Towards a pragmatist economic geography

Abstract

Following Jamie Peck’s remit for this initial set of Exchanges section contributions to present forward-positive approaches to economic geography, I offer American philosophical pragmatism, and more specifically, the neo-pragmatism of the American philosopher, Richard Rorty (1931–2007). Rather than providing a complete architectonic philosophy, pragmatism presents a set of ideas about ideas. Within the context of economic geography, I explore within this short paper three neo-pragmatist ideas: a reconceptualization of knowledge and truth; experimentation and creativity; and pluralism and conversation.

American philosophical pragmatism often gets a bad rap. In his novel, The Master, Colm Tóibín (2004: 115) mocked the original pragmatists – John Dewey, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry James, George Herbert Meade and Charles Peirce – saying that they ‘did not believe in anything and yet managed to make the view seem both reasonable and popular’. As an upholder of pragmatism in economic geography, especially Richard Rorty’s later neo-pragmatism, I’ve been similarly taunted. ¹ Following a presentation I gave in San Francisco, Andrew Sayer asked me that given pragmatists don’t believe in anything why did I enter the room using the door rather than walking through the wall? Or, Dick Peet at a Miami meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) asked me that given pragmatists don’t believe in anything why did I subject myself to being air conditioned to an inch of my life in a hotel conference room rather than tanning on sunny South Beach? Despite that alluring prospect I stayed, and at the end of the session I even resisted walking through the wall, tempting as that was.

It is nonsense to say pragmatists don’t believe in anything, though. They espouse a strong viewpoint based on a belief that humans increasingly figure out more and better ways to cope with and intervene in the world. As Rorty put it in a 2006 interview, ‘pragmatists think. . .that in the wake of Darwin humans . . . are clever animals who find cleverer and cleverer ways of talking about what’s going on and cleverer and cleverer ways of dealing with what’s going on’. ² None of this, though, is based on timeless foundations such as Rationality, or Mind, or Truth, that lay outside the historical and social context of those clever practices. Pragmatism is resolutely anti-foundationalist believing that nothing lies under, or below, or supports economic geographical knowledge making it foolproof.

Consequently, pragmatism is critical of any claims by economic geographers of grounding methods, epistemological certitudes, unchanging core principles, single vocabularies or claims to an upper-case T truth. For pragmatists foundationalism is without warrant, bringing in train corrosive tendencies like division, conflict and dogma. Neither is it an architectonic project, providing building blocks for yet another complete system, one more capitalized Economic Geography. For this reason, my paper is different from other contributions in this Exchanges section. Pragmatism offers no grand theory, but rather is a meta-theory, a set of ideas for thinking about ideas. Nevertheless, following Jamie Peck’s remit for these initial Exchanges contributions, pragmatism offers forward-positive suggestions for thinking constructively about the field. Inter alia, pragmatism holds to the social hope that through a reconceptualization of knowledge and truth economic geography can be: (i) reparative; (ii) experimental and creative; and (iii) pluralistic and open-minded. That is, it can be a better discipline.

For pragmatism, context, meaning both situatedness and relationality, was everything, including its role in shaping pragmatism itself. Here, the American Civil War (1861–65) was crucial. That conflict cut a deep, festering wound across the face of America, directly affecting the lives of many of the original pragmatists (Menand, 2001). The purpose of their work became primarily reparative, a philosophy for amelioration and healing. As Dewey (1917: 65) said, ‘philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men [sic]’. The American Civil War was just such a problem. Consequently, pragmatism eschewed the long-standing concern among philosophers around disputes over foundations (the ‘Greek’ tradition of philosophy as Rorty calls it). Those disputes were a large part of the problem, fanning the flames of conflagration: my foundational belief versus your foundational belief. Instead, pragmatists, while recognizing continued difference and plurality, aimed in their work to foster solidarity and community, social knowledge that through discussion and exchange aspired to forge connection rather than rupture.

After the Second World War, however, philosophical pragmatism was pushed aside by the rise of analytical philosophy and concerned precisely with devising foundational methodological rules. The only original pragmatist then still alive, John Dewey – he died in 1952 at age 92 – was mercilessly ridiculed, regarded as ‘a nice old man [but] who hadn’t the vaguest conception of real philosophical rigor or the nature of a real philosophical problem’ (quoted in Gouinlock, 1972: xi).

Three decades later pragmatism was revived by the work of Richard Rorty as well as others under the rubric of neo-pragmatism. Rorty originally made his name contributing to analytical philosophy, but in 1979 he became a Trojan Horse. Rorty’s (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was a full-throated, no-holds-barred pragmatist-inspired attack on analytical philosophy. The book didn’t only demolish, but also pursued the positive aims of the original pragmatists.

