This paper argues that the ideological irresponsibility of Richard Rorty’s (post)modern neo-pragmatic theories in ignoring broad social and political phenomena is necessarily a reflection of the penetration of global capital in almost all fields of life and the disintegration of the liberal public sphere. Further, this article maintains that the alternative to (post)modern neo-pragmatism is a dialectical theory and a socio-historical consciousness that amounts to a criticism of the organizations and the Ideological State Apparati of monopoly and late capitalist societies.

Rorty's Complicit American Neo-Pragmatism [printable version]

Haidar Eid

<1> Despite the obvious French origin of poststructuralism, its paradigmatic resonance can be found in the American philosophical scene, an essential part of which is Richard Rorty's neo-pragmatism -- the theoretical basis of American (post)modernism. However, different from poststructuralism's apparent antagonism to the authoritarian establishments, Rorty adopts the Derridean poststructuralist motifs of the decentering of the subject, and the disappearance of meaning and truth in order to defend the establishment -- or rather, the status quo.

<2> In his introduction to his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty announces that his mission is to create "a single vision [that will] let us hold self-creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity" (1989:xiv). Moreover, "the aim of a just and free society [is] letting its citizens be as privatistic, irrationalist, and aesthetiscist as they please" (xiv). What we need to understand, Rorty argues, is that societies are historical contingencies, and the individual who comprehends and adopts this point is called a “liberal ironist” (xv). The ‘liberal ironist’ is, in other words, the individual who thinks "that cruelty is the worst thing we do ... [and] the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires--someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance"(1989:xv). And it is literature that can bring and create this ironic perspective, since "the novel, the movie, and the TV programme have replaced the sermon and treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress" (1989:xvi). In a poststructuralist vein, Rorty insists that we can in no way step outside the various vocabularies we have employed. Neither can we create a ‘metavocabulary’ that includes all possible vocabularies (1989:xvi). Hence Truth is made rather than found, and since what we have is different descriptions of the world, it follows that truth is a matter of ‘contingency of language’ (1989:3,4,5).

<3> In a Nietzschean fashion, and repeating Derrida, Rorty announces that the ‘fundamental ground’ and the ‘centre’ are (wo)men's temptation to look for an intrinsic criterion, ‘an essence’ to interpret the world. This, according to Rorty, is the result of privileging "some one among the many languages in which we habitually describe the world or ourselves"(1989:6). His alternative to all traditional philosophical theories is an "interesting philosophy" which is a "contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things" (1989:9). That is, by drawing on Wittgenstein, Rorty’s contention is that philosophical ‘truth’ is not experienced through a real experiencing of life, but rather through a new vocabulary. To repeat, our access to experience is mediated by vocabulary and, therefore, ‘truth’, being part of these vocabularies, influences the nature of our experience.

Truth

<4> The chief importance of Rorty's work lies in his criticism of the traditional notion of truth. Truth as conceived by most traditional philosophers is static, final, perfect, and even eternal. It may be identified with God, ‘Being’, ‘the will to power’, ‘The Will’, ‘Reason, ‘The Spirit,’ etc. These are, according to Rorty, "only descriptions of the world" (5). Thus, we should “drop the idea of language as representation and ... de-divinize the world”; that is, we should get to the point where we “no longer worship anything -- our language, our conscience, our community -- as a product of time and chance” (21- 22). In other words, there is nothing called ‘Truth’. Hence Rorty judges a belief by its effects not causes. His emphasis is on the connection between the truth of statements and their practical applicability, or their work for us, and this is the revival of pragmatism. That is, borrowing from William James and John Dewey, Rorty is interested in the function of our ideas and statements and their effects rather than the sources and conditions of their production.

