19.1stuhr practice, semiotics, and the limits of philosophy

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Journal of Speculative Philosophy,Vol. 19, No. 1, 2005.Copyright 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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Practice, Semiotics, and the Limits ofPhilosophy

JOHN J. STUHR

Vanderbilt University

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote that each generation must write its own

books or, rather, the books for the next generation. Many American philoso-

phers have shared this goal and have taken up this task. They have wanted to

think forward, wanted reconstruction in philosophy, wanted their own, new, origi-

nal relations to the universe.If this is possible, howis it possible? This is a pragmatic question, but it

seems to be a particularly difficult question for those pragmatists who are com-

mitted to: pluralism (such that the books that speak to one person may not ad-

dress or be alive for or be instrumental for another person); time and finitude

(such that change, precariousness, and difference are ineliminable, and that theo-

rizing is always situated and provincial); and practice (such that beliefs are hab-

its of meaning-full, meaning-giving, embodied action.).

In their illuminating and genuinely original new books, both Robert Innis

and Richard Shusterman provide substantial resources for reconstruction in phi-

losophy today. Here is the cash-value of this claim: If you have not already

done so, you should buy these books and then you should read them.

In Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics,

Innis presents us with a scholarly tour de forcea book that draws on figuresfamiliar to members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philoso-

phy as well as on European authors too often at (or beyond) todays professional

canonical margins. Beginning with the observation that we have experiences in

which we fuse with the probes or instruments we employ and that extend us to

the world in new ways, and reaffirming the view (from John Dewey, Ernst

Cassirer, and others) of tools and language both as ways of making the absent

present, Innis develops the probal nature of language and technics as embod-

ied in, and as embodied forms of, perception (Innis 2002, 3): Language and

technics are treated in this book as twin forms of sense, that is, vast weblike

systems of meaning-making in which we dwell, into which we have extended

ourselves, and upon which we must fatefully rely. They are also forms of sense

in that they shape, form, and mold the very channels in which our body-based

perceptual systems grow and develop. Language and technics are alike in not

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74 JOHN J. STUHR

just shaping but also growing out of their perceptual, actional, and social roots(3, 4). We attend from them, Innis writes, for attending to something; both

language and technics have this from/to structure (3). Innis thus develops an

account of the irreducible sociality (83), nature, scope, and consequences of

systems of signs and systems of toolsand of the ways in which their forms are

embodied in perception while also being embodied forms of perception.

At the close of his introduction, Innis writes: What I am arguing for is,

then, the analytical, descriptive, and normative power of a set of overlapping

and mutually reinforcing ways of thinkingthinking with the combined con-

ceptual resources of pragmatism and semioticsabout our embodiment in lan-

guage and technics as forms of sense. I am exploring and attempting to justify,

what I consider to be pivotal forms, of sense abut the forms of sense (14). What

is most distinctive and, I think, most important here is Inniss understanding of

the ways in which meaningful perception saturates language and tools while, atthe same time, they seep through and constitute perception. As Innis writes at

the end of his first chapter on the perceptual roots of linguistic meaning, Not

only, then, is perception embodied in language; language is embodied in per-

ception (50). And, as for language, so too for technics.

So, what is the analytical, descriptive, and normative power of this view?

The descriptive power, the phenomenological illumination, of Inniss account

of meaning-taken and meaning-making seems immense. His rotations of prag-

matists and semiotic theorists recast and advance the insights and theoretical

strengths of each, and his examplesparticularly, I think, his discussions of

aesthetic experience and artmake clear the relevance and practical applicabil-

ity of this theory. Let me close this portion of my fan letter with four brief

questionsthey are questions, not criticisms; not even rhetorical questions, but

real questions that might deserve some further attention. First, Innis stresses theways in which those who use probes or instruments of some sort a)realize a

fusing in some ways with the (thus transparent) probe, and b)experience an

opening of a new world, a new access structure, an extension of ourselves

toward the world (see, e.g., 1, 134). I think this is true, but I wonder if it is a

