Pluralism at the Millennium

There are four main definitions of pluralism, not all of them relevant to this talk. Anyone who is interested in debating whether Anglican priests should be vicar of two parishes at the same time is out of luck. Anyone who is particularly interested in cultural pluralism is out of luck here too, but there is probably something for you right down the hall: anyone who checks out recent essays and books with "pluralism" as a topic will discover that the lion's share are about ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity. The pluralism I am going to be dealing with is the one first used in 1882 by William James: a "system of thought that recognizes more than one ultimate principle," although down the road a piece a political version of pluralism (opposition to monolithic state power) will have its fifteen seconds in the spotlight.

To my understanding, the critical pluralism developed by Richard McKeon and Ronald Crane in the 1940s and 1950s was the key metacritical commitment of both the original Chicago school of literary interpretation that flourished in the 1950s and the three generations of their successors who appear at this session, from Wayne Booth of the second generation down to Elizabeth Preston of the fourth generation.

Richard McKeon's thought was one mode of the antifoundationalism that has become crucial to twentieth-century philosophical discourse. Like the Austrian logical positivist Ludwig Wittgenstein, the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, and the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, McKeon turned away from the project of creating a single coherent system of philosophy. For McKeon as for Wittgenstein, thought was insistently bound up in language and its practices. For McKeon as for Rorty, the world could be understood in any number of different ways dependent on the human interests one brought to the process of inquiry. For McKeon as for Derrida the passage beyond the monistic philosophies of the past lay not "in turning the page of philosophy... but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way," in McKeon's case a way that located the powers as well as the limitations of each monistic system.

What was peculiar about McKeon among this group of seminal thinkers was what Dennis O'Brien has called his "constructive view of the ends of philosophy." Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Rorty were principally concerned to cure Western thought of metaphysics. It was McKeon's less fashionable dream to recuperate the thought of the past by understanding the ideas of philosophers throughout history as the products of their individual semantic choices. A philosopher's principles could be Comprehensive or Reflexive, Simple or Actional; her methods could be Dialectical or Operational, Logistic or Problematic; her interpretations could be Ontological or Entitative, Existentialist or Essentialist. Any particular set of choices would shape a particular language-game with its own way of discovering its own version of truth. All thought fits on this grid, including that of the gridmaker himself: McKeon himself uses Reflexive principles with an Operational method and Essentialist interpretations.

While few have accused Ronald Crane of being light reading, Crane's pluralism might be called McKeon Lite. The abstractions of McKeon's grid disappeared, but not his constructive aims. In The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, Crane's version of pluralism begins with the premise that criticism is "a collection of distinct and more or less incommensurable 'frameworks' or 'languages'" differing widely in "matters of assumed principle, definition and method." Each of these "languages," Crane argued, had its own intrinsic powers and limitations, areas of blindness and insight, questions it could answer and other questions which it could not even ask. Each separate mode of criticism should therefore be considered an instrument, a tool useful for one or more specific purposes but ill-adapted to a great many others.

Wayne Booth's discussions of pluralism in "Pluralism and Its Rivals" (1970), an affirmation of Crane's vision of critical systems as a toolbox. The "rivals" to pluralism are monism--the affirmation of one system and denial of all others; skepticism--the rejection of any theory as productive of valid knowledge; and eclecticism--the use of many different theories without examination whether their fields of discourse and terminologies were coherent with one another. Booth concludes that there are many valid ways of knowing any literary text, because the questions provoked by literary theories light up different aspects of the text, so that elements that are key evidence to one theory may be minor players or even invisible to another.

This was not, however, where Booth's vision of pluralism ended. In Critical Understanding (1979), Booth was to present the limitations of instrumental pluralism in epistemological terms. Although any pluralism is arguably richer and more complete than any of the nonpluralistic alternatives (monism, skepticism, eclecticism, and so forth), Booth feels the need to acknowledge that Crane's "pluralism of discrete modes" is only one of many methods for organizing the variety of voices into a harmonious chorus. After examining other forms of pluralism--those of Kenneth Burke and M.H. Abrams--Booth feels driven to seek a pluralism of pluralisms--only to find himself within an infinite regress. (That is, Booth realizes that once he has organized his pluralisms in one way he will surely be able to see yet another way of arranging or combining them, which will lead him to construct a pluralism of pluralisms of pluralisms....) At this point Booth shrugs off the goal of finding an ultimate pluralism and settles for a pragmatic scheme to "improve the practice of controversy" in the interest of three key virtues: "vitality," "justice," and "understanding." While doing so he finds he needs to embrace the notion that some ways of "overstanding" a text (viewing it in the light of a prior ideological commitment) might be as vital to an engaged critical discourse as the ways of understanding it.

The history I have been giving might be seen as the abstract evolution of a complex idea, but of course the pluralism of Crane and Booth was a product both of the way they thought about literature and of the critical scene in which they did their thinking. Crane was confident that the greater richness of his poetics -- his Neo-Aristotelian method of understanding the text as formed matter -- would triumph over the neo-Coleridgean method of the New Criticism--which viewed all texts as troped allegories of commonplaces. His pluralism enabled him to situate his poetics at the origin of a series of concentric circles spiraling out to broader relationships, with authors, their historical moment, and the "larger moral and political values" in which literature participates but to which his chosen formalism allowed him scant access.