<5> Rorty's truth is seen in terms of the metaphor that solves a problem, removes a perplexity and resolves a frustration. Put differently, his theory of truth should be understood as suggesting that there would be no point in calling something true that satisfies all our aims in inquiry, although one does not need to conclude from this that in practice anything very interesting could be called true in this version. What could be called true would be just those things we think we have good reason and justification for believing and using. But one is tempted to doubt that even the best of our efforts do not lead to the pragmatic conclusion that they are true. Moreover, ‘workability’, ‘useability’, and ‘practicability’ are the basis of the justification of the existence of any institution. However that does not take into account the circumstances under which these institutions are ‘workable’, neither historically nor socially--which raises questions with regard to the legitimacy of such pragmatic institutions. Rorty's neo-pragmatism thus becomes an ideological set of justifications for the notion that whatever ‘we’, that is, white Western liberals, have is justifiable and thus legitimate since it is 'workable' and 'practical' regardless of the means through which it is achieved. Thus Apartheid, Nazism, Zionism, American Imperialism can be justified. However, Rorty maintains that 'irony' -- in opposition to 'cruelty' -- is supposed to serve as a self-reflexive counter to this eventuality. Paradoxically, ‘irony’ in Rortian terms is the awareness of the contingency of beliefs, and, therefore, an ‘ironist’ cannot stand for his beliefs ‘unflinchingly’ -- an issue I will deal with in the course of this study.

<6> Rorty's defence of ‘the contingency of selfhood’ is a way of arguing that one is made of a self that is a tissue of contingencies rather than a ‘potentially well-ordered system of faculties’ as Freud postulated. For Rorty, Freud "helps us take seriously the possibility that there is no central faculty, no central self" (1989:32-3). That is to say, Freud's explanation that the idea of an underlying coherent individual essence of particular personhood is a myth that has led to the conclusion that there is no point in trying to relate our social roles with a common human 'essence'. One's self is made of 'selves', or rather 'metaphors' which may even be contradictory, like the conscious and the unconscious. A self can never be completed "because there is nothing to complete, there is only a web of relations to be rewoven, a web which time lengthens every day"(Rorty, 1989:43). One's self is always ready to be made and reshaped through metaphors and vocabulary, i.e. aesthetically. The multiplicity of the self, however, does not mean that one should not avoid being 'a copy' or 'replicant', but rather try "to make a self for [one's] self by redescribing [the] impress, in terms which are ... [one's] own" (1989:43). This is what Rorty calls ‘ironism’, and what Bhaskar calls ‘romanticism and poeticism’ (1991:81). The examples of ‘ironists’ that Rorty gives are Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov, John Keats, George Orwell, all of whom are, significantly, Europeans (and males) who wrote in English. It becomes clear then that what Rorty is after is a poetic culture made of self-invented ‘liberal ironists’, or as he puts it, a ‘moral community’ (64n). To put it in other words, in order to proceed to the ‘di-divinization’ of the world and the self, and to provide a better perspective on human behaviour, one should discard ‘inquiry’ and trust ‘imagination’ (xvi). Hence, it is fiction which can explain cruelty and which can awaken us to the ‘humiliation’ of particular social practices. However, one is, again, shaped by different vocabularies so that one can in no way define oneself as one coherent self, i.e. the subject is decentred again and even redescribed.

<7> The poet/liberal ironist is, then, in a relentless journey of discovery and redescription of her/himself, an ironist who never adopts a ‘grand narrative', a poet who always tries to find new vocabularies in order to avoid being a ‘copy’. Richard Shusterman argues that this journey or ‘quest’ is obstructed by the absence of a structuring centre because "the maximized spawning of alternative and often inconsistent vocabularies and narratives of the self ... makes the whole idea of an integral enduring self seem completely empty and suspect"(1988:346). Without such a self there is no ‘ironic’ self that is capable of expanding aesthetically in order to have a changing identity. The absence of such self, according to Shusterman, "would nullify the Rortian aesthetic life of self-enrichment by rendering it meaningless" (1988:346).

<8> How can one define this ‘contingent self’ if not in relation to other selves? And how can I identify myself if I do not relate to others? ‘Irony’, Rorty says, is the only thing that can overcome suffering and reconcile the demands of ‘self-creation’ and ‘human solidarity’. Ironists are the only individuals who can realize “that anything can be made good or bad by being redescribed”, and who deny that “any criteria of choice between final vocabularies exists”. They are, in Rorty’s words, “never quite able to take themselves (as well as the world and truth) seriously” (1989: 73, 74, 89f). Moreover, in his attempt to define ironism as ‘the power of redescription’ Rorty admits that “most people do not want to be redescribed” (89). However, it is the ironist’s duty to tell them that the language they speak is “up for grabs by her and her kind”(89). Rorty, then, admits again that there

is something potentially very cruel about that claim. For the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seem most important to them look futile, obsolete and powerless ... Redescription often humiliates. (1989:89-90)

