Richard Rorty argues that there have been three major movements of intellectuals: the religious intellectual, the philosophical intellectual, and the literary intellectual. An intellectual, says Rorty, is anyone who seeks personal authenticity and has the wherewithal to consume cultural artifacts to try and get there. (I would add that the intellectual feels the right to engage those artifiacts on his own terms.)
Philosophical intellectuals first took the scene during the Renaissance, leading the process of society’s secularization while the figure of the religious intellectual peaked and then faded during the Reformations. For the religious intellectual final personal authenticity was found through right relationship (variously defined) with the-one-god. For their philosophical intellectual successors, right beliefs about reality (variously defined) held hopes for finding final personal authenticity. (Fundamentalists, I could add, might be viewed as philosophical intellectuals pretending to themselves to be religious intellectuals.)
For literary intellectuals there is no right anything to be related to or believed in which can produce final personal authenticity. Final authenticity is no longer a goal. (As a pragmatist Rorty will still argue that some ways of being and living are better than others; there is neither relativism nor absolutism here.) Instead, multiple ways of being and living are collected through the reading of novels and poems. Religion and philosophy are marginal now, says Rorty, because intellectual culture has long moved beyond them. It is fine, he says, to include religion and philosophy among one’s “novels” and “poems,” but literary intellectuals won’t regard them as any more important than some other great work. The point for the literary intellectual is to imagine new ways of being–however worthy or unworthy she may judge them to be. Relating to a deity or seeing things “as they really are” is quite beside the point.
Indie film and indie music enthusiasts seem candidates for Rorty’s literary intellectual. Their concern for authenticity (and disdain for “fake authenticity”) can reach legendary proportions of snobdom, that frequent companion of intellectuals of all stripes. Indie fashion trends–black plastic glasses, blue collar work shirts, pearl snap shirts–seem efforts to try on novel ways of living and being. But only to try them on. The indie enthusiast must always retain an ironic distance from his appropriated lifestyles. And why not? Rorty elsewhere praises the “personal ironist” uninterested in any final authenticity but dedicated to liberal political ideals that aim to reduce suffering. If there’s no harm, does the indie enthusiast foul?
Why only the printed form for the attention of Rorty’s literary intellectual? Aren’t digital forms like movies, music and website valid for exploring new ways of living and being? And what about traditional art and sculpture? Whatever personal preference Rorty may have, it seems we should have a “cultural-aesthetic” intellectual rather than a strictly literary intellectual who is limited to only novels and poems. Or if you like, the indie intellectual.
UPDATE: Andrea at Arjlog makes a good case for the inclusion of “low art.”
And why only traditional novels? (Rorty likes to throw around Nabokov and Proust. Eck.) Why not science fiction? And why not cartoons while we’re at it?
I think you may be reducing Rorty’s translation of Heideggerian “authenticity” in your discussion of how it relates to “Indie” music enthusiasts. Their concern for “authenticity” is directly connected to the perceived and ironized cultural value of that pearl snap shirt, and furthermore that value is only perceived in the context of an awareness of how others around them will perceive the ironization. In other words, the joke depends on making sure other people get the joke and know you’re in on the joke: the concerns of such people — what you rightly call snobbery — is not a concern for Heideggerian authenticity, but merely evidence that one is consummately the product of one’s environment. This is entirely the opposite of Heideggerian authenticity.
The whole discourse of authenticity strikes me as fruitless and foolish anyway, since definitions of authenticity must ultimately be based only on one’s own lived experience, and so can never be interpersonal: they resist theorization in the same manner faith resists theorization. Besides which, as with the word “radical”, I think anybody who finds the need to call themselves “authentic” . . . isn’t.
Rorty also inherits Heidegger’s elitism: apparently, the poor can never be “authentic”. And yet, as a society, we most frequently attach the word “authentic” to cultural phenomena associated with the poorer classes: by the popular definition of the term, bluegrass is authentic, as is Mississippi Delta blues, whereas the art-rock of Yes is the antithesis of authenticity.
By the way, Nabokov is hardly “traditional.” Give “Pale Fire” a try. Brilliant, avant-garde, mysterious, and absolutely hilarious. One reason Rorty might not include science fiction as a genre (he mentions specific titles; “traditional novels” aren’t a genre) is that, like all literature, much of it enacts the same cliches that all other literature does, and so closes off possibilities-of-being rather than opening them up, which is what Rorty sees “good” literature as doing. “Dhalgren” and “Neuromancer” and “Radio Free Albemuth” — yes, definitely opened up some ideas and possibilities. The latest derivative crap from overgrown boys who see the spaceships and want to enact the cliches of the movies they’ve seen but don’t understand the possibilities for productive philosophizing that removing a novel’s scene from what we today understand as “the real” opens up? Hardly. If science fiction doesn’t raise tough questions, it’s not good literature. The same goes for books in general. “The Da Vinci Code” is a fun read, sure (albeit predictable), but it’s fun because it reassures readers rather than challenging them. Bloom valorizes Shakespeare because he asked the most difficult questions of all; questions that we still struggle with — and, one hopes, that we will always struggle with.
Postmodernism’s point
Still following up on Rorty, the point of “postmodernism” is the rejection of the project of philosophical intellectuals, that is, the hope that discovering reality-as-it-really-is “would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do w…
You’re right about Heidegger’s authenticity, but elsewhere Rorty’s ironist seems to abandon the quest for authenticity. He defines the ironist with three conditions:
The third seems too much to me, except in some vague theoretical sense. In spite of my radical doubts, I still like to think my “final vocabulary” is improving through the years. But the point is taken.
It seems to me that Rorty intends his ironist and his literary intellectual to be one and the same. Once we’ve expanded the literary intellectual to the cultural-aesthetic intellectual, I want to know what one looks like. Does he wear pearl snap shirts? Does he listen to Johnny Cash? Or is that too easy? It seems the ironist is doomed to some adoption of “fake authenticity.”
Rorty’s lack of a “preferential option for the poor” is a troubling point I hadn’t considered. It makes Rorty vulnerable to the accusation that postmodernism is nothing more than the philosphical justification for late capitalism. But even after Freire and Gutierrez, I’m unsure what a beneficiary of late capitalism is supposed to do. I won’t give up what place and privilege I’ve managed to scap together in order to indentify with the poor. I feel I can do more from here, and that using my place and privilege is required of me. It still feels lacking, but I don’t expect to find much more in the way of authenticity. So pearl snap shirts it is?
It’s funny that you mention Sam Delaney. That’s exactly who I had in mind for science fiction, particularly his Neveryon series. I’ll have to trust your judgment on Nabokov–my wife is the literary critic in the family. Looking over Contingency, Rorty talks some of Orwell, so perhaps we could include science fiction by that route.
Indie god-talk
The point of the humanities, staying with Rorty, is to shake things up, to help us imagine new ways of living and being. He argues that the humanities offer “a desirable replacement of bad questions like ‘What is Being?’, ‘What is really real?’ and ‘Wh…