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THESIS

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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

Dystopian Elements of Richard Rorty's
Liberal Utopia

presented by

Maude Falcone

has been accepted towards fulfillment
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mun-unmet

 

 

DYSTOPIAN ELEMENTS OF RICHARD RORTY'S LIBERAL UTOPIA:
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RORTY'S PROPOSAL FOR THE REFORM

OF INTELLECTUAL CULTURE AND HIS APPROPRIATION OF GEORGE

ORWEll'S NIHEIEEN ElfiflliziQflB IN CONTINGENCX, IBQNX,
AND SOLIDABIII

BY

Maude Falcone

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTERS OF ARTS

Department of Philosophy

1997

ABSTRACT
DYSTOPIAN ELEMENTS OF RICHARD RORTY'S LIBERAL UTOPIA:

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RORTY'S PROPOSAL FOR THE REFORM OF
INTELLECTUAL CULTURE AND HIS APPROPRIATION OF GEORGE

ORWELL’S NINETEEN ELGEII;EQUB
IN QQNIINEENQXL lBQNXL AND SQLIDAELII
BY

Maude Falcone

Richard Rorty's claim that his reconciliation of irony and
human solidarity is consistent with the interests of
intellectuals is interpreted in terms of the problem of social
legitimation. Rorty's neglect of agency and his tendency to
totalize discursive activity threatens to subordinate
intellectual activity to social institutions and thus relieves
those institutions of theoretical accountability. Within this
context, Rorty's reading of Nineteen Eighty;£eur is questioned
for its failure to account for Orwell's interrogation of the
position of the intellectual in the reproduction of social
institutions. Reading the novel in this light points to an
analogy between Winston Smith and Rorty's ironist. In both
cases it is an awareness of the arbitrariness of institutions
combined with a thoroughgoing powerless which establishes an
identification of the intellectual and institutionalized
power. This analogy suggests that Rorty's reconciliation of
irony and human solidarity might not be consistent with the

interests of intellectuals.

Copyright by
Maude Falcone
1997

‘Acknowledgments

It goes without saying that no work such as this could
be successfully undertaken without the support of others who
take an interest in the ideas contained in it. I owe a
special debt to Professor Richard T. Peterson who acted as
my thesis advisor. His careful readings and thoughtful
suggestions have not only substantially improved the final
version but-~more importantly—-made a beneficial
contribution to the learning process behind it. Professors
Stephen L. Esquith and Mark Sullivan, both of whom served on
my thesis committee, gave the work generous readings and
made the oral examination a pleasant and interesting
experience through their insightful questioning.

Intellectually stimulating and emotionally supportive
personal relationships are indispensable to writing. Rick
Yuille has, in addition to reading previous versions of this
work, been a dear friend and source of inspiration. Steven
Dandaneau accepted responsibility for more than his share of
housework and child care throughout the writing of this and,
at measurable cost to himself, allowed the completion of my
thesis to be our family's top priority. I deeply appreciate
his companionship in matters both domestic and intellectual
and recognize that I could not have finished without his

assistance and encouragement. Finally, there is our son

iv

Patrick whose patience far exceeds that which is appropriate
to his four years of age and whose openness to and being in

the world has enabled me to feel what utopia might be like.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................ 1

PART

I: IRONISM, HUMAN SOLIDARITY, AND SOCIAL LEGITIMATION..9
The Problem of Social Legitimation ..................... 9

The Consistency of Liberalism and Ironism .............. 15

PART II: POST-METAPHYSICAL INTELLECTUAL PRACTICE AND HUMAN
AGENCY ..................................... . ....... ....23
Language, Selfhood, and Truth ................ . ......... 25
Human Agency and Discursive Totality ................... 36
Social Legitimation without Truth ...................... 43

PART III: RE-DESCRIBING NINETEEN_EIGHIX;EQHB ................ 47
Orwell's Contribution to the Self-Understanding of

Contemporary Liberals....................... ...... 50
The Alienation of Winston Smith: The Division of

Labor ............................................. 54
The Alienation of Winston Smith: Doublethink ........... 63

CONCLUSION .................................................. 83

ENDNOTES... ................................................. 9O

BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................. 100

vi

INTRODUCTION

A complex book, Richard Rorty's Centingeneye Irenye and
Seliderity is written at the edges of philosophy and the
liberal tradition of which it is a part. Rorty negotiates
the boundaries between disciplines and fields of study,
searching for continuities between such diverse topics as
philosophy of science and political theory, metaphysics and
psychology. He seeks the point where established
understandings wear thin, clear-cutting the last vestiges of
a philosophical tradition that has outworn its utility.
Having set for himself the task of leading philosophy into
its new post-modern, post-metaphysical, but thoroughly
bourgeois age, Rorty intends to show the practical
implications of his positions for intellectual activity.

A central element of Rorty's CentingeneyL Irenye and
Seliderity is his call to re-evaluate the status of
narratively construed intellectual disciplines such as
literature and ethnography relative to the foundationalist
disciplines of philosophy and social theory. Specifically,

Rorty claims that novels, poems and ethnography, journalism,

comic books, and television programs can successfully
provide for the development of popular normative commitments
at the level of both the individual and the collective
[W mm and Selidaritx [CIS], xvi]. Such
genres as these can produce the substance of a vibrant
intellectual culture capable of meeting the needs for
personal meaning and social or communal stability.
Philosophy and its close relation, social theory, are thus
demoted by Rorty to the status of a special interest: of no
general public relevance and the concern of only the few who
find it satisfying.

That this general position I have attributed to Rorty
tends toward the conservative, as has been pointed out, for
example, by Cornel West (1993), Nancy Fraser (1989), Richard
J. Bernstein, (1987), Jo Burrows (1991), and Roy Bhaskar
(1991), should not come as a surprise given that Rorty
openly acknowledges that his unapologetic liberal political
commitments clearly shape his phiIOSOphical speculations.
Indeed, an important strategy in Rorty's attempt to show the
desirability of his articulation of post-metaphysical
intellectual activity is to establish its consistency with
existing liberal political institutions.

It is with this in mind that I have organized my

position around the theme of social legitimation, as it

relates to intellectuals as intellectuals. I focus on
Rorty's recommendation that intellectual practices dependant
on narratives for their justification should be privileged
over intellectual practices dependant on claims to truth,
analyzing this claim in terms of how such a recommendation
might aid in the task of preserving the taken for granted
nature of social institutions. Specifically, I interpret
Rorty's intention to convince other intellectuals that his
proposed reforms would be consistent with the preservation
and expansion of cultural freedom as an appeal to the self
interest of intellectuals themselves. I argue, in contrast,
that Rorty's promises concerning the freedom of
intellectuals are systematically undercut by the various
restrictions he places on intellectual activity.