But, ironically, the ‘liberal ironist’ is not an agent of emancipation, i.e. not liberal, because “[s]he cannot claim that adopting her redescription of yourself or your situation makes you better able to conquer the forces which are marshalled against you. On her account, that ability is a matter of having truth on your side, or having detected the ‘movement of history’” (91). For Bhaskar, this contradiction--the humiliating and illiberal character of the ironist -- is the product of the underlying tension between two impulses in Rorty: “a romantic and a pragmatic one” (1991:84).

<9> The neo-pragmatic presumption that all philosophies emphasizing the centrality and unity of the self cannot lead to the ‘ironic’ self that is open to expansion is misleading in that it denies the privileges of the harmony of coherence of such a self if it is compared to the futility and meaninglessness and contradictions of the multiple ‘ironic self’ (Shusterman, 1988). In this regard, the history of non-western philosophical experiences such as Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian cannot simply be ignored. Moreover, from our social and political relationships we derive many of our obligations and a set of shared values and common purposes which are a substantial component of any viable concept of life and self, and in terms of which we can measure and evaluate our progress through life. The individual who does not encode relations to others in her/his being-self does not exist; all individuals -- not only Western -- depend on already existing coherent and incoherent socially transmitted bodies of knowledge that are usually controlled by the rich and powerful. Hence, to change oneself and maximize one's alternatives is not to avoid taking a political and moral position. One is not entitled to discover a centre, but rather make one, which is acknowledged by Rorty himself. Hence he is obliged to recognize the existence of a satisfactory, coherent, unified, holistic self -- even if it is not Western.

<10>The fact that such self does not exist now is undoubtedly the reflection of the destabilization of the bourgeois identity with the rise of the proletariat and other marginal groups. ‘The end of the bourgeois Odyssey’, as Fredric Jameson (1981) puts it, is not universal. Thus Rorty’s neo-pragmatism is a remodelling of the ideas of old American pragmatism retheorized to suit the requirements and outlooks of the liberal middle-class intellectuals of the late-capitalist American society. Rorty’s inconsistency in reducing everything to contingency is obvious in his denunciation of all ‘metanarratives’ and his celebration of ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’ (1983). This ‘metanarrative becomes the only narrative that has the ability to explain everything:

For in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism would be one which was enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible. It would drop, or drastically reinterpret, ‘truth’ and ‘fulfilment of the deepest needs of the spirit’. (1989:45)

Taking the vocabulary that revolves around the notions of metaphor and self-creation as his weapon to attack Enlightenment rationalism, Rorty suggests that "progress, for the community is also a matter of using new words as well as of arguing from premises phrased in old words"(1989:48-9). The ideal liberal society is, then, "one which is content to call 'true' whatever the upshot of such encounters turn out to be" (1989:52). And what a liberal culture needs is ‘an improved self-description rather than a set of foundations’. Thus, the tension between the private perfection of the ‘liberal ironist’ and ‘public pragmatism’ as realized in a liberal culture is to be resolved by the privatization of irony, or as Bhaskar puts it, by “reserving the public sphere for pragmatic social engineering” (1991:82). And as Rorty himself puts it, his project involves “a full-scale discussion of the possibility of combining private fulfilment, self-realization, with public morality, a concern for justice” (1982:58). ‘Ironism’ is, then, the ‘private’ aspect of the equation. And ‘Public morality’ can crystallize only in a liberal society.

