Comments on: The indie intellectual

By: makingchutney.com

makingchutney.com — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 21:04:57 +0000

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…

By: chutney

chutney — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 19:20:38 +0000

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:

Radical and continuing doubts about one's "final vocabulary."
Abandonment of the attempt to resolve those doubts.
Belief that one's own "final vocabulary" is no closer to the mark than anyone's elses.

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.

By: makingchutney.com

makingchutney.com — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 20:25:59 +0000

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…

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 20:12:45 +0000

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.

By: chutney

chutney — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 17:20:20 +0000

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?