Thus, in Part I, I understand Rorty's attempt to
reconcile the contrary tendencies of ironism and human
solidarity in terms of the legitimation of social
institutions. I assume that the task of creating and
supporting a sense of human solidarity and the task of
social legitimation are the same for at stake in both is the
preservation of an institutionalized community in the face
of challenges to its pre-given validity. Following Peter L.
Berger, in Ihe Sacred gangpy, I define social legitimation

as "socially objectivated 'knowledge' that serves to explain

and justify the social order. Put differently,
legitimations are answers to any questions about the why of
institutional arrangements" (1967, 29). The very
possibility of asking about the 'whys' of institutions
presupposes a break down in the pre-given order of the
humanly constructed world such that, the social order
appears as a construction. The successful resolution of
challenges concerning the whys of institutional arrangements
involves actively restoring the 'naturalness' or giveness of
the construction. This is, of course, a perfect
contradiction, the bearing of which requires the
mobilization of intellectual resources necessary to the
contradiction's maintenance.1

Placing Rorty's Contingencxi Ironyr and Solidarity in
this broad context brings out the full complexity of Rorty's
attempted reconciliation of irony and solidarity. Rorty's
effective claim is that the legitimation of liberal
traditions and institutions is only an issue for an elite
population of intellectuals who, by definition, understand
the contingency and mutability of social institutions. This
understanding would have a reflexive element in that it
would include an awareness that the intellectual's own
freedom to question the foundations of social institutions

is itself dependant on liberal institutions. Because of

this, Rorty's implicit claim is that the interests of
intellectuals and the interests of liberal institutions are
the same. As I read Rorty, his recommendation is that
intellectuals should adopt this self-understanding as their
own and, as a result, voluntarily privatize their doubts
about liberal institutions. In short, Rorty is claiming
that intellectuals should see the utility of keeping their
ironic awareness of the fragility of institutions out of
public discourse, lest their own institutionalized freedom.
be threatened.

In addition to this primary, self-imposed, political
limitation on the freedom of intellectuals, I argue in Part
II that Rorty's articulation of a post-metaphysical
intellectual activity also involves various restrictions on
that activity. Specifically, in order to avoid
epistemological quandaries, Rorty tends to treat discursive
and non-discursive practice as if they were two separate
spheres of activity. This results in a severing of
intellectual activity from material, non-discursive
practice. With the goal of showing how this works, I devote
Part II of this essay to examining various aspects of the
construction of Rorty's text. I explore such issues as
Rorty's dismissal of the problem of epistemology, his

metaphoric re-descriptions of various elements of linguistic

activity, his neglect of human agency, and his unification
of the concepts of contingency and freedom. My aim is to
show that, while Rorty's stated intention is to avoid taking
a position on epistemological issues, his consistent
privileging of the discursive side of the epistemological
problematic results in a text that asserts the primacy of
language over the facticity of the body and the embeddedness
of social action in always already existing social
institutions and cultural patterns.

While this position appears to privilege the language
user, I argue that it is a privilege limited by Rorty's
tendency to hypostatise the world as 'out there', immune to
human influence. The result of this, so I claim, is that,
because Rorty openly discounts the possibility that social
and political institutions could be justified independent of
their factual existence, this hypostatization of the world
works to relieve social institutions, and thus
institutionalized social power, of any burden of theoretical
accountability. I discuss this through a reconsideration of
Rorty's treatment of social legitimation that is focused on
how Rorty's dismissal of 'truth' serves the interests of
existing liberal institutions.

After presenting this interpretation of Qootiogoooyi

ltonyi and Solidarity, I consider Rorty's reading of George

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty;£ont. I assume it to be given
that, in the process of furthering various points made by
Rorty in previous chapters, Rorty's reading of Nineteen
Eighty;£ont provides a concrete model of a post-metaphysical
intellectual practice that exemplifies Rorty's intellectual
and political ideals. More precisely, Rorty redescribes
Orwell's last novel in such a way as to both support his own
claim concerning the centrality of social hope to the
liberal tradition and obscure Orwell's own interrogation of
the position of the intellectual in the reproduction of
institutionalized social power and a manifestly irrational
form of social organization.

In contrast, I argue that a reconstruction of Orwell's
insights into social reproduction--including Orwell's
emphasis on the institutional roots and latent functions of
the alienation of intellectuals which he articulated through
the character Winston Smith--suggests an analogy between the
situation of Winston in Nineteen Eighty;£ont and that of the
liberal ironist populating the pages of Qontingenoyi ltonyi
and Soiioetity. The interpretive act of placing Winston's
resistance in the context of the material operation and
intellectual logic of power in Oceanic Society indicates
that Winston's alienation and Rorty's irony have the same

function of establishing the commitment on the part of

intellectuals to the maintenance of existing institutions.
The ironic consequence of this analogy is that it suggests
that in both texts it is a combination of an awareness of
the arbitrariness of social institutions combined with a
thoroughgoing powerlessness that establishes the primacy of
institutionalized social power.

While this situation might undermine the plausibility
of Rorty's appeal to the legacy of George Orwell in the
furthering of his own positions, it also and most
importantly illustrates the potential efficacy of Rorty's
practice of re—description in the pursuit of his political
ends. The analysis of this dynamic helps to illuminate the
technical strengths of Rorty's positions concerning the
reformation of intellectual culture for the legitimation of
social institutions. Even so, recognizing the technical
strengths of Rorty's practice of re-description does not
alleviate the burden of examining that practice for its
desirability, but instead, underscores the urgency of such
an examination. Given that Rorty's proposals for
intellectual reform depend for their implementation on the
voluntary compliance of intellectuals, Rorty's appeals to
the self-interest of intellectuals would seem an appropriate

perspective from which to interrogate their desirability.

I.