<11> Rorty's pragmatic attitude is grounded in a Eurocentric understanding of liberal democracy (see Novack, 1998; Sardar, 1998), which does not take into consideration that Western democracies are full of people who regularly vote in a way that is quite contradictory with their own perceived preferences and real interests, because they are persuaded by the ‘descriptions’ of liberal politicians. Put differently, people can easily be manipulated into ‘choosing freely’ what is clearly contrary to their own interest. Otherwise, Hitler would have never established the Third Reich. Furthermore, the seeming flexibility of liberal institutions, ‘free press’, ‘free universities’, etc, is dependent on their ability either to absorb or exclude elements that radically oppose them. For instance, the witch-hunt during the McCarthy era led to the exclusion of the American left, a process that is undoubtedly linked to the weakness and absorption of the left in the 1980s. Thus bourgeois liberalism and neo-liberalism in their pragmatic and neo-pragmatic forms, homogenize and hegemonize the society with reforms and exclude any radical critique that may lead to radical social change. In this regard, Rorty’s argument is that liberalism is the only political system in which plurality can function. Liberalism, according to this logic, contains a plurality of beliefs and, therefore, it is the only system which reflects the fact that no one set of values is more worth than another. “But”, says Ziauddin Sardar, “to preserve that diversity one has to defend the values of liberalism and this cannot be done by declaring the indefensibility of all values” (1998:173).

<12> Taking the individual as the arbiter and source of moral values is dialectically related to the concept of ‘Liberal Community’. In this regard, Rorty argues that the "citizens of this liberal utopia would be people who had a sense of the contingency of their language, of moral deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their community"(1989:61). But how can individuals, made of different incoherent narratives -- as Rorty claims -- get together to make one community? What is at issue here is not the 'difference' of the narratives, but rather their 'incoherence' and fragmentation, that is, their denied telos. And since the hero of this society is the ‘strong poet’ who has that ‘aesthetic self’, or the ‘liberal ironist’ whose self is made of different narratives, one concludes that such a community is a utopian fantasy, and human solidarity, then, becomes only a narrative -- not to say a lost paradise that has nothing to do with praxis and the needs of, not only fragmented Western bourgeois 'subjects', but all those human beings who constitute the rest of the world. As Pierre Bourdieu puts it in his attack on neoliberal economists (1998), separated from the economic and social realities of the world by his intellectual formation, which is bookish and theoretical, Rorty falls in the trap of confusing the things of logic with the logic of things. In fact, Rorty’s distinction between intellectual ironists and non-ironists (1989:87) is a hierarchical binarism that he never manages to resolve. Ironists, thus, remain, in the realm of an isolated cultural elite called ‘liberal ironists’. Commenting on Rorty’s solution to this split -- that is, ironism as a component of the ‘private sphere’, with no political applications, and liberalism as a separate, free component of the ‘public sphere’ that never interferes with one’s own romantic private project of ‘self-invention’ -- Bhaskar writes:

Note that if the official position were tenable, there would be no reason in principle against universal ironism. Discounting the actual division of labour, wealth and time in society, why should the project of self-invention be restricted to only some -- a privileged elite? (1991:85)

<13> The ideological background of Rorty's argument gets clearer when he argues that "the contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for its own improvement ... Indeed [my] hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs" (1989). That is, his argument is not a futural one, but rather an argument which endorses the status quo. Moreover, he goes on to suggest that "discoveries about who is being made to suffer can be left to the workings of a free press, free universities, and enlightened public opinion"(1989:63). This argument of the state as a necessary agency of mutual protection, and the guarantor of individual rights is undoubtedly persuasive and even desirable. However, the actual practice of contemporary liberal Western countries is very far from Rorty's ideal. Socio-historical analyses of such societies reveal that the rich are powerful, and have invented ways of legitimizing what they own, and how they legally hire and abuse the labour of the lower classes and poorer countries. They legitimize such unjust gains by means of laws protected by institutions, laws that appeal to the common good, laws -- or rather ‘descriptions’ -- that persuade a big sector of the society to vote against their own interests. Votes in Rorty's contemporary liberal society are not conferred on each person, as they are supposed to be, but on each dollar, which guarantees an undemocratic outcome (Milner, 1994:15). To take the matter further, voting in elections does not, then, guarantee one's freedom in choosing one's representative in terms of one's interests. Rather, it is a fundamental part of a system whose rules have been determined by the powerful bourgeois class against feudalism and its attempts to assimilate its antagonistic class, i.e. the working class. Colonized peoples were never guaranteed the 'human right' to choose freely their representatives under the ‘liberal’ colonial system. Many white South Africans participated ‘freely’ in choosing an oppressive racist regime legitimated by the participation of ‘Liberals’ in the parliament. To vote is to legitimize pragmatically; to struggle for a real ‘undistorted communication’ -- as Habermas puts it (1979) -- and to disparticipate is to question "the legitimacy of the actually existing and [to argue] for other possibilities" (Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1994:151). That is to say, the sharp split between the private sphere, with its ironists, and the public sphere, with its liberal democratic polity, leads to the dislocation of the latter from “the agency of the citizen who reproduces and transforms the social structure--and [thus] only one political voice is heard: that of the bourgeois-liberal democracy. On the one hand, singularity; on the other, technocracy” (Bhaskar, 1991:90)