partial or selective truth. Sometimes, I think, those who use probes or instru-

ments a)realize deep apartness, alienation, or otherness from the (thus opaque)

probe, and b)experience a closing of an old world, loss of an access structure, a

contraction of ourselves toward the world. The weekend do-it-yourselfer, for

example, may experience the hammer in hand as hammer that is not hand, that

is not self, that is other. The professional farmer inside an air-conditioned thrasher

has lost the world, the structure, the experience of swinging a scythe in the

summer heat. Is each development of a new probe an extension of self, world,

and meaning; or is it, rather, a change, a transformation, a differencing of self,

world, and meaning? Does not a probe close a world each time it opens one? As

Innis writes (127) that philosophy is caught between generating and abolishing


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75PRACTICE, SEMIOTICS, AND THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY

distinctions (and, I add, generating and abolishing worlds), does not a probeabolish as well as generate?

Second, how many forms of sense are there? Are there two (language and

technics) or three (perception, language, and technics), or one, or a great many

plural ones, or some other number? Might we say, for example, that language is

a kind of technics, or that technics is a language? Would saying this be right or

wrong, or just more or less useful or useless for a given purpose? In other words,

is it that there simply are a certain number of forms of senseis this an onto-

logical issue? Or is that it is useful for various purposes to distinguish forms of

sense into two categories, or some other numberis this a normative issue such

that it is appropriate to ask questions such as, say, for what purpose is a given

distinction useful? and whose interests are advanced by this distinction? Are

not issues of power at the heart of an account of forms of sense?

Third, what is gained by taking perceptionto be embodied in language,and language to be embodied inperceptionrather than taking experienceto be

embodied in language, and language to be embodied in experience?I am not

sure if Innis would use perception and experience as interchangeable terms here,

and, assuming not, I wonder if there are ontological and/or epistemological pre-

suppositions embodied in this account of forms of sense, and forms of sense

embodied in this account of perception. What he says about perception seems to

me true of experience generally.

Fourth, does this account have any implications for the familiar disputes

between pragmatists who, closer to Dewey, for example, focus on experience

and those who, closer to Richard Rorty, for example, focus on language? Given

the interpenetration of perception and forms of sense that Innis stresses, is there

anything beyond the merely verbal at stake here? Or, for example, does an aes-

thetics that takes seriously qualitative immediacy require a language of thenonlinguistic?

I want to shift now to another sort of claim that Innis makes: the claim

that his powerfully descriptive theory has normative power as well. Now, Im

not entirely clear what it means for a theory of forms of sense to have normative

power. If it means that the theory describes the irreducible normativity of per-

ception, language, and technics, then the normative power of this theory is sim-

ply one aspect of its descriptive power. As I have stressed, Inniss theory is

remarkably successful in this regard. As Innis writes, technological embodi-

ment raises normative issues. Yes, it does. Experience raises normative issues.

Life raises normative issues. But if it means that the theory provides a basis for

holding some values or meanings rather than others, for making some norma-

tive judgments rather than others, or for working for some idealsabsences

made present through forms of senserather than others, then I think Inniss

claim is more complex and problematic. This issue takes center stage in the

books second part. Innis asks, for example, about what categories we should


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76 JOHN J. STUHR

use to evaluate the transformations effected by contemporary technics (137).He asks whether we are enriched or impoverished by technics. He seeks the

answer to this question in a reconstructed aesthetics (165). He asks toward what

ideal(s) a rightly ordered technology should head (188). He seeks a critique of

military, industrial, technological, consumer values.