SOCIAL LEGITIMATION, HUMAN SOLIDARITY, AND IRONISM

Having rejected theories of human nature, Rorty
does not posit a universal characteristic common to all
members of a post-metaphysical culture. Instead, the
population would be divided according to the extent to which
members question not only who they are but the social
processes that create who they are. On this basis Rorty
suggests that the population of a non-metaphysical culture
would be divided into commonsensical non-metaphysicians and
ironists.2 It is with this distinction in mind that Rorty
frames the issue of creating and supporting a sense of human
solidarity as the posited foundation for a general

commitment to liberal institutions.3

The Problem of Social Legitimation

Rorty introduces the distinction between the ironist
intellectual and the commonsensical non-metaphysician
through a discussion of his idea of a "final vocabulary"4 as
the limit of language and thus the linguistically construed
self. A final vocabulary is composed of words which, if

questioned, cannot be defended argumentatively. Their

defense can only be circular. In Rorty's words, a final
vocabulary is,

a set of words which...[people]...employ to

justify their actions, their beliefs, and their

lives. These are the words in which we formulate

praise of our friends and contempt for our

enemies, our long term projects, our deepest self-

doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words

in which we tell...the story

of our lives (CIS, 73).

In essense, then, one's final vocabulary effectively draws a
circle around the core region of the self. It is the last
resort of a differentiated identity and within that circle
is undifferentiated otherness.

The commonsensical non-metaphysician takes for granted
the taken for granted nature of this vocabulary. As Rorty
describes it, a person operating under the sign of
commonsense would "unselfconsciously describe everything
important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and
those around them are habituated" (CIS, 73). Thus, while
they might acknowledge a relation between social processes
and their final vocabulary, they do not question the
facticity of either this relation or the social processes
themselves. Most people would not be concerned with such
matters, for Rorty "cannot imagine a culture which
socialized its youth in such a way as to make them

continually dubious of their own processes of socialization"

(CIS, 94).

10

Some people, ironist intellectuals in particular, will
harbor such doubts. According to Rorty, this is because,
having been impressed with other final vocabularies, the
ironist understands that even this last resort of language
is contingent on something other than itself. The ironist
knows that while final vocabularies may be the last words on
the matter, they are never the end of the matter, for there
is always an element of arbitrariness to the terms in which
individuals settle on their selves.

It is within the context of this distinction between
ironists and commonsensical non-metaphysicians that Rorty's
position concerning the legitimation of the social bond can
be understood. At stake in Rorty's articulation is the
possibility of grounding and justifying a sense of human
solidarity in a liberal society without recourse to
metaphysical concepts. Rorty claims in the first place
that, "The idea that liberal societies are bound together by
philosophical beliefs...is...ludicrous" (CIS, 87). Instead,
for Rorty, it is common vocabularies and common hopes which
bind liberal societies together. The vocabularies are
dependant on the hopes in so far as "...the principle
function of the vocabularies is to tell stories about future
outcomes which compensate for present sacrifices" (CIS,86).

Such stories of 'social hope' underwrite the commitment of

11

most people to the liberal tradition; and, in "modern,
literate, secular societies (CIS, 86)," these stories are
political in emphasis. Describing these stories, Rorty
writes,

To retain social hope, members of such a society

need to be able to tell themselves a story about

how things might get better, and to see no

insuperable obstacle to this story's coming true

(CIS, 85).
In general, then, Rorty's answer to the question of what
underwrites a sense of social solidarity in a post-
metaphysical culture is a shared belief in progress
articulated through a common vocabulary and narrative
tradition.5

Rorty approaches the problem of justifying and
legitimating such a belief in progress in terms of different
rhetorical strategies appropriate to different segments of
the population. As a rule, this issue of social
legitimation is hardly a dilemma for the majority pOpulation
of commonsensical non-metaphysicians. Because Rorty defines
commonsensical non-metaphysicians, contra ironist
intellectuals, in terms of their lack of reflexivity towards
their final vocabularies, it is unlikely that the issue of
justifying one's sense of solidarity will ever be an issue

for this group. In Rorty's formulation, a commonsensical

non-metaphysician would not need such justification, "...for

12

she was not raised to play the language game in which one
asks for and gets justifications for that sort of belief"
(CIS, 87).

Moreover, the political commitments and allegiances of
commonsensical non-metaphysicians would not be grounded
philosophically through the exploration of principles and
definitions, but, instead, would be grounded through the
exploration of concrete practical alternatives and programs
(CIS, 87). In a different context, Rorty maintains that
liberal political institutions would be better off if
relieved of the burden of philosophical justification.
Appealing to the authority of such figures as John Dewey,
Michael Oakeshott and John Rawls, Rorty writes "...that a
circular justification of our practices which makes one
feature of our culture look good by citing still another, or
comparing our culture invidiously with others with reference
to our own standards, is the only sort of justification we
are going to get" (CIS, 57). Rorty's claim is that, as a
rule, legitimation issues can be resolved through the
narrative re-description of the concrete alternatives to
liberal institutions that make the alternatives look bad and
the liberal institutions look good.

For the ironist, however, social legitimation is a

problem, for it is the habit of ironists to doubt their

13

final vocabularies and reflect on the processes which create
those vocabularies. In other words, the ironist questions
the shared narrative tradition that would otherwise
establish, as given, a sense of human solidarity within a
post-metaphysical liberal society. It is with this group in
mind that Rorty frames the the problem of reconciling the
need for human solidarity or community with the ironic
awareness of the contingency of the same. This problem is
not, for Rorty, irresolvable: although 'irony' and
'community' may involve contrary impulses, they need not be
thought of as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Thus,
while Rorty is fully aware that the combination of a skill
with re-description and a heightened awareness of the
contingency of the terms of re-description can interfere
with the taken for granted nature of community and is thus
potentially dangerous to social stability, he also contends
that intellectuals can choose not to make this a problem by
privatizing such ironic tendencies.6

This privatization of irony would constitute a basic
feature of intellectual life in Rorty's post-metaphysical
intellectual culture. Rorty contends that the privatization
of irony contradicts neither the needs of liberal
institutions nor the interests of a well-intentioned

ironist. Intellectuals who understand the inter-

l4

relationship between liberal institutions and private
freedom will voluntarily censor their ironic reflection.
Moreover, this voluntary compliance with the requirements of
liberalism is itself motivated by an awareness of
contingency”, or irony. Rorty argues this position
concerning the consistency of liberalism and ironism through
a combined appeal to the sympathy and self—interest of

ironist intellectuals.

