Julian Ratcliffe: 'Towards a Critical Pragmatics: Power, Exclusion and Genealogical Anxiety'
Format: In-person
Chair: Boaz Laan
Abstract: Robert Brandom’s 2019 A Spirit of Trust presents an expansive and powerful response to Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox – the strongest possible articulation of what Amia Srinivasan has called genealogical anxiety – by presenting an intertwined account of the social-recognitive institution of normative force and the historical-recollective determination of semantic content. While more promising than its predecessors, I argue that Brandom’s account is unsuccessful because it is not appropriately sensitive to the realities of systematic inequality exerting pressure on the practical structure of discursive relations, a fault he shares with the pragmatist programme more generally. Building on Steven Lukes’ and Kristie Dotson’s three-dimensional analyses of power and exclusion, I argue that while Brandom can account for some forms of recognitive asymmetry, he does not have the resources to respond to identity-based uptake failures nor to cases of discursive colonisation due to a thoroughgoing failure to recognise the institutional dynamics of our discursive lives under conditions of inequality. I propose instead to conceive of genealogical anxiety not as a philosophical problem demanding solution, but as a social problem from whose grip we can be freed only through practical intervention.