Now, I recognize the importance of this question, and I am in deep sym-

pathy with what I take to be the values the motivate it, but I do not see how an

account of the forms of sense can provide a response to it. Technological em-

bodiment, that is, raises normative issues but ittechnological embodiment in

the abstract, or in general, or understood as a general form of sensedoes not

resolve those issues. It is difficult to oppose aesthetic rationality in the abstract;

the normative issue, however, is what counts as aesthetic rationalityin particu-

lar contextscontexts more particular than general forms of sense. Similarly, it

is hard to disagree in the abstract with Deweys desire, quoted by Innis (202),for an environment in which all things conspire to the perfecting and sustaining

of values otherwise only occasionally and partially experienced. The normative

issue, however, is what counts, as well as who is empowered to make the count

asperfection and sustenanceof valuesand whose values they are. Notions of

perfection, like notions of rationality, are, dare we say, always already norma-

tive. As Vincent Colapietro has observed, pragmatism is semiotic; semiotics is

wholly pragmatic. General forms of sense, it seems to me, precisely as general

forms of sense, must account for the real meaningfulness of both any set of

values and all sets of values that stand in opposition to it. Here (when we con-

front actual, practical normative issues), it seems to me that the relevant ques-

tion is not one about general forms of sense but rather about the ways in which

particular forms of sense make or do not make possible criticism of those val-

ues, criticism that is not traditionally transcendental but rather wholly imma-nent (in the way in which unrealized, absent values are actual, present ideals

within webs of meaning and living). The from/to structure of forms of lan-

guage and technics is underdetermined, that is, with respect to the specific con-

tent of the to to which we should attend or move from our present from. I

take this point to be consistent with what Innis writes at the end of his book, it

is ... the quality , in every sense of that term, of the meanings, and not some

external nature functioning as a norm that defines and constrains the norma-

tive and heuristic powers of the various information technologies. ... These

technologies have distinctive expressive powers and feels and must be used

with close attention to their operative logics. These logics are not the same.

They open up different spaces wherein the embodied subject orients itself to

and within the world (23637). A theory of the general forms of sense accounts

for these different operative logics but it, by itself, does not give us reason to

occupy any one, rather than another, of the different spaces they open up. Inniss

account of forms of sense seems to me to make possible an account of criticism


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as language, perception, and technics. To develop that account, I think, we wouldrequire a critical politics of specific webs of meanings, practices, institutions,

and lives. General forms of sense make possible such a politics, but they pro-

vide no basis for any particular politics or any particular ideals

In this context, Innis writes: Whether we are in fact enriched or dimin-

ished is best seen from a reconfigured aesthetic point of view that does not

glorify art but extends the aesthetic over the whole surface of the perceived

world. Pragmatist aesthetics, exemplifiedpar excellencein DeweysArt as Ex-

perience,throws a distinctive normative light on this surface and on its depths

(165). Ive tried to indicate why it is a reconfigured political or social point of

view, rather than an aesthetic one, that can extend aesthetic experience. This

might be more a matter of temperament than doctrine, but it is intertwined with

another matter that is one of doctrine.

Consider the issue in terms of the perceived world having surface anddepth, of the sort of thing Innis has in mind when he writes, citing Richard

Shusterman, that a reconfigured pragmatic aesthetics pushes meaning-making

down to the deepest somatic and perceptual levels (168). This passage reso-

nates deeply with the way in which Richard Shusterman begins his wide-rang-

ing, penetrating Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture,with

his own double desire for [arts] sensuous surface and [interpretations and

criticisms] explanatory depth, desires that often seem to pull in different di-

rections (Shusterman 2002, xi). Shusterman writes: How could I properly ap-

preciate arts surface meanings and qualities without understanding the cultural

contexts and underlying practices that structure their creation and perception?

Yet probing more deeply into the underlying logics of art, culture, and criticism

threatened to take me away from those captivating surface qualities and mean-

ings that first prompt our efforts of understanding (xi). What is the tension, ordialectic, of surface and depth? Shusterman addresses this issue by considering

admittedly diverse theorists and wide-ranging topics. The care and richness of

the thirteen essays, the thirteen chapters, make summary impossibleand I have

learned that it is generally best not to attempt the impossible. So I am going to

focus on the way in which pragmatic themes run through Shustermans account

of logics of criticism and logics of culture and the work of several contem-

porary theorists, and, especially, on his account of art as dramatization in the

final essay.

