Previously a dissertation fellow at
the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, J. Kameron Carter is currently
Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies at Duke University,
The Divinity School. His first book, Race: A Theological Account, is
forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Harris, Leonard. The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A
Reader on Value Theory, Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education.
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
Wood, Mark David. Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic
Pragmatism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
"Alain Locke was a
pragmatist." So begins Leonard Harris' book The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke: A Reader on Value Theory,
Aesthetics, Community, Culture, Race, and Education, an important
collection of essays that assesses Locke's thought, evaluating his relationship
to modern philosophy—American pragmatism, in particular—in light of the
questions he raised about value, identity, pluralism, multiculturalism, and education.
If the value of a collection of this sort is whether the essays stimulate
readers to a fresh appraisal of and engagement with, its central figure, then
certainly Harris' editorial labors have not been in vain. With this collection
of critical essays, Harris, a philosopher and well-respected Locke scholar in
his own right, provides a complement to his previously published anthology, The Philosophy of Alain Locke, a
collection of primary texts expressing Locke's philosophy and its pragmatist
bent. Ranging over a broad field of topics and disciplines, The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke
brings together essays from a number of scholars to assess and recommend
Locke's critically pragmatic orientation. That orientation offered, first, a
cultural, or non-property-based, analysis of race, what Locke calls
"secondary race consciousness" and "social race." However,
that orientation offered, second, a class- or property-based analysis of race
as well. That is, it offered an analysis that understood the notion of race as
emerging from the exigencies of political economy and its history, both
domestically and internationally. These two dimensions of Locke's analysis of
race together constitute his critical pragmatism.
Locke's critical
pragmatism prefigures in telling ways Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism. In
his Cornel West and the Politics of
Prophetic Pragmatism, Mark David Wood objects to West's prophetic
pragmatism, and in so doing, he may also be read as objecting to a Lockean
critical pragmatism as well. Pragmatism, so Wood contends, in its present forms
is but a species of an inert postmodernism, which is at the base of a fair bit
of recent progressivist politics. As a tool within contemporary cultural and
progressivist politics, pragmatism fails to offer a "political theory that
supports the work of democratizing global productive and consumptive
relations" (6). The constructive task of Wood's work is to proffer just
such a theory—one that is rooted in West himself, albeit not West the prophetic
pragmatist and promoter of reformist politics (the later West), but rather West
the democratic Marxist who promotes a class-based revolutionary politics, which
draws on the resources of Christianity (the early West).
Leonard Harris argues
that a Lockean critical pragmatism "avoids the pitfalls of critical
theory, anticipates its tremendous contribution to human liberation, finds a
middle ground between objectivism and subjectivism, and offers an alternative
to the limitations of classical pragmatism" (xiii). That is to say, a
Lockean critical pragmatism can do what critical theories of varying sorts—be
they post-Marxist, legal, race, or gender theories—have been, to the present
moment, unable to do. Despite the contribution such theories have made in
placing under suspicion established philosophies by destabilizing the subject,
shaking epistemological certitude, localizing universal reason, subjectivizing
objective truth, weakening strong ontologies—in short, unsettling philosophy,
as it is now fashionable to say, as a metaphysical enterprise—they yet remain
seriously wanting. Harris' qualm, as he explains in the preface, with the
current fashions of critical theory is their inability to offer a positive
vision of the human community, one that offers substantive guidance in the face
of the hard realities of life and the density of existence. This inability
suggests how those theories, in fact, remain beholden at crucial junctures to
the established philosophies they would deconstruct. The claim uniting the
varied essays of The Critical Pragmatism
of Alain Locke, which commends a Lockean critical pragmatism as a
diagnostic of the present moment, is that the deconstructionist effort as
exemplified in much of postmodern and critical theory may be finally but a
moment within modernity itself and its established philosophies. This is a
daring, audacious, and important claim, to be sure, one that, as true as it may
be, requires further elucidation.
Such an elucidation,
however, is not the purpose of this fine collection. Its purpose is to
recommend Locke's thought and his particular deployment of American pragmatism
as a resource for getting beyond the stalemates afflicting critical and
postmodern theory. Locke's critical pragmatism suggests a politics, a vision of
the social order, that gets us somewhere. It offers a narrative of communal
identity that can provide direction for "a radically different
future." The essays making it up are intent on pointing the way to such a
future, through varied considerations of Locke, by offering a narrative of
pragmatism that exceeds the logic of modernity. A Lockean critical pragmatism,
so the underlying claim of this collection seems to be, can account for the
historic limitations of American pragmatism while yet being able to narrate
that pragmatism out of the doldrums, indeed the conundrums, of the
metanarratives of modernity. I will discuss two aspects of Locke's critical
pragmatism here: his pragmatist aesthetics and his pragmatist analysis of race.