The Consistency of Ironism With Liberalism

In his appeal to the sympathy of ironist intellectuals,
Rorty contends that the liberal ironist's understanding of
the power of re-description is the foundation for a sense of
solidarity with the commonsensical non-metaphysician. In
other words, the ironist understands the world-destroying
power of words and hence the potentially cruel consequences
of re-descriptive activity. Rorty writes of the liberal
ironist:

She thinks that what unites her with the rest of

the species is not a common language but inst

susceptibility to pain, and in particular to that

special sort of pain which the brutes do not share
with the humans--humiliation (CIS, 92, emphasis in
original);

and,

15

What matters for the liberal ironist is not

finding such a reason [to care about suffering]

but making sure that she notioes suffering when it

occurs. Her hope is that she will not be limited

by her own final vocabulary when faced with the

possibility of humiliating someone with a quite

different final

vocabulary (CIS, 93).
Implicit in this argument that liberal ironists can be
motivated to limit their re-descriptive skills is Rorty's
assumption that liberalism is best understood in terms of
its primary publicly relevant end, "the elimination of
cruelty" (CIS, 65, 68), and that the liberal is one for whom
cruelty is the worst thing humans can do (CIS, xv, 74). In
addition to the relatively unimportant phenomena of its
physical manifestation, in Rorty's lexicon, cruelty refers
to humiliation, a form of cruelty produced through re-
description. Following Elaine Scarry (1985), Rorty writes,

The best way to cause people long lasting pain is

to humiliate them by making the things that seemed

most important to them to look facile, obsolete,

and powerless (CIS, 89).
This is precisely what the intellectual does to the non-
intellectual, for the intellectual's moons ooetsnoi is re-
description and "re-description often humiliates" (CIS, 90).
While this tendency to humiliate is characteristic of both
metaphysical and ironist intellectual activity, ironist

intellectual activity is particularly humiliating, given

that it is informed by an "awareness of the power of re-

16

description" itself (CIS, 89). Because metaphysical re—
description assumes a relationship between a particular re-
description and some sort of truth, its humiliating
tendencies are compensated for by promises of an increase in
power, freedom, enlightenment or some other such value. It
is a humiliation attenuated by hope. Ironists make no such
promises, for their heightened awareness of the arbitrary
moment in all re-descriptive activity prevents this.
Ironists thus humiliate without the ancillary claim that
something good will come of it. According to Rorty,
ironists who desire not to be cruel will, in public life,
not like a metaphysician or hold their tongues, reserving
their irony for the privacy of their own homes.8 Of course,
this can only be counted on in the liberal, one who, above
all else, is dedicated to the elimination of cruelty. Rorty
is aware that not all ironists are liberal.

It is, perhaps, with the non-liberal ironist in mind--
the intellectual who does not care about caring--that Rorty
includes within his attempt to establish the compatibility
of liberalism and ironism suggestions that it would be in
the self-interest of ironists themselves to recognize the
validity, or at least the utility, of his position.9 .Again,
Rorty's definition of liberalism provides the basis for this

argument. According to Rorty, the liberal desire to

17

eliminate cruelty is related to the desire to expand private
freedom in the interest of increasing opportunities for
self-creation. Because cruelty deprives humans of their
ability to use language (CIS, 94) and thus of their ability
to create their selves, cruelty is contrary to this end.
Because ironism is potentially humiliating and thus
potentially cruel, it is inappropriate for political
discourse and should be limited to the private sphere. Such
a limitation might on the surface appear to contradict the
end of expanding freedom, but, in Rorty's accounting, it
does no such thing. This is because Rorty works with two
understandings of 'freedom', one appropriate to public life
and one appropriate to private life.

With regard to the former, Rorty resists defining
political freedom in terms other than existing liberal
political institutions, which, in his View, should be
thought of as having been "designed to diminish cruelty,
make possible government by consent of the governed, and
permit as much domination-free communication as possible to
take place" (CIS, 68) in order to optimize the "balance
between leaving people's private life alone and preventing
suffering" (CIS, 63). Public, or political freedoms, such
as those which exist "when the press, the judiciary, the

elections and the universities are free" (CIS, 84), are

18

necessary to the liberal goal of maximizing opportunities
for self-creation. Rorty writes,

...without the protection of something like the

institutions of bourgeois liberal society, people

will be less able to work out their private

salvations, create their private self-images,

reweave their webs of belief and desire in light

of whatever new people and books they happen to

encounter (CIS, 84-5).

Understood in this way, freedom in the public sphere is
limited by the goal of maximizing freedom in the private
sphere. It is here that Rorty's counsel that ironists
should privatize "their attempts at authenticity and purity"
lest they come "to think that there is some social goal more
important than avoiding cruelty" (CIS, 65) can be seen as an
appeal to the self—interests of ironists themselves.

As Rorty understands it, irony, an attitude oriented
towards questioning that which is held in common by members
of a community, especially the pre-given sense of human
solidarity, is necessarily parasitic on, and disruptive of,
common traditions and vocabularies. Additionally, and for
this reason, irony involves a reflexive understanding of the
contingent nature of communal institutions and is thus
intimately aware of the fragility of those institutions.
Even the liberal value of private freedom oriented towards

self-creation is contingent on the lucky coincidence of

various historical tendencies. Because of this, Rorty

19

suggests that not only are liberal institutions contingent
on such things as peace, wealth, universal literacy, and
higher education, but that the ironist's freedom to question
those institutions, and recreate their selves according to
an alternative image of their own choosing, is equally
contingent. In short, the freedom to pursue the project of
private perfection is a liberal freedom dependant on the
institutions characteristic of a liberal society. The
implication of Rorty's claim is that the interest of the
ironist and the interest of liberal institutions are the
same: the ironist seeks private perfection and liberal
institutions create and preserve the conditions wherein that
search might be possible for the greatest number of people.
The ironist should thus recognize the utility of keeping
whatever doubts they may have about those institutions to
themselves, lest they shake the ground of their own freedom.
Summarizing these considerations, Rorty confronts the
problem of creating a sense of human solidarity in the
interest of preserving a general commitment to social
institutions from two perspectives, that appropriate to the
general population of commonsensical non—metaphysicians and
that appropriate to an elite population of ironist
intellectuals. It is the latter issue which is the more

complex one, for, as a rule, social legitimation is only a

20

problem for intellectuals who question the foundation-—
philosophical or otherwise--of social institutions. Rorty
provides a dual response to this issue which involves an
appeal to sympathy directed at those who might find such an
appeal compelling and an appeal to self-interest for those
who do not. Thus, even if one is not instinctively repulsed
by cruelty or if one is not quite taken by Rorty's equation
of 'cruelty', 'humiliation', 're-description', and
'intellectual activity,’ one might be persuaded of the
validity of the liberal cause by considerations of one's own
interest in that cause, namely, that Rorty's liberalism
promises to protect even the most difficult and recalcitrant
ironist.