Having said what I will do, I now find that I must interrupt myself in

order to think about surface and depth in a way both somewhat similar to and

somewhat different from Shustermans thinking. When I first read Shustermans

book, and as I still read it now, it is impossible for me not to hear, both as echo

and as counterpoint, what Dewey says (here, for example, in the final chapter of

Experience and Nature):


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78 JOHN J. STUHR

Things that are means and things that are fulfillments have different qualities;but so do symphonies, operas and oratorios among themselves. ... It is self-

contradictory to suppose that when a fulfillment possesses immediate value,

its means of attainment do not. ... Means-consequences constitute a single un-

divided situation. ... When criticism and the critical attitude are legitimately

distinguished from appreciation and taste, we are in the presence of one case

of the constant rhythm of perching and flights (to use Jamess terms), char-

acteristic of alternate emphasis upon the immediate and the mediate, the con-

summatory and instrumental, phases of all conscious experience. ... The

rhythmic succession of the two modes of perception suggests that the differ-

ence is one of emphasis, or degree. Critical appreciation, and appreciative

warmly emotionalized criticism occur in every matured sane experience.

(Dewey 1981, 297300)

So, in many ways, it seems to me that what Dewey says about apprecia-tion and criticism is just what Shusterman says about surface and depth. Yet,

where Dewey finds integration of means/ends, flights/perchings, and criticism/

appreciation (rather than dualism), and finds deepening and funding of later

appreciation by earlier criticism, Shusterman begins with himself pulled in dif-

ferent, dual, nonintegrated directions and with the possible loss of the very sur-

face qualities and vivid immediacy that initially captivated him. While I am

wholly persuaded by Deweys antidualism, I think that Shusterman here (and

throughout) makes a very important point. I say I think because I do not want

to put my words in his mouth, but this is what I hear, this is the lesson that I

draw. Dewey described the work that criticism performs on appreciation as con-

structive, expansive, and agreeable. It is normatively positivecriticism illu-

minates, funds, deepens, builds, enriches, expands, renders more meaningful.

Shusterman, as I read him, points out that criticismdepthis transformativein multiple directions all at once. In terms of the appreciationthe surface

with which it begins, it is as much destructive, constricting, and violent as it is

constructive, expansive, and agreeable. Depth creates new surface, but it does

so by destroying earlier surface. Our very efforts to secure our experience trans-

form it and us and those efforts, undo them all, redo them all. To make meaning

is at once to unmake and to remake. Nothing later is ever like the first time, or

even the last time. As Dewey put it, every existence is an event. As Shusterman

writes, For pragmatism, interpretation and inquiry are always rendering some

sort of change in what they study (Shusterman 2002, 70)

This is why I am made a little nervousI realize this may seem little

more than personal confessionby the language of surface and depth, and by

the idea that the somatic level is meaning-making at its deepest level. This lan-

guage seems to me to suggest not merely temporal phases in, and of, experi-

encedifferent experiencings and experienced differencesbut levels or

hierarchies of more or lessjudged such, of course, from the standpoint of the

supposed more. I thus find the forms of sense to be surfaces, the dialectic of


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surface and depth to be different surfaces. I have in mind here the logic ofsense that Gilles Deleuze, the self-described radical empiricist, presents in his

book of that name:

The autonomy of the surface, independent of, and against depth and height;

the discovery of incorporeal events, meanings, or effects, which are irreducible

to deep bodies and to lofty ideasthese are the important Stoic discoveries

against the pre-Socratics and Plato. Everything that happens and everything that

is said happens or is said at the surface. The surface is no less explorable and

unknown than depth and height which are nonsense. ... Deeper than any other

ground is the surface and the skin. A new type of esoteric language is formed

here which is its own model and reality. ... Nonsense and sense have done away

with their relation of dynamic opposition in order to enter into the co-presence

of a static genesis. (Deleuze 1990, 132, 141)

Of course, at the surface, even at the surface, forms of sense make con-tested sense and they both are, and express, relations of power. At the close of

his useful comparison of the aesthetic theories of Alain Locke and John Dewey,

Shusterman observes that even the combined forces of aesthetic experience,

aesthetic criticism, and theoretical argument are not in themselves enough to

win full legitimization for an unacknowledged art, especially one that emerges

from a culturally marginalized or socially stigmatized source. But aesthetic

arguments can help, Shusterman concludes (Shusterman 2002, 38).

