Pragmatic consequentialism is a prerequisite to queer flourishing

I want to attend to the reading practices that inform my own work here to be transparent to my readers, but also provide lessons on the different ways in which “theory” informs reading as a practice. I first came to think about reading practices through pragmatism—not queer theory. For some this might seem rather unqueer. There has been little written looking at the ways in which pragmatism and queer theory could be productive together, although I’ve tried (Greteman & Wojcikiewicz, 2014). Nor have pragmatists in general taken up a queer project, despite pragmatism being a little queer. That’s neither here nor there. What is of interest to me in this chapter are reading practices. As Cleo Cherryholmes (1999) illustrated, reading is more than meets the eye. Pragmatism itself is, as well, more than meets the eye. Pragmatism presents a particular form of reading that attends to action. I dwell on pragmatism here to reveal my own pragmatic leanings. I like pragmatism. I also tend to read things I like as I sense, as argued elsewhere, there are pedagogies and politics tied to liking (Greteman & Burke, 2017). Cherryholmes (1999) began Reading Pragmatism, noting that the reason to engage pragmatism was “that pragmatism looks to the consequences that we endlessly bump up against” (p. 3). And we bump up against consequences all day, every day. Those consequences are the results of things we—ourselves and others—have done as well as things far outside of our control. “Pragmatists conceptualize the world where we, all of us,” Cherryholmes argued, “are constantly thrown forward as the present approaches but never quite reaches the future” (p. 3). It is, in his estimation, “a discourse that attempts to bridge where we are with where we might end up” (p. 3). A key word, of course, being “might,” as pragmatism cannot predict what will come, but attends to contemplating conceivably what might come. We don’t know what will come, but we suspect we will come in some way to a future. Pragmatism is less a theory. Instead, it is a way of doing things in the world attending to the conceivable consequences of our actions. Queers come in the world, and in coming they encounter consequences, and not just theoretically.

I sense pragmatism’s attention to consequences is important decades into the existence of various queer theories that have offered readings of various types of objects—films, performances, novels, policies, experiences, and more. Those readings—once scandalous in the academy—have now become part of the academy. They have in infiltrating the institutions they once critiqued or parodied or subverted become practices that can inform work that more, now than ever, has the backing of the institution . And, with such institutionalization we can more, now than ever, contemplate the conceivable consequences of queer theory and its attendant practices. We might now be able to think about if and how queer theories have had and could continue to have consequences for the worlds we inhabit—through discourse, material practices, and more. What are the conceivable consequences of various types of queer readings? What do such readings do for readers as those readers encounter the daily work of living? This is a question I will hopefully provide responses to throughout the remainder of this book as I contemplate how queer theory—as I have read and encountered it—has allowed me to contemplate queer thriving.

Reading is—this might seem obvious—contingent and contextual. It is informed by our time, objects we have encountered, relationships we have had, and much more. Our readings are not, nor can they be, ahistorical. They will become dated, outdated even, becoming instead signs of a time gone by. Such times gone by might be read—in the present—as a sign of progress. See, things have gotten better as texts written years ago show things were pretty shitty. However, such times might also be read nostalgically as a time one wished one had lived in. “Wow, the 1970s sound fabulous! What happened to us?” I will, I suspect fall into reading things as signs of progress and nostalgically. I hope you’ll forgive me, but I think progress and nostalgia can serve us in various ways.

Theoretical traditions serve us in various ways as well. Different theoretical traditions have offered different ways of reading texts . Cherryholmes (1999) illustrated this by providing readings that take an “authoritative” perspective or are informed by deconstruction, new historicism, and, of course pragmatism. This move was pedagogical, providing readers with a strategy to distinguish between related, but different, reading practices. Reading practices, Cherryholmes illustrated, have different consequences for how a text impacts readers and beyond. In addition, his readings illustrated distinctions between particular critical traditions (under the banner of poststructuralism and postmodernism) and pragmatism . Cherryholmes argued:

Poststructural and postmodern investigations tend to be investigatory, interpretive, critical, and analytic. They are not forward-looking. They are oriented to commentary and criticism instead of consequences and action. Poststructuralism and its postmodern relatives do not have a project that looks to action, nor do they seek one. (p. 4)