It has been argued by Nancy Fraser (1989, 100-2), Roy
Bhaskar (1991, 89-91), Charles Anderson (1991, 367), and
others, that, if taken at face value, this reconciliation of
the contrary tendencies of ironism and liberalism would seem
to depend on the salience of Rorty's distinction between
'public' and 'private' spheres-—a distinction which is
notoriously unstable in liberal political thought.
Criticizing Rorty on this count, however, assumes that there
ought to be a relation between the ideas expressed in

W ILQDX... and Solidaritx and non-discursive

material practice. In essence, such criticisms assume that

21

this work is best interpreted as a program for institutional
change and that questions of practicability are relevant
issues. That Rorty does often adopt the voice and persona
of a strident critic and reformer tirelessly dedicated to
social causes--a post-modern Jane Addams--lends credence to
this assumption. However, if one brackets these rhetorical
devices and focuses on Rorty's stated commitment to a
consistently maintained rejection of attempts to posit or
assume a positive relation between linguistically construed
artifacts and those which are not linguistically construed,
the relevance of such questions is immediately brought into
question. Having set aside the epistemological problematic
as irretrievably metaphysical, Rorty also sets aside all
issues revolving around the relation between language and
that which is external to language. This includes concrete
programs for institutional reform as well as problems
arising from actual attempts to practice his posited
reconciliation of the pursuit of private perfection and the
pursuit of human solidarity. That Rorty's stated intention
is conservative with respect to existing social institutions
implies that part of his aim is precisely to prevent the
translation of ironic reflection on the contingency of
institutions into a viable program for institutional change.

When set in the context of the historical fact that the

22

public-private split has proven, in practice, to be very
stable given the absence of revolution in liberal societies,
Rorty's own sophisticated, participatory self-understanding

renders questionable the relevancy of criticizing

Contingsncyi Ironyi and Solidarity on these grounds.

II.

POST-METAPHYSICAL INTELLECTUAL PRACTICE AND HUMAN.AGENCY

It is now possible to consider in closer detail Rorty's
attempt to develop an understanding of intellectual activity
which neither posits nor assumes an epistemological
position. Rorty's stated intention is to avoid entanglement
in what he considers to be the irresolvable problems
inherent in a concept of truth which involves understanding
truth as a representation of "the world". These problems
have been articulated in his earlier work, Eniiosoohy and
tbs Mitten of Nature (1979). In gentinaanayi thnxi and
soiiostity, Rorty assumes, as given, many of the positions
worked out in BhlLQSQDhX and Lbs MiILQI Qfi Nainzfit applying
them to new problems and contexts.10 Because of this, those
positions lose contact with their origins in a specific

argument against the Cartesian tradition of philosophy. It

is this aspect of Contingsngyi Ironyi and Solidarity that I

23

am considering here. For example, Rorty's interrogation of
the problems inherent in conceptualizing "truth" as a

representation or correspondence to reality outlined in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature... has, by the time of
Contingency; Ironyz and Solidarity. been extended by Rorty

to include any posited or assumed relation between
'language' and something external to it. "Truth" is thus
dispensed with as a regulative ideal. My concern is to
explore some of the consequences of this, focusing on
Rorty's tendency in contingenoyi itonyi end solidstity to
treat 'language' and the 'world' as separate spheres. I
argue that this separation, when combined with his textual
practice of privileging the sphere of 'language', has a
double result: it restricts the significance of language to
its pragmatic utility in furthering the immediate concerns
of the language user at the same time as it works to
hypostatize the world, as it exists.

In order to develop this analysis, I will first provide
a brief summary of Rorty's positions on language and self-
hood. After this, I will turn my attention to an
examination of Rorty's practice of text construction.11
This, in order to explore how Rorty's explicit positions are
refined, taking on added meanings and shapes, in the

articulation of his positions. In other words, I endeavor

24

to show how Rorty's practice of text construction exerts a
constitutive influence on his positions. To this end, I
analyze Rorty's emphasis on the power of the language user
and how this emphasis is consistently undermined by an
invocation of objective contexts of powerlessness
(illustrated in the metaphors he uses to describe language
use within given vocabularies, vocabularies as a whole, and
a posited post-metaphysical culture) and Rorty's tendency to
totalize discursive activity (illustrated in his treatment
of the prudence/morality distinction). I conclude from
these considerations that Rorty does not give sufficient
attention to non-discursive human agency--the human capacity
to affect the objective structural conditions of their
existence through material practice--in his articulation of
his conception of intellectual activity. At this point, I
consider how this relates to Rorty's position that "freedom"
is founded on and limited by "contingency". I conclude this
section with a reconsideration of Rorty's proposed solution
to the problem of creating and preserving a general

commitment to liberal social institutions.

Language, Self-Hood, and Truth

Rorty lobbies for a disenchanted View of language that

25

neither depends on a conception of truth as anything other
than habit nor requires the positing of an inner truth prior
to or beyond language (CIS, 19). According to Rorty,
versions of language which treat language as a medium (CIS,
10-11) or third thing (CIS, 14) coming between humans and
the world, imply access to something external to language,
either to be represented or expressed. Rorty argues that
because this view involves a subject-object picture of
language, they remain entangled in irresolvable problems
(CIS, 10-11). While Rorty does not deny the existence of
worlds outside of language, he resists philosophical
integration of these worlds. Instead, Rorty approaches
language pragmatically. Thus, for Rorty, languages are
composed of vocabularies which neither represent the world
nor express an inner truth or message (CIS, 19). Instead,
vocabularies are the means for describing and redescribing
the world and one's relations in it. Significantly,
different vocabularies might be used to describe the same
object, there being no necessary connection between a given
vocabulary and the object in question. The choice between
two incompatible vocabularies is not a question of their
relation to the object. Rather, such a choice is a question
of their relative efficacy in the pursuit of given ends

(CIS, 19, 21). In Rorty's articulation, these ends are

26

external to the vocabulary, referring to the language user's
social or communal context (CIS, 11-15, 20-22).

Rorty's treatment of self-hood follows from and is
consistent with his treatment of language. Having already
rejected as metaphysical notions of something prior to
language, Rorty presents the sense of having a self, or
self-hood, as a function of its linguistically construed
identity. The self, as Rorty articulates it, is nothing
more than that which employs language, particularly
metaphor, to construct a personal history which would
distinguish it from its fellow humans.

