The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

For some time I have admired Richard Deming’s work—his humor, his goodwill, his nuanced reading, the breadth of that reading, and his poems, many gathered in his recent volume, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman Books, 2008). And I am pleased to encounter him again in a book that takes its leave from Emerson, a figure or ongoing figuration dear to us both.

Listening on All Sides offers a politics of language, one that asks us to think about language use as community constituting and communities as linguistically constituted. If this is so, Deming reasons, how we read and write can affect something like a constitutional moment: “It seems at least that coming back to one’s own language as if for the first time is Emerson’s idea of remembering a body politic, and re-forming (in all senses) a politic’s body” (2).

This is not a new thesis, and Deming does not present it as such. What is unique to him is the range of authors he brings to the project. While his decision to begin with Emerson owes much to the work of Stanley Cavell, his forays into figures like Melville, Wallace Stevens, and W. C. Williams deepens the American grain of the tradition whose inception Cavell locates in Emerson and Thoreau. Second, Deming defends this tradition against what he portrays as a deconstructive politics of language, suggesting that “Emersonian modernism” can supplement a deconstructive skepsis with a commitment to establishing, in readerly and writerly negotiations, something like a temporary, transitional sensus communis by way of the intersubjective bearings and resources of ordinary language. Listening on All Sides thus furthers a Cavellian project hilariously described by Tim Gould as “retaking by land what the French took by air.”

Emersonian modernism arises within “acts of language upon language” that move between philosophy and poetry in a field that Deming terms poetics: “Emersonian poetics flows between philosophy and literature, between analysis and originality, and keeps the work in flux while it critiques and makes use of its own methods of belief and expressivity” (86). “Poetics” thus names a kind of praxis, a way of inhabiting language wherein we contest it and allow it to contest us, and on all sides, such that the language of our engagement is recurringly revisited and redetermined.

According to Deming, the movement that is Emersonian poetics is more or less the movement of a democratic subjectivity. Let me reconstruct the argument, which lies at the heart of Listening on All Sides. First, we acquire selves insofar as we inhabit a language that provides us with a Lebsensform. In a paraphrase of the later Wittgenstein construed along the lines of social construction, Deming [End Page 71] writes: “Learning that language is thus learning the outlook, assumptions, and practices with which that language is inseparably bound” (16). And it is precisely those outlooks that give us to ourselves and one another, that is, the language we inherit provides us with the “very contents of knowledge that are the propositions by which one discerns the shape of the world as one understands it” (107). Second, actively inhabiting a language is a process of rewriting it and thus rewriting the manners in which one “discerns the shape of the world.” It is not that one simply forces one’s language to match one’s intentions or the like. Rather, one accepts the fact that one has invested one’s self in one’s language and then sets about contesting the self one finds there. To restate a line quoted earlier: “It seems at least that coming back to one’s own language as if for the first time is Emerson’s idea of remembering one’s self and re-forming (in all senses) it.” Of course, poetics along these lines would be nothing more than bourgeois self-creation of the Rortian sort if this were a private venture (as Deming more or less notes). But in writing as a reader and for readers...