In his essay explaining
the "roots and radicalism" of Locke's "pragmatist
aesthetics," Richard Shusterman argues that Locke advocated an aesthetic
sensibility that was "an intellectual response to the problems one faces
in the project of living" (97). In this Locke was a pragmatist clearly in
the tradition of Emerson, James, and Dewey. The problems of living are informed
by a number of factors, which Shusterman lucidly discusses. I will mention just
a few to make clear the critical moment in Locke's "pragmatist
aesthetics," and to begin to suggest its limits.
Locke builds on the
Deweyan principle that art is naturalistic, that is, that "the rhythms of
the human organism interacting with [the] world" inform art (98). Here we
see the artistic value of the Negro spirituals, for example. The spirituals
proceed from a bond black folks have maintained with nature. In the aesthetic
energies of European culture, claimed Locke and so explains Shusterman, the
bond uniting peoples and cultures with nature flickers on the brink of
extinction. But the embers may be aesthetically flamed afresh, the bond
retrieved, and thus culture revitalized. But its retrieval must necessarily
pass through those who have not forsaken the bond, namely, New World black
folks. The sign of the bond's eclipse in European culture, explains Shusterman
summarizing a passage from The New Negro,
a programmatic text of the Harlem Renaissance edited by Locke, is the European
technologizing and manipulation of art, "where art worked merely from its
own past models while forgetting nature" (98). In short, in European
culture art is converted into a mode of power for the manipulation, control,
and subjugation of nature and its constituent elements.
The art of black folks,
as exemplified in the Negro spirituals and in the productions of the Harlem
Renaissance, reveals a cultural sensibility that maintained the earthy bond
between people and culture with nature. Considering this bond through the Negro
spirituals reveals that naturalism is not hostile to spirituality or religious
seriousness. Actually, it would stand to reason that the bond properly
understood is spiritual and religious as such. Religious seriousness and
spirituality, understood within a Lockean aesthetic understanding, are an inflection
of the fundamental bond between nature and the living creature, a bond that is
made and re-made given changes in and through historical conditions and
circumstances.
Here we come to another
significant feature of Locke's pragmatism and pragmatic aesthetics, namely, the
significance of history and the interactions in and constituting history. This
feature of Locke's aesthetics would seem to place priority on particularity as
the only avenue through which to judge an aesthetic production. This must be
the way, through concreteness and particularity, to consider the value of the
spirituals as an expression of the religious consciousness and as an inflection
of the bond uniting a people and a culture with nature. In principle, then,
Locke's aesthetics would not be grounded in the autonomous subject nor in the
grand apparati of universal reason.
But is this the case in
fact? For, curiously (at least from what can be gleaned from Shusterman's
essay, which seems to be fairly consistent with the other essays in the
collection) Locke bypasses the spirituals' particularity in his evaluation of
what aesthetically commends them. The spirituals are thoroughly contained
within nature's immanence. But would not a concrete engagement with the
spirituals uncover an aesthetic vision in which nature's intelligibility is
connected to the transcendent? And might this suggest a communal and
socio-political vision grounded in the sheer fecundity of existence, such that
the ground of being is sheer gratuity, that is, in Christian terms, caritas? It is, arguably, this dynamic
of nature that the spirituals express. It is a vision of the freedom of black
existence and even of the cosmos as having a transcendent depth that is
immanently visible. A number of the spirituals give voice to this. Approached
from this vantage—the vantage, shall I say, of "pragmatic
particularity"—the spirituals are not unlike religious chants or icons,
whose aesthetic conditions of possibility lie in their being a response to
having been creatively and gratuitously called forth by God. The concreteness
of the religious traditions, particularly the Christian traditions, is crucial
to a critical pragmatic commendation of the aesthetics of the spirituals, yet
this possibility is not entertained by Locke, nor is it raised as a question in
Shusterman's exposition of him. Locke's pragmatist aesthetics also eschews
"the aesthetics of purist segregation or isolation," preferring
"the mix" of an "interactive brewing of diversity"
(99-100). Both the Negro spirituals and the Harlem Renaissance exemplify
"the mix" insofar as they both are the product of certain historical
exigencies that have brought into convergence African and European elements,
both of which themselves are not homogenous. Art, thus, is culturally
"democratic" in form, and in this it advances a radically
"democratic" political practice, given that "art is a practical,
purposive form of activity" (101).