Rorty describes three basic approaches to this problem
of identity, describing each in terms of their attitude to
the problem of contingency which is primarily understood in
terms of one's dependency on other humans (CIS, 27, 37—38).
There is, first, the metaphysical approach, which never
comes to terms with the fact of contingency, instead seeking
refuge in its identification with that which is not
contingent (CIS, 26-7). There is, second, the strongly
poetic approach which, in its appreciation of contingency,
attempts to appropriate it for its own purposes, thereby
hoping to individuate itself by making others contingent
upon it (CIS, 27—30). Finally, there is the approach of the

weak poet”, who has come to terms with contingency in the

27

knowledge that its individuation can only be a partial
unfinished project, always parasitic on a wider community
(CIS, 35-8, 42-3). It is this weakly poetic model of self-
creation that Rorty takes to be the most appropriate for
describing what most people in his liberal utopia would be
like. In his discussion of this model, Rorty attempts to
establish the plausibility of a self which receives its
identity, its sense of itself, and its individuation, from
the social network of which it is a part (CIS, 42-3).13

Rorty's intention to avoid metaphysics“ encourages him
to reject a concept of 'truth' that is anything more than a
convenient term for describing settled habits or conventions
(CIS, 5—7). Because of this, Rorty rejects any attempt to
establish a concrete relation between language and the world
or between language and a pre-linguistic self, such as is
implied in a correspondence or expressive theory of truth.
His thinking is that, since truth is a property of
statements (CIS, 5, 7), and since statements always take a
language dependant form and are thus socially and culturally
determined by the conventions of the language community,
then truth can mean nothing other than the conventions and
habits regulating discourse (CIS, 18—19). At best, then,
and mostly by implication,15 'truth' is, for Rorty, a

shorthand expression for the totality of institutions

28

assumed in the use of language. Truth is not, therefore, a
property of the world to be discovered or even a
characteristic of the relation between discursive systems
and something external to those systems (CIS, 5).

Because of considerations such as these, Rorty
dismisses a theory of truth which posits a connection
between language and something that exists independently of
language. This unwillingness to assume such a connection
between language and that which is external to it is evident
in both his pragmatic understanding of language and his
understanding of self-hood as a coping mechanism. In both
cases, Rorty avoids defining his objects of analysis in
terms of what they one, choosing instead to define them
functionally, in terms of how they work in the human effort
to deal with contingency on other humans. From this
perspective, language is a means to directly manipulate
other people. A sense of self is, in its turn, the product
of processes of indirect manipulation, or imaginative re-
descriptions of one's personal relationships in terms of
ones own choosing.

Rorty's focus, in both cases, is centered on the active
agent or subject and his emphasis is on empowerment. This
empowerment, however, occurs in an objective context of

powerlessness. He writes of the power of the objective

29

world that it is not "the sort we can appropriate by
adopting and then transforming its language, thereby
becoming identical with the threatening power and subsuming
it under our own more powerful selves. This latter strategy
is appropriate only for coping with other persons..." (CIS,
40). As an instrument uniquely suited for overcoming the
power of other humans, language is, as Rorty presents it, of
no use for influencing the extra-linguistic environment.
Thus, while "the world can blindly and inarticulately crush
us; mute despair, intense mental pain can cause us to blot
ourselves out" (CIS, 40), re-description is a poor defense
against that sort of thing. 'The world' which exists
independent of its description is not vulnerable to the
transformative power of language, nor is the body of the
self so vulnerable, since it, too, exists independent of
one's linguistically construed identity.16 Rorty writes
that "...our relationship to the world, to brute power and
to naked pain, is not the sort of relation we have to
persons," concluding that, "when faced with the non-human
and the non—linguistic, we no longer have an ability to
overcome contingency and pain" (CIS, 40).

This tension between Rorty's subject-centered focus and
his invocation of an objective context of powerlessness is

illustrated in Rorty's choice of metaphors that he employs

30

to describe elements of linguistic activity. Such
metaphors, as Rorty acknowledges, exert a constitutive
influence on the conception of language Rorty is presenting
and the implicit conception of the kinds of humans who might
use it. Understanding the implications of these metaphors
is thus essential to a full understanding of the
complexities of Rorty's positions. For example, the
descriptive differences between Rorty's treatment of
language use within discursive systems and discursive
systems as a whole point directly to the conception of human
agency Rorty is working with.

When describing language use within a given vocabulary,
Rorty relies on metaphors which privilege the acting subject
such as those implied in his use of the terms "language
game" or "tool." Through these metaphors, Rorty creates a
picture of linguistic interaction which is both inherently
empowering and manipulative. For example, in comparing
language to a "tool," Rorty suggests it is an instrument
ideally suited to coping with the human environment. In
this way, Rorty presents language as a means through which
the subject increases its power in the world. Along the
same lines, Rorty's use of the metaphor "language game"
creates a picture of language use that resembles a strategic

competition in which words and sentences are the means of

31

play and metaphor the characteristic maneuver. While Rorty
does not concretely specify how one "wins," he does indicate
that the goal is always to produce effects on one's
linguistic partner. For Rorty, this means to change how
others speak, and in this way change how they act and who
they are (CIS, 18, 20). Both of these metaphors privilege
the acting, speaking subject at the expense of their
communicative partner, treating the latter as a contingency
to be dealt with or overcome.

Referring to vocabularies as a whole, Rorty relies on
metaphors which are very different from those just described
in that they work to displace the privilege of the speaking
subject. In presenting his View of the history of ideas,
Rorty often uses naturalistic metaphors such as
"contingency" and "evolution" (CIS, 16-17). For example,
referring to his analogy between natural evolution and the
history of ideas, Rorty writes,

This analogy lets us think of "our language"--that

is, of the science and culture of twentieth-

century Europe--as something that took shape as a

result of a great number of sheer contingencies.

Our language and our culture are as much a

contingency, as much a result of thousands of

small mutations finding niches (and millions of

others finding no niches) as are the orchids and

anthropoids (CIS, 16).

As this statement indicates, in Rorty's usage, these

metaphors suggest that, while language as a whole may be

32

subject to change, it, like all natural systems, is not
subject to conscious manipulation. Given Rorty's usage of
such phrases as "random factors" (CIS, l7) and "blind
contingent mechanical forces" (CIS, l7), Rorty's treatment
of these metaphors precludes a discussion of the
specifically historical. At issue is the role of conscious
human activity: the concept of history preserves a place for
it while concepts like contingency and evolution do not.
The result of relying on these metaphors is that Rorty
treats the history of discursive systems or vocabularies
with the same reverent indifference typically reserved for
natural phenomena beyond the scope of human agency: "It
hardly matters how the trick was done. The results were
marvelous" (CIS, 17).

