Making it Work: US Thought and Culture between Practice and Paralysis

Keynotes: 

Paul Taylor (Philosophy / African American and Diaspora Studies, Penn State): author of Race: A Philosophical Introduction

Lisi Schoenbach (English, University of Tennessee Knoxville): author of Pragmatic Modernism

Are there distinctively American attitudes toward objectivity and truth, judgment and action?  Two of the most enduring cliches about US culture are, first, that its thought characteristically refuses universal grounds, and second, that it privileges material practicality over theoretical or metaphysical abstraction.  Yet without universal grounds, how can we be convinced that anything is worth doing?  Let’s grant that it is; such a groundless granting may initially let us act with a sense of freedom and unlimited potential, but justifying or revising that action requires us to establish provisional grounds that can themselves be hedged, negotiated, interrogated to the paralyzing point of infinity.  Which side of this tension to prioritize—whether to elide contingencies and reduce deliberative friction or to recuperate the experience of hesitancy and dwell in possibility—is a governing question for distinctively American thinkers from Jonathan Edwards to Audre Lorde, Emily Dickinson to Sidney Hook, Jane Addams to Timothy Leary.
 

With this interdisciplinary graduate conference, we, the US Literatures and Cultures Consortium at the University of Michigan, hope to foster cross-departmental discussion of questions like the following...

How have objectivity, truth, rationality, and agency been represented and conceptualized in US thought and culture?  How have these models permitted or circumscribed action?  How have they informed individual and communal practices: from action planned or spontaneous, to decision-making public or private, to governance local and federal?  What universalist appeals do make their way into US culture?  How are shared belief and/or knowledge constructed, articulated, perpetuated, scrutinized and revised without universalist guarantees?  How have such modes of understanding interacted and conflicted? How, essentially, have US philosophers, artists, politicians and citizens forged justifications for acting and judging in a world without universal grounds?  And how and why have some of them found greater value in resisting just this rush to action?