Here is a moment of
potential convergence between a cultural and political aesthetics, mediated
through a pragmatic approach to the problems of life. The possible convergence
becomes clearer on considering Locke's New Negro aesthetic. Locke's vision of
the New Negro, which highlighted the cultural uniquenesses of black folks, far
from advancing a racial purism, understood the mix constitutive of African
American culture as contributing to the flowering manifold of American
civilization as such (104). In this can be seen the strategic functions to
which Locke put the concept of race in aesthetics. His "prime goal [was]…to
improve and develop the Negro's artistic creation and thereby also enrich
American aesthetics and the world's" (106). Negro art so understood is a
philosophical tool that is both cultural and political, a tool to be used in
the project of living. By "political" here it is meant that
aesthetics tends towards a certain "democratic" social arrangement
that is in fact liberating.
But what might such a
"democratic" social arrangement as promoted by a Lockean pragmatic
aesthetics look like? Though suggestive
of a politics that might "benefit human life" (107), Locke's
aesthetics does not seem to mandate
one, or any particular one, as preferable over another. If there is any such
mandate entailed by Locke's pragmatic aesthetics, it is hidden. In this, a
cultural and political aesthetics remain dialectically related, with the former
having the final word over the latter. Thus, the true value Shusterman derives
from Locke's aesthetics is in how it transcends the conservatism of Deweyan "high
culture" or elitist aesthetic sensibilities. Locke's aesthetics in theory
embraces the aesthetic value even of popular art (108), something Deweyan
aesthetics resisted. This, however, is not to establish that a critical
pragmatic aesthetics, which ostensibly unites the cultural and the political,
provides a vision of and guidance for the social order. In short, a critical
pragmatic aesthetics leaves us with the discourse of cultural difference and
incommensurable otherness, and here we arrive at the horizon, the upper limit,
of Lockean aesthetics: a political aesthetics finally gets absorbed by a
cultural one.
Nancy Fraser's
important essay, "Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical 'Race' Theory,
and the Politics of Culture," theorizes this horizon while uncovering
Locke's philosophical foresight on a number of issues. Indeed, one might read
her essay as both the alpha and omega of the collection. Fraser includes Locke
in the echelon of American pragmatists and attempts to re-narrate American
pragmatism, to offer "another pragmatism," through him. His
pragmatism puts pragmatism as such to the "test" by employing
"social intelligence to guide social practice" on what Du Bois
famously called the twentieth century's perennial problem, the "problem of
the color line." Locke attended the problem not simply as aesthetician qua
black cultural theorist and even black nationalist. According to Fraser, this
is the way Locke is typically received. But just as there is "another
pragmatism," so there is, one might say, "another Locke": Locke
the "critical theorist of society, specifically of the history and
political economy of racism…a thinker who is grappling with the tangled
relations between culture, political economy, and 'race'" (3). As a result
of Fraser's efforts, the Locke who emerges is a pragmatic philosopher whose
cultural endeavors rest on a most insightful critique and vision of political
economy. Locke the pragmatic philosopher and social theorist reconciles the
seeming antinomies of how to weight the political and cultural dimensions in
the modern construction of race. This other Locke, the pragmatist philosopher,
does not leave aside Locke the aesthetician. Rather, cultural aesthetician and
political and social theorist are united as pragmatist philosopher and analyst
of race.
Locke, as Fraser
explains, offers an analysis of race that highlights the notion of
"power." Insofar as Locke does this he may be read as prefiguring
Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism in many ways. For both bring attention to
the significant place of political economy, which any thorough account of race
in the modern world demands. Locke, in particular, organizes race into three
tiers: theoretical, practical, and social. As Fraser explains:
The first, "theoretical" tier comprises biological and
physical interpretations of race. The second, "practical" tier
comprehends a political-economic interpretation of race as a construct of
imperialist domination. The third, "social" tier encompasses modern
forms of solidarity that could in principle be decoupled from domination. (7) He demystifies "theoretical race,"
showing it to be grounded in questionable science. He notes that race so
understood is "static, purity-obsessed, [and] biological" (9).