A troubling dynamic emerges when, in the act of
interpretation, these two sets of metaphors are brought
together. On the one hand, Rorty's use of instrumentalist
and gaming metaphors appears to empower the language user.
On the other hand, this empowerment is undermined by his
further reliance on the metaphors of contingency and
evolution which demand passivity in the face of the language
system. In this way, empowerment occurs only within the
context of a greater dis-empowerment.

This dynamic is intensified in Rorty's use of the

33

 

metaphor "playfulness" to describe the culture anticipated
in his re-description of intellectual activity. This
metaphor points to a culture wherein an empowered subject
operates and is limited by an objective context of
powerlessness. A culture characterized by playfulness would
be made possible by the de-devinization of both "the world"
and "the self." As Rorty presents it, such de—devinization
would involve no longer seeing the world and the self in
anthropomorphic terms, or as "quasi-persons" (CIS, 40).
Because the world and the self are insensitive to language,
caring neither to be represented or expressed, re-
description is useless. The use of metaphor to represent
and transform only applies to other people and is of little
value when dealing with the non-human and the non-
linguistic.

According to Rorty, then, this resignation in the face
of the world and the non-linguistic self would allow for the
development of a culture wherein projects of self-creation
would be characterized by a "spirit of playfulness" (CIS,
39-40). Importantly, it is the recognition of contingency
that underwrites this cultural freedom. Presumably, once
reconciled to their own contingency, people would no longer
feel responsible to the conditions of their existence and

would no longer feel responsible for things they cannot

34

change. Unconstrained by the objective demands of their
situation and reconciled to their own powerlessness, they
could afford to dispense with seriousness and pretension;
they would be free to pursue diverse projects of self-
creation.l7

In general, then, Rorty's use of subject-centered
metaphors to describe language use and his re-description of
intellectual culture in terms of play both imply an
effective objective state of powerlessness. Rorty's
instrumentalist and gaming metaphors suggest that
individuals can use language to further their own immediate
ends or desires. However, Rorty's language users are
powerless in the face of the objective context in which they
use language. They may successfully maneuver within a
particular language game, but the nature of the game itself,
its rules and conditions, is beyond their control.
Furthermore, Rorty's contention that an intellectual culture
premised on the full appreciation of contingency and
characterized by an experimental, non-binding approach to
its artifacts suggests that members of such a culture would
be free to choose their own narrative identities. They
would, however, remain passive with respect to the
conditions of their existence. In other words, their

freedom would be of a compensatory, coping nature, and not

35

expandable to material practice.

Human Agency and Discursive Totality

As both Rorty's dismissal of the problem of the
relation between language and phenomena that exist
independent of it and the above consideration of the various
metaphors Rorty uses to describe elements of intellectual
practice is intended to show, Rorty's evasion of the
epistemological problematic limits his recognition of human
agency to its manifestation in discursive activity. In
other words, Rorty does not include within his accounting
the human capacity for concretely influencing the conditions
of their existence through material practice, or practice
which takes a non-discursive form. Simply stated, Rorty
devalues the activity of bodies. At the same time, he does
not deny this activity. His claim that language is useless
against the real power of the world and self implies that
there is something beyond language even if it cannot be
articulated or known. The result is that Rorty works with
two spheres of activity which do not come into contact with
each other. Moreover, Rorty's performative privileging of
that which can be articulated, or that which takes a

discursive form, renders the two spheres not only separate

36

but unequal as well.

This can be seen, for example, in Rorty's inclination
to totalize discursive activity treating it as a self-
contained sphere, evident in Rorty's adoption of a coherence
theory of truth. Rorty's strictures against referentiality
necessitates the replacement of an intellectual standard
that might recognize the binding force of an objective order
such as was implied in the conceptions of language he
opposes, with that of internal consistency. The criteria
for evaluating any given discursive system is rendered by
Rorty to be internal to that system.

A consequence of this inclination to totalize the
universe of discourse by making the criteria for evaluation
internal to the discursive unit is that, in neither assuming
nor positing a possible connection between intellectual and
material phenomena, Rorty extends the ban on metaphysics to
include anthropology, sociology, history and other theory
dependant empirical research projects.18 Illustrating this,
Rorty provides various narrative accounts of the history of
philosophy in the last two or three centuries.19 In none of
these accounts does Rorty intend to provide an empirical
description of what actually happened in the historical
period he addresses. Instead, through re—description, Rorty

provides various definitions of the history of philosophy,

37

 

and thus prefigures the sorts of responses adequate to that
history. Moreover, without ever appealing to what, in fact,
'actually happened,’ Rorty invokes what happened some two or
three hundred years ago to give rise to philosophy as we
know it, thereby reducing history to its telling.20
Explaining his method in general, he writes of his project:

The method is to redescribe lots and lots of

things in new ways, until you have created a

pattern of linguistic behavior which will temp the

rising generation to adopt it, thereby causing

them to look for appropriate new forms of non-

linguistic behavior (CIS, 9).

This suggests both the extent of his intent to redescribe
and its acknowledged manipulative tendencies.

A further illustration of Rorty's tendency to totalize
the universe of discourse occurs in his discussion of the
distinction between prudence and morality.21 Appealing to
the insights of Freud, who "lets us see the moral
consciousness as historically conditioned, a product as much
of time and chance as of political or aesthetic
consciousness" (CIS, 30), Rorty redescribes morality in
terms of prudence (CIS, 32-3). His suggestion is this: what
is usually understood as a function of 'moral consciousness'
is better understood as a possible or attempted adaptation
to a particular situation. Accordingly, the distinction

between morality and prudence is that between alternative

modes of adaptation or the expression of a particular self

38

in the attempt to cope with certain contingent facts of its
existence. In other words, Rorty understands morality in
terms of prudence. Following from this, Rorty redescribes
Kantian morality in terms of Kant's psychology, that is,
Kant's idiosyncratic, though perhaps laudable, desire to
make room for "the unselfish, un-self

conscious, unimaginative, decent, honest, dutiful person"
(CIS, 34) with whom, Rorty suggests, Kant identified due to
(unspecified) events of his personal history (CIS, 33).

This tendency to interpret intellectual positions in
terms of psychological dispositions, establishes, in Rorty's
text, the totality of psychological processes. Given
Rorty's understanding of the 'self' as a linguistically
construed identity, this totality remains a discursive
totality, one which is limited by the narratives individuals
settle on to tell their life's story. Intellectual
commitments become indicative of nothing more than one's own
experiences, narratively construed. This, in turn,
threatens a closed system where the significance of
intellectual claims is reduced by the fact that, unlike
intellectual differences which beg resolution, psychological
differences, making no claims to objectivity, are easily
tolerated and need not be settled one way or the other.