<14> The desired Rortian neo-pragmatic society is claimed to be a ‘Liberal Utopia’ that has ‘free discussions’ which, he adds, does not mean

free from ideology, but simply the sort which goes on when the press, the judiciary, the elections, and the universities are free, social mobility is frequent and rapid, literacy is universal, higher education is common, and peace and wealth have made possible the leisure necessary to listen to lots of different people and think about what they say (1989:84).

An important question arises: how can each individual have all these things when all social primary goods -- including income and wealth -- are distributed unequally? Liberal bourgeois freedom that is based on ‘peace’, ‘wealth’, and ‘freedom’ -- exploitation is never mentioned -- is the neo-pragmatic answer, an answer that lacks historical awareness; or rather, an answer that deliberately adopts a form of historical and political amnesia. Rorty’s futuristic ‘project‘ incorporates two ideologies: capitalism and liberal democracy. As Sardar puts it, Rorty “thus seeks to defend his contingency culture with both the power of capitalism and the institutions and practices of the rich industrialized democracies” (1998:174). However, what makes Rorty's argument concerning this kind of life attractive to academics is that it centres on the self-vocabulary of the intellectual and the poet (see Shusterman, 1988:351). If, according to Rorty, the liberal society is "one whose ideal can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution" (1989:60) can we, then, ignore the historical fact that the basis of the contemporary liberal society, which ‘already contains the institutions for its improvement’, was a bloody revolution, i.e. the French Revolution? Is there a real ‘free press’ and ‘enlightened public opinion’ to whom Rorty leaves ‘discoveries about who is being made to suffer’? Put differently, do the media in contemporary capitalist societies not mislead public opinion around issues like the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian cause, Nicaragua, Chile, the assassination of Lumumba and Allende, the support given to Mobutu and other reactionary regimes in the Middle East?

Persuasion

<15> 'Persuasion', from a neo-pragmatic point of view, then, plays a fundamental role in the creation of the liberal society. Technically, persuasion is the means through which one gets to 'pluralism' in which there is no exclusion of ideas whatsoever. However, from this perspective, any opposing, or radical points of view should work from within the bourgeois liberal system as the only existing ‘legitimate’ one. Rejecting the system and its ideological basis by revealing and opposing its exploitative feature leads to ‘illegitimacy’ and exclusion. If one, in other words, is not ‘persuaded’ by the logic of the American intervention in the Arab World and Panama, one still has to accept it; otherwise, one is considered ‘undemocratic’ even if hundreds of thousands of civilians are being killed by such intervention. Rorty's argument is contested by Zavarzadeh and Morton in another context:"... the options come down to either being 'persuaded' of the legitimacy of working within the system and thus accepting the existing structures, or finding that there is no space for radical change" (1994:149). Liberal 'persuasion', then, is nothing but a 'distorted communication' and acceptance of the views of those who have the power to hegemonize and 'persuade' in the realm of knowledge/power. This argument is not a rejection of democracy as such, but rather a rejection of the exploitative basis of liberalism and neo-pragmatism which insist on reducing any other radical opinion to ‘one of us’ within the realm of 'pluralism' and 'dissensus'. ‘Disparticipation’ is rejected completely by most liberal institutions because it points to "the illegitimacy of the existing system by a refusal to 'play the game' according to its oppressive and exploitative rules". "Disparticipation", as a revelation of the socio-economic basis of this liberal system, "is to point out to the possible which is suppressed in the pragmatic is" (Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1994:150).