Theoretical race is thoroughly untenable insofar as it neglects history and
"misses the dynamic development of human culture and even human
biology" (8). When does the idea of theoretical race arise, and do the
problems with theoretical race render the notion of race utterly useless? Answering
the first part of the question, Locke offers "a political-economic
genealogy" of "practical race." "The move," claims
Fraser, "is quintessentially pragmatist" in that it moves the
discussion from theory to practice (9-10).
For Locke, imperialism
is the engine driving practical race. Locke brilliantly saw early on that the
modern construction of race could not be dislodged from modern colonial and
imperialist practices. In his consideration of race as a practical construct,
Locke saw a connection between the intra-national racial disorder of American
slavery and Jim Crowism, on the one hand, and the international economic system
of competitive commerce, on the other. Locke argued that America's caste-less
society generated "status anxiety, [and] hence a longing for fixed
division and boundaries, a longing that Jim Crow arrangements seem[ed] to
satisfy" (11). Biologically speaking, then, race is fictive; practically
speaking, however, it is non-fictive. If there is to be an overthrow of how
race functions in the modern world, it will of necessity be practical. But any
practical overthrow requires the overthrow of imperialism or the international
economic system of competitive commerce. This in theory would require the
implementation of a liberatively different socio-political arrangement that
refigures the modern notion of race by undoing the notion of power and
domination that underwrites modern racial discourse.
It is important to
understand Locke's placement of religion in the midst of all this. Locke sees
its operation here at the site of practice. Fraser does not say much on this
score except that Western religion, particularly Christianity, through its
missionary endeavors, functioned to "rationalize" imperialism's
"commercial imperatives" (10). Thus, Locke, even in criticizing
theoretical race by revealing it to be an imperialist practice of domination,
depicts religion as theoretically non-descript and, at best, only a
"regulative idea" useful for guiding practice towards the fulfillment
of the teleological ends of nature for the species, ends themselves that are
never really attainable due to the presence of radical evil in both soul and
society. At the ground of all of this is the Kantian verdict that religion, or
more specifically God, is practically "thinkable" but theoretically
"un-cognizable" or empty and non-particular.
Fraser, thus, perhaps
unintentionally helps us understand why Locke's aesthetics is unable to cognize
the content of Negro spirituals and why the Christian specificity of a number
of the spirituals is in fact significant for a pragmatic conception of blackness.
Locke brilliantly saw near the turn of the twentieth century what has only
recently caught the attention of a number of contemporary theorists at
twentieth century's twilight and this millennium's dawning. He saw that there
is a certain Cartesian, but even more, a certain Kantian configuration to
modern racial reasoning. Yet, this apex of Locke's philosophic insight is also
the nadir of his thought. Locke follows the itinerary of Kantian religion in
bracketing the content of the spirituals, and in so doing follows the itinerary
of a Kantian construction of race through his pragmatist aesthetics. 1
Mark David Wood's Cornel West and the Politics of Prophetic
Pragmatism, though rich on a number of levels, yields its greatest fruits
perhaps in its responses to the following three questions: What distinguishes
the later from the early Cornel West? What is continuous between the early and
later West? What is Wood's own "pragmatic" proposal for building upon
but, in the end, going beyond West's prophetic pragmatism? The last question is
crucial, for West's work is but the occasion, albeit a most important one, for
Wood to work out what might be read as a more rigorous pragmatism, one that in
fact attempts to retrieve West's crucially important work by dislodging and
even redefining the prophetic (read: politically revolutionary) from the
pragmatic (read: cultural) West. Wood positions West as having a conflicted
and, indeed, incommensurable account of overcoming what politically and
culturally ails and afflicts the modern world. Wood shows how the political
imperative informing West's prophetic pragmatism is finally compromised because
it really does not attend to the concrete realities of how capital creates
certain class and racial relations to sustain it. Wood's own proposal for more
truly attending to the concrete realities of existence signals a more basic and
deeply "pragmatic" trend occurring in African American religious
scholarship, a trend that retains some of the problems of pragmatism.