“Pragmatism,” as an alternative, “looks to results” (p. 4) but not just any results. The products of pragmatic readings “are never finished. They are interpreted, reinterpreted, and criticized indefinitely” (p. 4). Continuing, Cherryholmes wrote, “as a result, [pragmatic readings] are continually open to new experiences and problems and opportunities. Pragmatist productions deconstruct, they do indeed. And their deconstruction invites, indeed requires, revision and replacement” (p. 4). Pragmatism and its readings embrace the interpretive, analytic, critical options provided by poststructuralism. They are, I think, more alike than they are different. However, pragmatism moves beyond poststructuralism and postmodernism to contemplate action, to roll with the punches in order to make decisions about how to do things in the world.

I have, I sense, quoted rather liberally from Cherryholmes above so let me provide my reading. Poststructural and postmodern theories—in which queer theory would be included—do interesting and important work. They deconstruct, interpret, provoke with their readings. They play with words and read against the grain. The work they do is critical since they seek, in part, to expose injustices. Additionally, their work is interpretive, as they do not propose Truth, but offer truths. They are also primarily backward looking. They look back at texts to expose or reveal in those texts their limitations or how the text deconstructs, or how texts illustrate the formation of things. What such ways of readings fail to do (and every reading does some things well and other things less well) is to look forward to the consequences of what they are doing. Deconstructionists or new historicists have not immediately been interested or concerned with contemplating the possible consequences of their readings, although I suspect they are not unconcerned with consequences; being “critical” would imply a certain interest in consequences.

Pragmatism on the other hand is forward looking. It attends to the conceivable consequences of its readings. Reading—with a pragmatic bent—is an exercise in reading into the conceivable future that could be the result of actions. It gathers together, assembles, conceivable consequences of doing this, that, or another thing in the world. And this requires interpretive and imaginative thinking. This generally seems rather wishy-washy. How do we determine conceivable consequences? What types of results are we looking for? And what limits help us “conceive” the conceivable? And how do we make choices about what results and consequences we want to help bring to fruition? These are, as Cherryholmes illustrated, important questions to ask and questions that are answered carefully. We seek results that are fulfilling, we decide inclusively, we expose our ideas to multiple interpretations and criticism so as to deal with the ever-changing realities we encounter. We do, in a sense, the work we often are already doing living in the world, except we do so attentively. Such answers are, to be clear, not “idealistic,” rather:

At the beginning and end of the day pragmatists are realists because they value what happens. They are interested in results, in consequences. They understand that pragmatist experiments are social constructions. These constructions come from experience and ideas and knowledge and power. Proposed material/ideal and realistic/idealistic distinctions deconstruct because the material conditions in which we find ourselves contribute to and shape what we can conceptualize and enact. Pragmatists try to bring about beautiful results in the midst of power and oppression and ignorance . (Cherryholmes, 1999, p. 5)

Pragmatism accepts the contingent realities that we face in our everyday lives where we have to make choices. And those choices are informed and limited in all kinds of ways. We cannot base our decisions on some foundation or truth. Pragmatism is “anti-foundational” since such foundations and “Truth” are already conditioned and constructed. Rather, pragmatism makes its decisions attending to consequences that are satisfying and fulfilling within the complex milieu where we come to understand those very concepts themselves. It exists in the present, is informed by the past, with an eye toward a beautiful future.

Reparative Readings

Pragmatism—in looking forward —attends to contemplating pleasure and beauty as desired consequences of our actions. Pragmatism is, I suggest, an approach committed to bringing into existence positive affects and actions. This is something decidedly different from most critical traditions. Most critical traditions, as Eve Sedgwick (2004) aptly argued, embrace a hermeneutics of suspicion and this embrace, by the start of the twenty-first century, had become a problem. Sedgwick was concerned that there was a wide spread habit within critical work to engage a hermeneutics of suspicion. And while such hermeneutics—what she calls “paranoid” reading—is an important reading practice, there is a side effect when such reading practices become habitual. Critical theorists—variously situated in queer, feminist, race-conscious, and related theories—for Sedgwick , “may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller” (p. 124). Paranoid reading, while excellent at exposing things may, in becoming a “mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities,” limit encountering, intervening, and creating other possibilities. Or put differently, if we are mandated to do particular types of readings to be considered critical, we become limited in the work that we can do. We find ourselves always looking over our shoulder, paranoid about what enemies are chasing us without looking ahead to things that could trip us up (a paranoid option) or provide us support against our enemies.

