| OCR Text |
Show 21 key thinkers during the late 19th and early 20th century, such as Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey, who contended the function of thought is to serve as an instrument for predicting consequences, solving problems, and initiating political action rather than describing or representing reality. Deleuze and Latour share some affinities with this philosophical, and namely American, antitranscendental thinking, but their application of pragmatism is more conversant with French traditions of pragmatism developed by Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead's process-philosophy, because Deleuze and Latour focus more heavily on metaphysical questions rather then exclusively epistemological ones. To Deleuze, the world is in a constant state of change that is always in process, on the move, and never settled, so it makes no sense to assume a universalist metaphysic to study how humans develop language, knowledge, and meaning based on their practical utility, as many American pragmatists presumed. Deleuze and Latour's concept of pragmatism (a term they themselves use to describe their work and achieve various writing objectives) is thus relevant to the American tradition of pragmatism because it also rejects foundationalist values, morals, and beliefs that exist apriori; however, the term is more usefully conceived within Continental traditions because it is deployed as a way to describe how objects, on a metaphysical plane of consistency, creatively and performatively build networks that can fail or succeed. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) state, Schizoanalysis, or pragmatics, has no other meaning: Make a rhizome. But you don't know what you can make a rhizome with, you don't know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. So experiment. (p. 251) Pragmatism is thus part of Deleuze's philosophy of immanence, which rejects the idea that objects, subjects, and relations can be understood in isolation. Philosophy itself is an |