<16> A further discussion of Rorty's neo-pragmatic programme cannot avoid the historical fact concerning the relationship of the ideas and values of ‘liberal freedom and equality’ to the exchange system of the capitalist market and the rise of the bourgeois. Fredric Jameson argues correctly, with reference to Marx, that this freedom turns out to be ‘unfreedom’ and ‘exploitation’. According to Jameson, the market as a concept rarely has anything to do with ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’, since those are all determined for us in advance (1991). What we have is not ‘a free market’, but rather a mutual compromise and butting off of pressure groups, special interests and the like, which is considered by neo-pragmatists -- the American poststructuralists -- as a structure absolutely inimical to the real free market and its establishment (Jameson, 1991a: 261-262). This is, undoubtedly, reflected in the ideas of the dissolution of the subject and even its denial, the massive attack on traditional philosophy (so-called foundationalism), and the unwillingness to admit common-sensical facts. From a political economy perspective, the great leap engendered by the Industrial Revolution, machine production and scientific manipulation of nature have created a new type of consciousness that has culminated, but not ended, in the late phase of capitalism (Mandel, 1978), or so-called post-industrialism, or (post)modernism.

<17> As many critics maintain (Jameson, 1991a; Harvey, 1999; Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1994; Said, 1983; Bourdieu, 1998; Mandel, 1978; Offe, 1988; Sardar, 1998), arguing that liberal capitalism as a social system, as the only system that deals with the individual human being as s/he is, is another neo-pragmatic, (post)modern Eurocentric (mis)understanding of reality and history. Ignoring other perspectives that can add to this concept is a deliberate distortion. The logical question which thus arises is: if capitalism is the only way of achieving prosperity, why should one repress the historical fact that Western capitalism has reached its latest phase through a high price paid by humanity? As many Marxist and neo-Marxist critics argue, the foundation of contemporary liberal capitalist societies has literally been achieved through the exploitation of millions of workers, the death of millions of indigenous peoples, and the brutal murder of some other millions in two world wars. The other issue that one should interogate concerns the poststructuralist discursive mechanical understanding of history and how it deals with the rise of Nazism, colonialism, Zionism (condemned by the Security Council of the United Nations as a form of racism), and apartheid in relation to the bourgeois capitalist system.

<18> By contrasting what he calls ‘situational consciousness’ of ‘First and Third Worlds’ in terms of Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, Jameson argues that "the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are whereas [the] master is condemned to idealism" (1991b:102). Drawing on this Hegelian analysis, Jameson concludes:

It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of that very same position. The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the poverty of the individual experience of isolated nomads ... This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the 'nightmare of history,' but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the 'projections' of private subjectivity. All of this is denied to third world culture, which must be situational and materialist .... (1991b:102)

This is exactly what Rorty’s ‘utopian liberal society’ lacks -- a dialectical perspective with particular insights that reveal the mechanisms and interests of domination and the strategies of liberation at the same time. That is, Rorty’s is an ideology of a particular class with particular interests represented in specific perspectives, i.e. liberal neo-pragmatism.

<19> Thus, what seems to be ignored by Rorty’s dominant neo-pragmatic and neo-liberal discourse is that the current economic order is in itself the implementation of the utopia of neo-liberalism. As Bourdieu puts it, this utopia "converted into political problem" with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as "the scientific description of reality" (1998:1). That is why in order to understand Rorty’s neo-pragmatic theory, one should not fall in the trap of desocializing and dehistoricizing aspects that are characteristics of it. As a ‘theory’ and "a strong discourse", as Bourdieu would call it (1998), it coincides with neo-liberalism. Their strength is due to the fact that they have on their side all of the forces of a world of relations of power, a world that they contribute to making what it is. Bourdieu maintains that neo-liberalism does this by "orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationship. It thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces" (1998:2). The goal of the political project of such a ‘theory’ is "the methodical destruction of collectives" (1998:2). Rorty’s ‘theory’ thus never envisages a world without a market. Since the logic of the pure market calls "into question any and all collective structures" that could serve as an obstacle to its logic (Bourdieu, 1998:5), it becomes clear why Rorty’s ‘theory’ ‘coincides’ with the rise of neo-liberalism and the so-called post-Fordist Keynesian economics it was bound with. However, what I am arguing in this context is that Rorty’s ‘theory’ never offers an oppositional programme to the logic of the late capitalist market; it rather tends on the whole to favour severing philosophy from socio-economic realities and thereby constructing a ‘liberal utopia’ conforming to its description in pure theory, that is, a world that presents itself as a community of individuals made of contingent language. And yet, we are never told how the implementation of such a programme will deal with the increasing growth in income differences and "the destruction of the collective institutions capable of countering the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the State, repository of all of the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm" (Bourdieu, 1998:5). The alternative that is absent from Rorty’s powerful, bourgeois, neo-pragmatic ‘theory’ is one that theorizes a new social order that will not have as its only law "the pursuit of egoistic interests and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for collectives pointed toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified" (Bourdieu, 1998:5-6).