That begins for Rorty by reconceiving knowledge. Traditional epistemology is ‘knowledge as accurate representation’ and justified philosophically by the assumption that the mind mirrors nature (Rorty, 1979: 357). This ‘ocular view’, as Rorty (1979: 357) calls it, then leads ineluctably to epistemological essentialism, the view that knowledge is only knowledge when ‘the world [is] . . . seen as it “really” is. From such a viewpoint the world that emerges is a . . . universe . . . made of very simple, clearly and distinctively knowable things, knowledge of whose essences provides a master-vocabulary’. Following pragmatism, however, Rorty argues the world can never be seen as it ‘really’ is because that presumes we can stand outside the social bubble in which our knowledge is produced. To say something is true means only that there is social agreement, not that there is ‘transparency to the real’ (Rorty, 1979: 368). In this sense, knowledge is always a community accomplishment. How long agreement remains depends on how well knowledge continues to allow people to cope with the world, to intervene, to do things, to ameliorate their condition. Knowledge is judged, as William James (1902 [2012]: 24) put it, ‘by [its] fruits . . . not by [its] roots’.

Second, because knowledge for Rorty is always a community accomplishment, the pragmatist injunction is always to experiment: to try harder, and to fail better. There are no bad experiments. As Thomas Edison famously put it about his own experiments: ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work’. Experiments are necessary because there is no surefire method for guaranteeing knowledge. And for this reason, as Rorty (1982: 195) writes, ‘the whole idea . . . of choosing between “methods” . . . seems to be misguided’. The best we can do, the only thing we can do, is to experiment creatively by ‘cast[ing] about for a vocabulary that will help’ (Rorty, 1979: 321); that is, to try out novel and creative forms of language, including narrative, metaphor and other vocabularies to re-describe the world. By inventing new words, telling new stories and putting those words and stories into motion, it is sometimes possible to break through old stand-offs and logjams and repair sites where earlier conversation lagged or stalled or was abandoned.

Finally, Rorty champions as many different experiments by as many different people as possible, even those who we might think of as cranks, or who are marginal, or with whom we disagree. An open-minded pluralism is crucial, producing better conversations, livelier forms of what Rorty (1979: 390) terms kibitzing, richer re-descriptions and more profound forms of edification. Edification means here, as Rorty (1979: 360) puts it, the ‘project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking’. That quest never ends. There are no final answers and truths. For Rorty (1979: 318) the point is always to continue the conversation, ‘a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts’.

Rorty’s neo-pragmatism is therefore not ‘a method for attaining truth’ (Rorty, 1979: 357) – truth is ‘a wheel that plays no part in the mechanism’ (Rorty, 1982: 167). Instead, it offers something more important: an approach, as Wills and Lake (2020a: 4) write, to ‘enlarge the possibility of creating new knowledge in the world’ for the end of social amelioration. Rorty also offers that same positive possibility to economic geography.

Although it has been a long time coming, there are at least glimmers within the current form of economic geography that suggest it aspires to some of the same positive, reparative ends as Rorty and the pragmatists. Peck’s rationale for the AAG session on which this Exchanges section was based, and more generally, the very idea of an Exchanges section, was couched exactly in pragmatist affirmative language: conversation, dialogue, pluralism, experimentation, creativity, possibility. They are all from the pragmatist playbook. Not that Rory’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a methodological how-to manual like Harvey’s (1969) Explanation in Geography or Sayer’s (1984) Method in Social Science. Rather, in pragmatist fashion the book is an incitement, something to talk about, over and through, not a rigid template of irrevocable rule-following.

Perhaps the most difficult of pragmatism’s ideas to uphold in economic geography is letting go of the discipline’s traditional essentialist epistemology based on representation; that theories and explanations are judged by how well they conform to an antecedent reality, to a world ‘as it looks to itself, as it would describe itself if it could’ (Rorty, 1982: 194). Here Bob Lake’s recent work on pragmatism is immensely useful (see fn. 1). Lake (2020) argues that hankering for an essentialist epistemology is part of a larger ‘quest for certainty’ that Dewey (1929 [1984]) identified as endemic to science and social science. Bound up with that quest is a belief that only with theoretical and explanatory fidelity can social problems be identified and rectified, which for Lake, spills over then into theories and practices of planning, management and governance. As Lake (2020: 269) writes, there is a belief that ‘knowing how things work . . . [will] reveal how they might work better’. Furthermore, Lake (2020: 270, 2023a) also makes an argument drawing on Rorty’s (2021) recently posthumously published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism that epistemological essentialism can become political cover for authoritarianism, undemocratically imposing on society supposedly rock-solid truths. This is the ‘dark side of certainty’ as Lake (2023a: 1) calls it, producing ‘silencing’, ‘evisceration of alternatives’, ‘curtailment of enlarged knowledge’, ‘arrogance’, ‘dogmatism’ and even worse.