Central to Wood's
critique is accounting for the hiatus between the West of the works coming
before and the West of the works coming after the 1989 publication of The American Evasion of Philosophy,
where the program of prophetic pragmatism is first clearly articulated in a
sustained manner. Wood calls the former the "pre-Evasion" works and
describes the hiatus within West's work as follows:
Whereas the aim of West's [pre-Evasion]
African American revolutionary Christianity was to build a socio-economic
system based on "collective control of major institutions," the aim
of his [post-Evasion] prophetic
pragmatism is to "revitalize our republic" and "democratize the
market economy." The goal is no longer to develop "a revolutionary
praxis beyond capitalist civilization" but rather to improve conditions of
labor, leisure, and life within the limits of capitalist property relations.
(90) The failure of the later
prophetically pragmatic West, so Wood sees it, is in his seeking to democratize
market capitalism from within, a democratization that highlights a pragmatic
and multicultural pluralism. The salvageability of capitalism is crucial to the
outlook of the post-Evasion West.
There are several moves
that West makes to arrive at the conclusion driving prophetic pragmatism,
namely, that free market capitalism is salvageable, that it can be redeemed.
What appears to be most crucial, at least for Wood, is the influence of Michel
Foucault's interpretation of power. This influence is most evident in the post-Evasion works, though minimally present
in the pre-Evasion writings as well,
indicating problems haranguing West's work at its inception.
The post-Evasion writings jettison a Marxist
understanding of power for the starkly different one grounded in the work of
Foucault. Marx saw power as grounded in structures of material class relations.
Foucault saw the matter otherwise, indeed, in a poststructuralist fashion.
Quoting Power/Knowledge, Wood
observes that for Foucault power "passes through much finer channels"
than a Marxist notion, which contends that one class has it, while another does
not. As Foucault says, "Power must be analyzed as something which
circulates, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain.
It is never localized as here or there…because there is always in each of us
something that fights something else" (60-61). Wood concludes from this
that "Foucault's theory of power loses its capacity to explain who uses
power against whom and for what" (61). A Foucaultian notion of power,
then, is non-materialist and, in this, claims Wood, it is metaphysical:
Foucault's concept of power shares more in common with pantheological
formulations of divinity than it does with sociological formulations of power
that understand power as deriving from an individual's or group of individuals'
possession of some natural resource (e.g., an oil field, forest, or uranium
deposit) or machine (e.g., a tractor, refinery, missile) and the authority and
ability to use them to realize determinant goals. (61) This stands in stark contrast with the work of the pre-Evasion West and his advance of an
African American radical or revolutionary Christianity, which seeks to abolish
the socio-economic realities that generate racial inequalities in the first
place. For the early West, as for Locke, this means the abolishment of capital
and the property relations attending it:
The exploitation of labor, the investment goal of profit maximization,
and global capitalist competition are the principal forces responsible for the
regeneration of racialized occupational segregation and the resulting average
income and wealth inequalities between
and within groups of persons
designated "white" and "black." (74) Wood sees West as correct in his
fundamental intuition on the matter. The racial naming of groups as white,
black, and so on is the product of, and follows from, the socio-economic and
political practices of global market capitalism. Thus, Wood says, "The
racial division of labor is reproduced with and without the aid of white
racism" (74).
The fundamental hiatus
between the post- and pre-Evasion
West is due to different conceptions of power attending the various stages of
his writings. The post-Evasion
conception is deeply indebted to poststructuralist and postmodernist
conceptions of power as being both thoroughly nowhere and thus everywhere.
Power is conceived in abstract and deeply non-pragmatic terms, despite being
operative under the rubric of "prophetic pragmatism."
This brings us to the
question of what is continuous and indeed unites the early and later West. The
brilliance of West's early work to advance a revolutionary African American
Christianity, one that sought to synthesize Christianity and Marxism, is in its
ability to uncover the ways in which class and capital structure relations so
that they yield group coloring for their support, and to see how God-talk
supports the social order of things. Marxism offered West a social theory able
to demystify the operations of capital and, to an extent, of God-talk in
stratifying groups according to class and then by race. The racial ordering of
groups supports both intra- and inter-group class stratifications.
Part of the
demystifying work represented in West's call for a revolutionary African
American Christianity, according to Wood, necessarily entails a critique, one
inspired by Feuerbach as much as by Marx (can the two finally be separated?),
of the ways in which Christianity itself camouflaged the operations of capital
in the interests of those with and in power. In his use of Marxism as a social
theory to accomplish what Christianity cannot, West resembles other
liberationists like the Latin American theologians Gustavo Gutiérrez and
Leonardo Boff and theologians in the Afro-Christian prophetic traditions like
James H. Cone, Jacquelyn Grant, and Delores Williams. The fundamental
assumption is that Christianity is not a social theory, and thus requires
assistance to demythologize what it can only speak of in mythological terms.
