UNIVERSITY of HAWAI'1 LIBRARY Nlllllism, AMERICAN-STYLE
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'1 LIBRARY NllllLISM, AMERICAN-STYLE: THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE IDEA OF CULTURE A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DNISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN AMERICAN STUDIES DECEMBER 2002 By KevinD. Kim Thesis Committee: Mark Helbling, Chairperson Floyd Matson B. Jeannie Lum ABSTRACT There are at least three major moments of nihilism in American intellectual history. Against European tradition, Emerson had advanced a conception of culture that was radically interpretive, pluralistic and anti-foundationalist, and this eventually worked its way back into the United States through the social sciences (via Nietzsche and then Weber). Likewise, American pragmatist philosophy, conceiving science as serving plural values rooted in human needs, originated with Emerson. The various European conceptions of value had always conceived value as objective and transcendent, and this was reflected in the European ideas ofculture; the chasm between subject and object was a feature of the Western intellectual tradition. This notion of transcendent value was discredited, it led in the European tradition to a crisis of nihilism. In contrast, the early American culture idea united (subjectivity) values and culture with objectivity (science and technique); this revolutionary conception conceived value as immanent and not transcendent, and some critics felt that this was a nihilistic betrayal of eternal truths and ideals. By the middle of the twentieth century, especially in the United States, the close union of subject and object characteristic of early twentieth-century American academic theory led to a new kind of nihilism, in the form of the technocratic subordination of values to technique and the negation of existential meaning by rationality in American thought and society. The early balance between an interacting subject and object was lost in positivist pragmatism and in the functionalist social sciences. Since the I960s, the response to this crisis was ultimately counter-cultural protest, and consisted ofundermining the legitimacy ofthe technocracy by attacking rationality in general. On the theoretical level, this was accomplished primarily by collapsing the distinction between subject (culture) and object (science). However, this libertarian rebellion drew its values of self-expression and self-fulfillment largely from consumerism, and in its quest for greater individual empowerment laid the groundwork for the information age by equating technology with personal creativity. This is an ambiguous victory over the technocracy. III TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .iii Preface vii Chapter 1: Towards a Sociology ofNihilism 1 Typologies ofNihilism 2 Gillespie's Nihilism: Voluntarism Overcomes Rationalism 5 Nietzsche's Nihilism: Science Eroding Beliefin a Transcendental Realm ofTruth 8 Heidegger's Nihilism: Technology as a Worldview, Destroying a Sense ofWholeness 15 Consumerism, and Four Types ofNihilism: Loss ofTranscendent Truth, ofWholeness, ofLocal Meaning and the Rejection ofthe Modern World 19 Nihilism and Culture 34 American Nihilism .36 Chapter 2: Nihilism and Space .44 Space as a Construct of(Theoretical) Discourse 50 Modifying Bourdieu: Fields Contain Values, Not Just Forms ofCapital.. .55 Space as the Location of(Critically Reflective) Discourse 70 Reflection on the Idea of 'Values': Virtue Made Relative by Nietzsche 76 Critical Notes 2.1: The Idea ofValuation: The Philosophical Literature 83 Critical Notes 2.2: Values: The Sociological Literature 93 Chapter 3: Theory Versus Culture: Culture as Practice 99 Pierre Bourdieu: The Habitus as an Unconscious, Embodied Sense ofDoing..... 100 Anthony Giddens: Abstract Structure as Rules Recursively Formed !O3 Rogers Brubaker: The Social Sciences as Habitus .!06 Charles Taylor: Joining Rules and the Habitus 1l1 A Few Minor Alterations to Bourdieu and Giddens 115 A Genealogy ofDualisms 118 The Idea ofCulture as Oppositional, Transcendent and Absolute 119 A Tendency Toward Hierarchies ofDualisms .125 Historical Prefigurations ofTheories ofCulture and Social Structure 127 The Subject-Object Dualism in Twentieth-Century Academic Theory..l39 Theoretical Schema (Like Tripartitions) Derive From Dualisms .140 Critical Notes 3.1: A Modification ofBourdieu's Notion ofReflexivity: IV Theory or Discourse as Mirror or Alter Ego 147 Critical Notes 3.2: A Modification ofGiddens' Notion ofReflexivity: The Potentially Erosive Power ofTheory or Discourse 154 Chapter 4: Structural Homologies: The Culture Idea and the Nation-State .160 Ideas ofCulture: Original French, German, English and American Traditions.. 166 The French Enlightemnent Idea ofCivilization 168 The German Romantic Idea ofKultur ".'" .. 