While economic geography has tackled and attempted to remediate theoretical essentialism since the 1980s, found especially in the work of feminists, notably Massey (1984) and later during the following decade in Gibson-Graham (1996), essentialism in the form of accurate representation – the mind as the mirror of nature – stubbornly continues. It seems economic geographers cannot help themselves, something that they cannot not do, indelibly ingrained. But for Rorty the practice of mirroring nature is another historical contingency, reinforced over many generations, and built into the pedagogical and professional power structure of the field. Pragmatism shows there is another way. Not that it will be easy. It will take much effort and courage. But that effort will be helped both by economic geography’s disciplinary history that is predisposed to abrupt changes – over the last 150 years, like Penelope’s shroud, the field has been knitted, undone and reknitted many times – and by the absence of a core definition.

If there is no upper-case T Truth that can be recognized, then there is no single methodology for arriving at it either. Rorty’s methodological advice is to experiment by redescribing the world, using new vocabularies until one seems like it sticks, that is, it copes with the world, improves it, and around which there is some agreement. As Rorty (1991: 9) puts it, you should ‘redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways until you have created a pattern of linguistic behaviour which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it’. In this endeavour economic geography’s history is a long and honourable especially in its experiments with metaphors (for Rorty’s novel take on metaphor see, Barnes, 1991). Harvey (1969: 486) was wrong at least for economic geography: ‘It is not by our theories you shall know us’ but by our metaphors. ³ Economic geography’s past 70-years is chock-a-block with examples of economic geographers trying out new metaphorical redescriptions from Bill Warntz’s economic geographical world as Newtonian potential model to Doreen Massey’s economic geographical world as striations of sedimentary rock to Henry Yeung’s economic geographical world as global networks. In each of these cases, ‘rising generations’ adopted them. Further, what the discipline has been good at, and has gotten even better, is not making do and die last stands for individual vocabularies once they begin to ebb and pass gently into the night. Again, this seems very Rortyan: nothing lasts for ever. You use vocabularies only so long as they are historically useful. Admittedly, the passing into the night of Bill Warntz’s Newtonian social physics vocabulary was not so gentle, but that was because it was more thoroughly embedded than other of economic geography’s vocabularies within the natural sciences and its quest for certainty. Consequently, its proponents were especially recalcitrant to let go (for the story see, Barnes, 2022).

While experimenting with new vocabularies does not require a single right method it does require receptive openness to keeping the conversation going, to kibitz, to be ready for edification. Conversation will be always situated, partial, embodied, often hesitant, sometimes painful, skewered by unequal relations of power, potentially one-sided, but for Rorty it is our best hope – not that it will necessarily work but that it might work. ⁴ As Rorty (1982: 208) writes, conversation is the ‘unjustifiable hope . . . [for] an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity’. Moreover, the conversation should be as broad as possible, certainly not confined to only experts, but involve breaking down knowledge hierarchies and silos, transcending the distinction between researchers and researched. Conversations as Rorty (1979: 372) says should never ‘degenerate into a research program’ with its implied exclusiveness and exclusion. ⁵ This optimism about the possibilities of conversation is the opposite of what Sedgwick (2003: 123) labels, ‘paranoid reading’. This is the standard academic view, as Judd calls it, that ‘Everything is Always Going to Hell’ (quoted in Wyly, 2021: 1400; Sedgwick is discussed by Lake, 2017a: 491). Paranoid reading is perhaps best found in Michel Foucault’s despair about social science, consigned by him as an instrument of oppressive power, incarcerating and inescapable. Rortyan social science is more positive. ‘Reparative’ is Sedgwick’s term (2003: 123). If the right conditions can be created, continued conversation is possible providing ‘space’, as Rorty (1979: 370) writes, ‘for a sense of wonder . . . that there is something new under the sun’, for saying things that have never been said before.

Against such optimism, over the last 40 years or so in economic geography there hasn’t been a lot of kibitzing, at least within its Anglo-American version (Barnes and Sheppard, 2010). Different disciplinary sub-groups have each gone to their own corner (or on their own islands in Peck’s, 2012 allegory), giving others the cold shoulder and a wide berth. But my sense just recently is of a slight thaw, even offshore hailing. It is represented in part by this very forum. I believe such changes to the discipline are partly because it is more feminized, partly because of generational succession, partly because it is no longer so Anglo-American and partly because of transformations in the larger discipline of which it is part as big G Geography becomes more expansive and inter-disciplinary. Whatever the precise causes, and propelling greater Rortyan conversation, it is a precious opportunity that we have an obligation and responsibility to seize (also see Campbell’s, 2023 similar optimism about conversation in planning). It is the discipline’s Rortyan hope.