History

<20>In this regard, in order to historicize Rorty’s neo-pragmatic poststructuralism one needs to follow how the proliferation of (post)modernism in the 1980s, ‘coincided’ with the rise of Reaganism and Thatcherism. It was a time at which human society was placed on the threshold of a qualitatively new era that is at present controlled by American pragmatic values; values that -- with their current triumph and domination -- tend to ensure the dominance of liberal capitalism.

<21> The major question to be dealt with is capitalism's resilience and ability to renew itself taking into account that it is not the only claimed historical alternative humanity has experienced so far. Ernest Mandel's periodization of the development of capitalism helps us to understand how staggering technological advances have made structural changes in the developed liberal capitalist societies, including changes in the relative size and weight of the various social classes.

<22> Karl Marx's analysis of capitalism centred on the basis of the development of the European countries of the nineteenth century. The bourgeois economists studied this progressive economic analysis and incorporated some of its ideas. Fordism, for example, tends to provide workers with sufficient income and leisure time to consume the products they produce and thus leads to a co-ordination of production with consumption in order to get a more complete assimilation of the working class to capitalism by relying heavily on psychological management techniques. However, as Harvey notices (1989; 1999), Fordism and its Keynesian economics were too rigid as modes of accumulation, which gave way to the so-called post-Fordism, i.e. a more complex economic structure with "more flexible mode of accumulation" (Harvey, 1989:171). The current capitalist regime is characterized by great increase of commercial, technological, electronic and administrative innovation, and more advanced consumption patterns. Hence capitalism enacted its own renewal, based on its ability to expand and develop production as a reaction to challenges represented by the rise of socialism, embodied in the establishment of the Soviet Union, and the victories of a series of national liberation movements as a whole in the colonies. This renewal, occurring alongside the staggering electronic revolution, has even moved a sector of the proletariat closer to the middle class in terms of standards of living rather than the other way around, as Marx seems to have predicted. A new middle stratum has thus been spawned instead of disappearing. Such changes are partially due to the fact that the working class in the West has benefited, relatively speaking, from the metropole's exploitation of the colonies/periphery, which is an extremely important element in capitalism's ability to renew itself. Thus capital's internationalization has served to shift some of the contradictions inherent in the liberal capitalist countries to the periphery. However, that is not to say that the basic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production do not exist any more; on the contrary, they will continue despite past and recent renewals. The emerging micro-groups, i.e. blacks, feminists, environmentalists, etc., deepen and add more weight to the class struggle.

<23> This analysis, adopted by many neo-Marxists, is a good starting point for relating (post)modernism to the late developments of capitalism. The alternative to what is offered by ‘post-al’ theories is discussed in length by many theoreticians from different perspectives, reactionary and progressive. The philosophical claim of the end of philosophy as a discipline, with the end of ideology and history, has led to diverse reactions. However, what we are interested in here is the ground of such a claim, and the alternative one can offer based upon an historical understanding of the development of the material conditions that have led to it. The fundamental question in philosophy now is whether we should set aside tradition, as called for by many poststructuralists (see Rorty, 1979; 1989).

