Principles of Psychology (1855). To contemporary readers Herbert Spencer is remembered as the father of two grave epistemological misnomers. Firstly Spencer, an enthusiastic champion of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, popularised the notion of “the survival of the fittest”. This opposed the more scientifically precise idea that those best adapted to their environment are best equipped to survive within it. The second of Spencer's thought crimes was to encourage idea of “social Darwinism”, which has been a boon to the politics of self-interest and structural inequality since.

Herbert Spencer the Bastard

But William James, in his own Principles of Psychology(1890), finds a lot of Pragmatism in Spencer’s approach to psychology. Principally, Spencer’s definition of experience as 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations'. James is quick to clarify the importance of this “adjustment” to Pragmatism, acknowledging its value as an idea that can be built upon […] “because it takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react; because, in short, it takes mind in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely more fertile than the old-fashioned 'rational psychology,' which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and properties.”

An epistemology which “takes into account the fact that minds inhabit environments which act on them and on which they in turn react” serves as a prelude to the theory of purpose outlined by cybernetician Norbert Wiener and the ecologically orientated “second order cybernetics” ushered in by Gregory Bateson . James follows Spencer further still in citing Spencer’s observation that there is no “break” between the “phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life."

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James and Dewey speak of mind is embodied, reactive and adaptive. The pragmatism of experience, therefore, acknowledges the materiality of the elements that form it. James has his predecessors, which are also evident in the cannon of cybernetics. In 1863 Samual Butler in Darwin Amongst the Machines, also proposed that mind was embodied, reactive and adaptive; In the era of cybernetics, Butler’s mantel was taken up by Gregory Bateson who proposed an ecology of mind, in which there was no clear division between mind and environment. Like the cybernaticians that followed, the Pragmatists of experience rejected the idealism where the dialectic movement of better and better ideas drove mind to perfection (a notion inherited by Freud and Lacan). William James’ star pupil Gertrude Stein acknowledges as much in the form of Tender Buttons, in which text is exposed as text as such (the radical move of dada-surrealism was to reconfigured texts and images to render the “dialectical image”) . and in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which spoke of the “self” (Gertrude) as other, through the “experience” of another (Alice) Italo Calvino, in Cybernetics and Ghosts, also understood that those who work with text must work with a radical materiality which challenges “literature” as an institution. If literature is to be more than a set of possible combinations, or OuLiPo algorithms, or a post structuralist hall of mirrors (in which one thing or another is more or less interesting), it must speak through embodied, emergent experience. Perhaps a function of literature is a constant coming into consciousness.

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The relation between James’ practice of experimental psychology and that of cyberneticians Grey Walters, Ross Ashby, Kenneth Craik, Lawrence S. Kubie and Warren McCulloch is touched upon in Fabulous Loop de Loop (Floop). When Kenneth Craik claims “[...] our brains and minds are part of a continuous causal chain” he is in the same epistemological territory as the pragmatists of experience. The epistemology of the cyberneticians who were also world leaders is the field of experimental psychology, attempted to make material models of the activities of the human brain (Ashby, Walters, Craik) which was derived from the empirical practice of William James. The work of Gregory Bateson which applies cybernetic ideas to psychology, anthropology, ecology and aesthetics, also acknowledges that there is no “break” between the “phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life."

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The cyberneticians’ antipathy to Freudian psychoanalysis (McCulloch and Bateson particularly), follows the same logic of embodiment and experience articulated by James and Dewey.