170 The English Aristocratic Ideal of 'Self-Culture' as Personal Refinement. .174 Emerson: The Idea ofCulture Americanized 179 The Culture Idea as Homologous with Nation-State Education Systems 190 France (1806-1882) '" 193 German (1870-1840) 196 The United States (1830-1865) .199 England (1839-1902) 201 Chapter 5: Early Twentieth-Century America 206 Philosophy: Classical Pragmatism 209 Charles Saunders Peirce 211 William James 215 John Dewey 222 Pragmatism as Cultural Theory 225 Social Sciences: The Rise ofCultural Anthropology 228 The Human Relations Movement: 231 The Emergence and Spread ofthe Idea ofCreativity 237 Livingstone's thesis: Classical Pragmatism Born ofPostmodern Consumerism? 239 The Influence ofthe New Consumer Economy 241 Critical Notes 5.1: Dewey's Scientific Methodology 244 Critical Notes 5.2: Dewey's Philosophy ofArt 249 Chapter 6: Middle Twentieth-Century America 260 Philosophy: Positivist Pragmatism 261 Social Sciences: The Rise ofFunctionalism 265 The Role ofCreativity and the Work Ethic 276 The Social World 283 The Culture ofthe Corporate Economy .283 Chapter 7: Late Twentieth-Century America 287 Late Twentieth-Century Philosophy: The Disciplinary Context. 288 American Philosophy: Postmodem Pragmatism 295 Hilary Putnam .296 Donald Davidson " .30I Richard Rorty 304 Postrnodemism, Poststructuralism and the Social Sciences 309 Social Theory: Deconstruction and Synthesis .316 v Jeffrey Alexander. .318 Giddens and Bourdieu 321 The Human Resources Movement 327 Social Influences on Academic Theory 333 The Appropriation ofRebellion by the Technocracy 337 Critical Notes 7.1: The Social World ofthe Late-Twentieth Century United States: Technocracy and the Counter Culture 339 Conclusion .346 Bibliography 349 VI PREFACE The thesis of this study is that nihilism is a sociological phenomenon, ubiquitous in all societies, and that it consists of a loss or discrediting of the fields or spaces of a value system. Nihilism, however, is typically associated with the modem European intellectual experience, in which a transcendent and objective realm of value - be it of religious or scientific truth - is delegitimized and brought into doubt by the growth of science. The American experience of nihilism in the twentieth century is quite distinct from this. In the United States, the classical pragmatist philosophical school conceived the objective realm of value as provisional and a product of inquiry at the service of human interests, not as an absolute truth. Likewise, the American social sciences at the turn of the century constructed a relativistic, anthropological conception of culture. Both of these philosophical and social science movements conceived valuation pluralistically, in terms of value§.. Unlike the Western intellectual tradition, which tended to portray the subjective and objective dichotomy as an irreconcilable antinomy, the subject-object relationship was conceived in this American framework as fundamentally dialectical and mutually influential. To many observers however, this was seen as a banausic rejection of high 'Culture' and transcendent 'value' - a kind of nihilism in the European sense of the term. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, this relationship between the subjective and the objective in American philosophical and social theory began to alter. Subjectivity was either negated through the adoption of positivism, or was seen as derivative of objectivity. This can be seen in the fusion of European positivism in the VB United States with the pragmatist school, as well as in the hegemony of Parsons' structural functionalism in the social sciences. In this theory, objectivity colonized subjectivity, in a sense, and this was made possible in the American context because the two had been brought into relation with one another, whereas in European thought they had been more distant antinomies. This represented a subtle kind of nihilism in that meaning and value were subordinated to or negated by a technocratic valorization of objectivity. Beginning in the 1960s, there emerged a countercultural rebellion against the technocracy, a rejection ofa materialistic and pragmatically objective conception ofvalue in favor of an affective subjectivity. More than a simple negation of objectivity, however, the theme of this movement was the collapse of the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. In philosophy, a kind of 'postmodem pragmatism' emerged, with spokesmen like Richard Rotty who proclaimed science as a genre of literature. In the social sciences, relationism emerged as the prominent movement that sought to sunder all kinds of traditional sociological dichotomies by establishing how these elements interacted. (Relationist theory bridged both the United States and Europe and marked