Booth's way of thinking about literature was in many ways shaped by Crane, but his move to a rhetoric rather than a poetics of fictions shifted his vision away from Crane's still center where the text could be read in and for itself. Booth's journey was towards noisy scenes of interpretation, a marketplace of ideas where readers' interests and concerns jostle with those of authors and their creations, and Booth's pluralistic outlook shifts with the scene of reading. In his 1970 article, Booth is dubious whether Joyce's "Araby" can be convincingly read as "a trumpet-blast in the eternal battle for women's rights" but by 1979, when feminist and other ideological forms of criticism had moved into the mainstream, Booth's door is wide open to dialogue with them. Predictably, perhaps, the one mode of criticism shut out from the global dialogue was deconstruction, which for Booth seemed less to speak than to draw the text into a black cone of silence.

The ever more tolerant pluralistic discourse of Critical Understanding seemed designed to marshal the militant forces of the age of Grand Theory into a harmonious choir prepared for constructive dialogue, but that, of course, never happened. On the one hand, other rival modes of pluralism erupted. On one side of Crane's "splitting" pluralism stood the "anything goes" relativisms, including the Stanley Fish of Is There a Text in this Class? On the other side of M.H. Abrams's historical "lumping" pluralism was the pluralism of Fredric Jameson, whose Political Unconscious unleashed a holistically Hegelian project of co-opting all other forms of critical theory into his three dialectical moments of encounter between text and history.

At about the same time and for similar reasons, pluralisms in general around the mid 1980s began to get a pretty terrible press. Some of the arguments were primarily epistemological--versions of Stanley Fish's argument that pluralism is incoherent because the pluralist claims to be able to find a neutral corner from which she can dispassionately evaluate ideas written from a different perspective than her own. But most of them were primarily political arguments that pluralism was terrible because it was the cultural mode of liberalism, which was the political ideology of corporate capitalism.

From where we sit fifteen years later it may be difficult to make much sense of the motives behind the rage against pluralism, until one recalls how "pluralism" had become a political code word used by Jeane Kirkpatrick and others on the Right in the waning years of the Cold War, as synonymous with any politics of contending interest groups we delighted to honor. You can imagine it best if you think of it as that era's version of "bipartisanship."

With the end of the Culture Wars, in any case, the battle over the politics of pluralism dissolved into an enduring armistice and, within academic pedagogy at least, the older notion of instrumental pluralism, with its view of literary criticism as a field divided into fiefdoms and subfiefdoms, each with its own terministic screen, seems to have emerged as a position almost beyond debate.

The symptoms are very clear. The Graduate Record Examination, which had long ignored contemporary literary theory, now asked undergraduates to identify which of several offhand remarks about a text might have been uttered by a Marxist or a Lacanian. In the CUNY doctoral program where I teach, the comprehensive examination, which had once asked candidates to play Trivial Pursuit with the contents of the Norton Anthology, now asks them to analyze a poem from three complementary critical perspectives. The major textbooks of literary theory and critical practice--those edited by Davis and Schleifer, Rivkin and Ryan, Richter, Keesey, and Murfin--along with the handbooks by Terry Eagleton and lesser rivals--all perpetuated the same vision of competing but discontinuous critical modes. What has continued without significant change, despite the emergence of new areas of theory such as postcolonialism, queer theory, and disability studies is a general picture of a set of interlocking discourses focussed on issues of form, rhetoric, history, psychology, gender, race, and class. All these modes of criticism were clearly equal, and if some commentators like Eagleton felt that their own brand was more equal than others, such favoritisms tended to average out.

So we are all pluralists now, isolating and foregrounding a set of disparate discourses about literature, integral languages of criticism that one must study in isolation. Nevertheless, our contemporary discourse denies what our textbooks and examinations affirm. The separate strands of theory found in the textbooks have become desperately entangled with one another. We find nothing strange about a gender theorist like Judith Butler deriving her ideas about sex and society from Foucault, but taking her rhetorical ploys from Derrida and from J.L. Austin, and never minding that these three philosophers might otherwise be strange bedfellows. At present one is unlikely to find a pure-bred feminist or marxist or deconstructionist to study, and some postcolonial theorists, such as Gayatri Spivak, combine all three. If the chief antagonist for R.S. Crane's version of pluralism in the fifties was critical monism, and if Booth's in 1979 was deconstructive skepticism, the key issue today is syncretism: the combination of critical theories, some products of Enlightenment thought, others antagonists of that ideology, whose unexamined assumptions may or may not hang together.

But my own research into where pluralism has gone in the waning years of this millennium have shown the strengths as well as the weaknesses of this paradigm. Its strengths were demonstrated by essays by Matthew Kieran, David Herman, John Mebane, Patricia Schroeder, and Peter Lehman, that seemed caught in a time warp. It was as though certain fields of study or academic journals that had been isolated from the pluralism debate had checked in, noticed the inadequacy of critical monisms, and suddenly discovered the need for a more complex and pluralistic discourse.

My own small contribution to the debate over critical pluralism may have been caught in that same time warp. In The Progress of Romance I extended pluralism to literary historiography, arguing that no literary history from a single critical perspective could hope to do justice to a major event, and went beyond arguing to present three complementary narratives based on Marxism, Chicago formalism, and reception theory, about the vogue of the Gothic novel from 1790 to 1820. Each mode of historical narrative had a unique role to play in what I hope is not a mere syncretism but a genuine pluralism of some sort.