This raises several important questions that might profitably be pursued.

What is it to win full legitimization? Who determines victory? Are there arts

that do not seek, that perhaps actively resist, full legitimization, particularly

from cultural powers or centers? Perhaps we might later discuss some of these

matters. This also raises questions about the nature of aesthetics, criticism, and

philosophy. Are arguments about art and aesthetic experience thus aestheticarguments? Surely a particular argumentan arguinghas its own immediate

qualitybut what is at stake when such arguments are described as aesthetic

rather than, for example, political or social? If the forms of sense are irre-

ducibly social, are not arguments about webs of meaning and meaning-makings

also irreducibly social or political philosophy? If so, arent Deweys many works

on social events of his day (rather than artworks) practical criticism and critical

philosophyas practical, if different, from Alain Lockes work? Might we con-

sider art as social action?

Near the close of his book, Shusterman develops an account of art as

dramatization: the concept of drama embodies and unites two of the deepest,

most important conditions of art and may therefore hold the key to a useful

definition of art as a whole (227). This definition, Shusterman argues, cap-

tures, integrates, and reconciles the currently dominant and polarizing orienta-

tions of naturalism and historicism. It, like Deweys pragmatism, for example,

draws on and brings together both nature and experience. Shusterman charac-


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80 JOHN J. STUHR

terizes naturalism as a demand for experiential intensity and material substancefor surface, then. And he characterizes historicism as a demand for social frame

and contextfor depth, then. Shustermans report about these strange theorist

creaturesnaturalist aestheticians and historicistsis surely right. It does show

these aestheticians to be strange creatures, because there is no general reason to

think that naturalists would not view nature as frame and contextas depthor

that historicists would not see cultural time and place as the site of experiential

intensity and quality. This point aside, Shusterman makes an original, powerful,

compelling (indeed multilingual) case that drama captures both action and place,

both surface and depth. And this means, of course, that surface and depth, if in

tension, are in reciprocally constitutive tension. Surface and depth, it may be

said in a Deleuzian spirit, have done away with their relation of dynamic oppo-

sition in order to enter into the co-presence of a static genesis.

I am interested in the implications of this view of art for an understandingof philosophyboth philosophy as an art (and even a drama) and philosophy as

a politics and as thoroughly normative. I do not have time to develop these

implications here, but I want to close by raising two issues by means of two sets

of questions. First, suppose one understands philosophy as a deepening of sur-

face, or as particular operations of forms of sense to make particular meanings.

Are there not particular valueswhat Dewey called selective interestsat

work in these theories? Dewey wrote that these interests are unavoidable and

become problematic only when unacknowledged. What values, then, do guide,

or should guide, an account of forms of sense or an account of surface and

depth? Second, are there not particular valueswhat James called practical con-

sequencesof taking up a particular account of forms of sense or view of sur-

face and depth? Whatpresumably somethingfollows from these theories?

What is their cash value? What is their practical meaning? Putting these twoquestions together: Isnt an account of the forms of sense an account from a

politics to another politics? Isnt it political all the way down? And isnt an

account of surface and depth an account of political immediacies and political

mediations? Isnt this, too, political all the way down? This double-sided point,

or so it seems to me, constitutes the deflation of theory, and marks the limit of

philosophythe enabling limit of philosophy that is honest and self-critically

political and politically critical.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990.Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia UP.

Dewey, John. 1981. The Later Works, 19251953,vol. 1. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: South-

ern Illinois UP.

Innis, Robert. 2002. Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics. Uni-versity Park: Pennsylvania State UP.

Shusterman, Richard. 2002. Surface and Depth: Dialectics of Criticism and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

19.1stuhr practice, semiotics, and the limits of philosophy

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