For West, however, a
Christianity critiqued and humbled by a Marxist-inspired social theory does not
mean the utter abandonment of Christianity. Indeed, Christianity is an
essential and irreplaceable element in the Marxist-Christian synthesis. Its
indispensability has to do with its "more profound interpretation of the
human condition" (31). Christianity's understanding of the human
condition, as articulated by West, tutors Marxism's unbridled optimism about the
perfectibility of human nature. For West, immanent to Christianity is a
dialectical, theological anthropology that posits human nature and history as
both dignified and depraved. The dignity of human nature means that it is good
and worthy of salvation by God. This is the ultimate destiny of humanity,
namely, its redemption by God. But the realization of humanity's teleological
destiny is withheld from and unknown to us. The depravity of human nature,
which consists in the tragic, evil, and the absurd confronting us in the
interim, is what remains.
This, for Wood, is
clearly a problem. West has only concealed and repressed the ultimate facts,
that is, the social roots, of the human predicament. For in the face of the
depravity of human nature, West finds it necessary to confront another crucial
question: what inspires persistence in working for more democratic
socio-political structures in the face of the evil, tragedy, and absurdity of
human existence as witnessed in the imperfect human negations before us? West's
answer, so Wood shows, betrays just how much of a metaphysical thinker he,
despite his Marxist orientation, remains. Belief in and dependence on what West
calls in Prophecy Deliverance!,
"the almighty power of a transcendent God…that can sustain a sense of hope
and rescue human beings from their plight" (30-31): this is West's answer.
The theism and theological anthropology underwriting this response, its
employment of such theological, literary, and existentialist categories as
"evil," the "absurd," and the "tragic," function
in the end to "essentialize or to use Marx's concept, fetishize and
thereby mystify the social roots" of these categories, thereby
"[encouraging] the acceptance of the existing order of things at least as
much as they discourage it" (31-32).
The pre-Evasion West, then, in the end remains a
metaphysical and "pantheological" thinker, and thus, within the deep
structure of his thought, there is a thoroughgoing continuity with his later
cultural and prophetic pragmatism. Indeed, the "prophetic," that is,
the theological moment of prophetic pragmatism provides the metaphysical
justification or, rather, mystification, as Wood would have it, of the
metaphysical conception of power as "pantheologically" nowhere and
thus everywhere according to the "pragmatic" moment of the post-Evasion prophetic pragmatism.
Hence theology still
functions in West's thought, according to Wood, to obfuscate the operations of
capital in the modern world. Wood points to the problems of theism and of theological
anthropology in West's thought. On both fronts there is metaphysical thinking.
Another problematic side to West's theological anthropology is the way in which
theological language underwrites the cultural rhetoric of multiculturalism, and
it emerges most clearly in how West maintains the Christian side of the
synthesis between Marxism and Christianity.
"Marxists,"
claims West, "have not adequately investigated the complexity of culture
in general and religion in particular," and so "what is needed is a
mode of Marxist practice that critically engages cultural forms as sometimes
justifying the dominant social relations and at other times providing the raw
material for building opposition to the status quo" (22-23). This move
entails a fundamental re-reading of Marxism and thus also of the ways in which
capital structures the world. Class relations, the possession of power within
those relations, and finally how racism is produced by those relations are no
longer the teleological horizon within which to understand the world. West also
insists that an adequate account of what ails us requires an account of culture
and multicultural différence and a
belief that the radical egalitarianism at the heart of Christianity will
moderate cultural difference for the final realization of all individuality.
Belief in God gives hope in the face of the nihilism and imperfect human
negations that persist in the interim before any teleological or redeeming
consummation of human nature. A theory of multicultural différence proves crucial to West's re-reading of Marx and the
evils of capitalism through Christianity. The harvest of this move emerges most
fully in the post-Evasion pragmatism.
What is Wood's own
proposal for overcoming the problems in West's prophetic pragmatism, indeed, in
the general approach West's project takes from its inception? Wood proposes a
return to the Marxist commitments of the early West. However, to ensure that
the problems bedeviling the pre-Evasion
West do not return, the Christian part of the Christianity-Marxism synthesis
must be further demystified. It is here that Wood follows an emerging
trajectory of thinking in the field of black religious scholarship, a
trajectory seen in a number of scholars who themselves have been influenced by
the black theology of James H. Cone, but see a need to go beyond it. In going
beyond it many have turned to Cornel West and the tradition of pragmatism in
America, which is now being mediated through Charles H. Long of the Chicago
School of the history of religions.