Reading practices, I hope you see, are never neutral, but always bring with them assumptions and viewpoints about what counts and what does not count. Reading practices inform what we look at, how we look, and where we look. They inform why we look at all. Reading practices frame the world before us and, just as a “frame” does, it sets us up to see (or be seen) in particular ways. Frames—like our reading practices—limn the scene for better and for worse. There are always frames, one task is to begin to see different frames and what they do for the objects they capture within the borders and what they, then, by definition, exclude.

Sedgwick illustrated that queer reading practices, by and large, took up a paranoid position, which made sense. Within the history of sexuality, she argued, there was a clear relationship between homosexuality and paranoia. Homosexuality, as theorized by Freud, was connected to paranoia and anti-homophobic inquiries in a similar vein took up the paranoid position, in an attempt to expose the violence of, for instance, heteronormativity (Warner, 1991) or homonormativity (Duggan, 2002) or homonationalism (Puar, 2007). The paranoid position was critical to resistance as it assisted in recognizing and exposing the enemies to queer lives and practices not only at the interpersonal level, but at the cultural, institutional, and disciplinary levels.1 However, as Sedgwick aptly noted, “just because you have enemies doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid” (p. 127). “Indeed,” Sedgwick continued, “for someone to have an unmystified view of systemic oppression does not intrinsically or necessarily enjoin that person to any specific train of epistemological or narrative consequences” (p. 127). Recognizing the realities of oppressions—in their diversity—does not require that one engage in a particular type of critical project. In fact, limiting oneself to a particular type of project would eliminate the possibility of surprise. Instead, it would leave readers over time with the sense that they are being beat over the head with a bat of the same information. “There’s oppression. Do you see the oppression? Do you see the oppression? It is there, there is the oppression. Do you see it?” This type of exposure is, as Sedgwick noted, a central tenet of paranoid reading practices. However, as she noted “[paranoid strategies] represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge” (p. 130). And to be clear, there are important things that paranoid strategies do. Pointing out and exposing oppression is important. However, there are also important things that such strategies fail to adequately address; this being a lesson the tunnel of oppression I addressed in the preface taught me early on. The tunnel of oppression was rooted in exposing, but the moment it sought to promote, to assemble objects that did different work, its work became contested.

As an alternative to paranoid reading, but not as a replacement, Sedgwick developed what she called reparative reading, arguing that “to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new” (p. 146). To read from a reparative position is to allow for the possibility of surprise and leave open space that things could be different. This is “because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present” (p. 146). Additionally, she continued, “it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly relieving, ethically critical possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did” (p. 146). Reparative reading practices—embracing the contingent and positive—similarly to pragmatism, are concerned with how things could be different. There is with Sedgwick’s reparative readings, like Cherryholmes’s pragmatism, an opening for work looking forward done under the banner of queer theory. Queers do not have to maintain and be determined by their historical connection to paranoid positions, but can invent additional ways of positioning themselves in and against the world. Such a move makes sense as it recognizes the changing realities and needs of queers.

Sedgwick herself, central to the invention of queer theory, historicized the relationship of reading practices in her own work. Paranoia had (and has) a role to play in opening space and time to contemplate queerness. However, the consequences of only doing and allowing paranoid reading practices to define critically leads not to satisfactory and fulfilling experiences reading the word and the world. Rather, reading subsumed and limited to the practices of paranoia close down the creative and inventive possibilities that are also central to the work of queerness. After all, “the desire of a reparative impulse … is additive and accretive ” (Sedgwick, 2004, p. 149). Reparative readings, as opposed to paranoid readings, seek to add to the possibilities, to grow queerness in surprising ways. And such practices teach us. They teach us to look forward, not only over our shoulders, to advance our ways of life. Concluding her engagement with paranoid and reparative reading , Sedgwick (2004) noted, “What we can best learn from [reparative] practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (pp. 150–151). Reparative readings recognize that there are enemies in the world, but reads objects in that very world in ways that give life, that sustain the lives that are often ignored. Such reading practices are, I believe, central to contemplating queer thriving.