<24> By relating tradition to foundationalism in Western philosophy only, as Derrida and Rorty do, poststructuralists denounce all of its contingents and give it only Western features, i.e. ‘logocentrism’. Are all philosophical traditions exhausted at the 'end of history' with the 'death of the subject/philosopher'? Is not philosophy, and thus all related theories, passing through, a historical transformation at the end of the millennium, as usually happens at the end of every millennium -- not to say every century? Was J.P. Sartre the last committed Western intellectual/philosopher? Has ‘theory’ taken over philosophy once and for all? In response to Derrida, Edward Said asks: "what makes this system western?" (1983:211). And, this persuades one to ask: are all Islamic, Oriental, African philosophies ‘logocentric’? No one can give a definite answer, except a Borgesian cartographer who can get the ultimate knowledge of all knowledges. That is not to say that one is defending foundationalism, or that one does not reject the idea of a human historical essence shared by all humanity regardless of age and culture. Rather, one tends to believe that there is a dialectical dynamic movement between epochs; a movement between past world-views and our present diverse world-views, which should lead to a better society/world. Within this context, philosophy and ethics still have a crucial role to play.

<25> One of Rorty’s fundamental points in his defence of the ‘de-divinization’ of the world is that Philosophy is no longer a possible enterprise (1979; 1991). Philosophy no longer functions to ground politics and social criticism; hence Rorty’s defence of ‘imagination’ over ‘inquiry’ (1989). The rejection of foundational philosophy tends to reject even what it thinks of itself, of the basis upon which it stands. There is, then, no philosophical account that will finally enable (wo) man to make sense of her/his own life. Is there anything left, which is not exhausted, for philosophy to explore? Can it survive without traditional philosophy, which it rejects completely? How can one, then, have a world-view and make sense of the world? (see Nielsen, 1987). Hilary Putman, for example, believes that not only is traditional philosophy dead, but also ‘analytical philosophy’: "at the moment when analytical philosophy is recognized as 'the dominant movement' in world philosophy, analytical philosophy has come to the end of its own project -- the dead end, not the completion" (1985:28).

<26> Making sense of the world is a big challenge for the anti-foundational poststructuralist philosophies in that such a project requires historical and political consciousness; it requires making sense of the no-sense. The writer/philosopher, according to Georg Lukacs, should leave his/her ivory tower and get involved in the whole socio-political process (1973). To claim that the field is dead, as Rorty implies, does not necessarily mean that one should avoid the surrounding problems of life. As Nielsen argues, Marx, Engels, and Sartre -- to mention but a few -- rebelled against traditional philosophy in the light of dealing with the insistent problems of life. To put it crudely, ‘life comes before philosophy, before theory, and before consciousness;’ however, life is sustained and made eligible through philosophy (and consciousness), which has to change with the dynamic changes in life. Without this dialectical understanding, there can be no philosophical, cultural, self-critical environment: philosophy dies (Nielsen, 1987).

Conclusion

<27> The loss of optimism from which the post-1968 generation suffered opened the door for poststructuralist anti-foundational philosophers to launch their attack against the progressive theories of history, both Marxist and Hegelian. The seeming dissolution of class distinction in what seemed the ability of the worker to get the status symbols of the bourgeois, and the ‘rationality’ of having ‘deterrent’ nuclear weapons, monopolized by the West and used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have led to the nihilism and disillusionment that poststructuralism adopts. The question was, as it still is, what is left to believe in? Ignoring human solidarity in the name of the disappearance of universality, i.e. Western hegemony, is a way of repressing the long legacy of the exploitation of the periphery, now called ‘Third World’.

<28> To claim that poststructuralism's emphasis on the importance of ‘difference’ paved the way -- philosophically and ethically -- for the recognition of the colonized ‘Other’ is an ideological distortion because that does not take into account the importance of resistance -- as a fundamental element -- in the colonial world, a fundamental element that has forced the hegemonic Western intellectual scene to accept the ‘Otherness’ of the colonized. And because the stereotypical images of the ‘Other’ created by colonialism and modernity have been used as the basis for (post)modernism’s understanding and representation of the ‘Other’. In fact, what we have at our disposal is a contradiction between what (post)modernism claims to be defending, i.e. cultural differences, and its contribution to the cultural homogenization of the globe by exporting a philosophy of difference as, among others, a mode of ‘western cultural integration’ (Eagleton, 1999:3). To put it in different words, (post)modernism continues the proceedings of colonialism and modernity, pushing the project to ‘civilize’ and ‘humanize’ the ‘Other’ towards its (post)modern endgame: to absorb and consume the ‘Other’ (Sardar, 1998)

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