The problem with
prophetic pragmatism, according to Wood, is that, "like other theologies
of liberation, [it] uses theological categories to represent the conflict between private control over labor and its
fruits and the potential to create a society based on democratic control"
(37, italics mine). The great challenge to all liberation theologies, including
prophetic pragmatism, is "resisting the metaphysical temptation, the
otherworldly seduction, to translate political problems into theological
categories" such that the theological categories and what they signify are
real (37). Prophetic pragmatism, like
so many liberation theologies, has yielded to temptation and has been beguiled
by the allure of theology, and has thus sinned, in the end, reneging on its
commitment to address the pragmata of
existence—the things themselves, one might say—by mystifying them. Following
Long as a way to stay more thoroughly Marxist and thus more rigorously
pragmatic, Wood proposes that the true goal of liberation theology is
to create a society in which the need for liberation theology would not
exist….The essence of liberation theology can be realized only by negating the
world that produces the need for a theology of liberation, and the world that
produces this theology can be negated only by realizing the essence of
liberation theology. Once realized, liberation theology loses its raison d'être.
(37) Thus, liberation theologians must
not seek to "reproduce the fundamental assumptions that inform
[traditional] Christian theology," given that those assumptions mask the
roots of what socially and politically ail us (37).
Wood's analysis raises
a number of important questions; because of space constraints, I can only
address what I perceive to be the most pressing. They concern, first, his
reading of the fundamental problem of West's prophetic pragmatism, and second,
his proposal for a return to a Marxist interpretation of power, but more
rigorously executed to demystify God-talk and thereby to truly engage the pragmata of existence. Wood says of West
that he has insufficiently demystified theological speech in his discourse by
retaining its most problematic metaphysical moments. The retention of this
mystifying moment creates the space for further mystifications around a
cultural, indeed, a multicultural interpretation of race with its problematic,
that is, Foucaultian, understanding of power. But is this really the problem
with West's prophetic pragmatism, especially as it is rooted in his early
programmatic calls for a radical African American Christianity? For what most
afflicts West's work from its inception is its abstract, one could say,
non-pragmatic, vision of Christian identity as not concretely embodied in the
world. The problem I found in Locke's critical pragmatism applies as well to
West's prophetic pragmatism. Abstracting African American Christianity leads
West to negotiate a Marxist or Foucaultian vision of power for the
interpretation of what besets the modern world on matters of race and beyond.
But Wood's own proposal
to make West more rigorously Marxist and pragmatic through an appropriation of
insights from Charles H. Long gets us no further. For he too accepts West's
fundamental bracketing of Christianity. For neither West nor Wood is Christianity
a socially constituted, embodied, and therefore concrete mode of life, which
encodes a form of socio-political existence that participates in the
trinitarian dynamism through Jesus Christ. Having made this decision to bracket
Christianity, it can never be asked: What conception of power inheres in
Christian existence, and how does this mode of power exceed both Marxist and
Foucaultian visions of power?
Having raised these
questions about Wood's reading of West, a final problem demands mention insofar
as it is central to a consideration of pragmatism. Whatever incompatibilities
there may be between Marxism and Christianity resulting from their respective
"faith claims," as West calls them, there remains the question of
whether supplanting capitalism with a Marxist-inspired economics and politics
simply replaces one form of tyranny with another. Is it not the case that a
Marxist-inspired economics, with attendant policies like the equitable
redistribution of goods and so forth, is finally coercive? And is not coercion
but another form of abstraction from the pragmata
of existence? I do not raise these questions as an argument for the veracity of
capitalism as such. Rather, I raise them to suggest that the turn to a
wholesale Marxism is itself fraught with "un-pragmatic" difficulties.
But I also raise the question to clear the way for a reconsideration of
Christianity as, in its concreteness, already entailing a mode of existence
that operates according to a politics and even economics of suffering charity.
In such a politics, driven as it is by freedom, the incarnate God can actually
accomplish the ends of Marxism non-coercively.
1 For a more detailed discussion of the modern construction
of race, see my Race: A Theological
Account, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.