It is here that Rorty's overriding emphasis on

39

psychological processes, and his re—description of
intellectual matters in terms of those processes, can be
seen to subordinate thought to social institutions, and
thereby contains thought's powers of negation to individual
concerns.22 The details of Rorty's attempt to come to terms
with the conditionedness of intellectual and cultural
productions in Qontinoenoyi ltonyi end Soiioetity renders
invisible and thus unaccountable the highly mediated social
processes that have also been said to exert their influence.
In the working out of his position, Rorty places the burden
of explanation on those variables immediately present within
the individual life-world, privileging that which is close
at hand.

At issue in all this is that, in the working out of his
account of an intellectual activity which can avoid what he
takes to be the intractable dilemmas of the epistemological
problematic, Rorty fails to incorporate into his position
any recognition of the long acknowledged human capacity for
influencing objective conditions through material practice.

This results in the assumption of two self-contained
spheres of activity, one relating to intellectual phenomena
and one relating to material phenomena. This suggests a
duality applicable at the level of lived experience.

However, as is suggested by Rorty's tendency to totalize the

40

 

universe of discourse, this dualism is not sufficiently
sustained in the working out of the details of his position
in contingenoyi itonyi end Soiidstity. The tension between
the two poles quickly collapses.

The consequences of this collapse can be seen most
clearly in Rorty's contention that freedom is best
understood in terms of the "recognition of contingency"

(CIS, 46), which means that freedom is both founded on and
limited by the experienced awareness of contingency (CIS,
40). Rorty's privileging of the speaking subject does
preserve a form of freedom”; however, Rorty's neglect of
human agency--the power to impact the material conditions of
one's existence and the existence of others through concrete
practice--limits his articulation of the concept freedom to
its most abstract, subjective form.

Moreover, combined with his abstract, negative
rendering of contingency, this downgrading of agency
obscures the self- directed, self-formative structuring of
human behavior. Rorty's equation of contingency with
randomness24 closes off from analysis that which human
behavior is contingent upon, suggesting, at times, that such
analysis is the product of an only psychologically relevant,
metaphysical approach to the world (CIS, 26-7). There would

be no point to inquiring into the concrete determinants of

41

human behavior if those determinants are already assumed to
be randomly distributed. Agency is in this way rendered
inexplicable and unanalyzable and thus not subject to
evaluation.

This last move effectively unifies the concepts of
contingency and freedom. Rorty concludes from his
recognition that there is nothing universal governing human
behavior that human behavior is contingent upon
unpredictable random events not subject to conscious
control. When combined with Rorty's implied understanding
of freedom in negative terms, as not being subject to
conscious control, this leads Rorty to assume that
contingency is the foundation for human freedom. An
embracing of contingency is the best protection freedom can
hope for.

In summary, then, I have considered Rorty's attempt to
develop what he considers to be a post-metaphysical account
of intellectual activity. His stated intention to avoid
epistemological issues, combined with his neglect of agency,
creates an unstable dualism in the face of the relation
between intellectual and material phenomena. In the
articulation of his positions, this dualism collapses into a
monistic totality of discourse. Intellectual activity is in

this way rendered by Rorty to be a self-contained, self-

42

 

referential sphere, its objective significance limited to
the immediate concerns of the language user. Finally, this
results in the hypostatization of existing social
institutions and institutional social power. This dynamic
is consistent with Rorty's intention to develop a model of
intellectual practice capable of meeting intellectual
challenges to social institutions, for it occurs in a
context where Rorty discounts the possibility that social
and political institutions can be justified independent of
the fact that they exist.25 In short, Rorty's tendency to
hypostatize the world independent of language helps to
relieve social institutions of any burden of accountability,

both theoretical and practical.

Social Legi timation Without Truth

A central aspect of Rorty's attempt to persuade
intellectuals to relieve themselves of metaphysics involves
his contention that the embracing of the contingency of
community would be a step further in the progressive
disenchantment of the world, a step which most liberal
intellectuals have been unwilling to take. Rorty's claim is
that liberal social institutions would not be endangered by

a general appreciation of the fact and its implications that

43

communities are not permanent self—subsisting entities, but,
rather, are dependent always on situations and conditions
(CIS, 44, 57). Such an appreciation would aid in the
development of a world view consistent with the liberal
values of individual freedom and tolerance, particularly in
the domain of culture (CIS, 52). This is because
institutions would not (if they ever did [CIS, 86]) depend
on philosophical justifications for their legitimacy.
Intellectuals would thus be liberated to pursue the popular
forms of literature and political rhetoric (CIS, 53-5).
Furthermore, this shift away from epistemology and
metaphysics would neutralize long established ideological
threats to existing institutions (CIS, 53, 69).

Rorty hints at the potential efficacy of his position
in his recognition that, if it were widely accepted, it
would be necessary to give up

the idea that liberalism could be justified, and

Nazi and Marxist enemies refuted, by driving the

latter up against an argumentative brick

wall...[for]...any attempt to drive one's opponent

up against a wall in this way fails when the wall

against which he is driven comes to be seen as one

more vocabulary, one more way of describing things

(CIS, 53).

This, however, is only a minor problem, for while it does
undermine the possibility of meeting social criticism with

arguments, it also neutralizes the impact of those

criticisms. An intellectual culture that viewed all

44

positions as artifacts, that seeks a multiplicity of
vocabularies and perspectives, could tolerate even highly
critical perspectives so long as they were considered just
examples of many possible perspectives.26

It seems that Rorty's suggestion is that liberal
institutions would be strengthened if their justifications
were always dependent on the institutions being legitimated.
Such circularity, when accepted as valid, would render the
intellect an ineffective weapon against social institutions
and established powers. This would, in turn, create the
conditions for the generalization of intellectual freedom:
no longer able to do much damage, intellectuals could also
provide a positive legitimating function both in the
practice of that freedom and its product.

Rorty's claims further that the product of a liberated
intellect would not be restricted to negative, de-
legitimating practices, but would still prove useful to
attempts to generate positive legitimacy. This claim refers
to the significance of "stories of social hope" described
above. According to Rorty, such stories underwrite the
commitment of the general population to liberal social
institutions. Providing these stories is a literary
project, and therefore, according to Rorty, is not a job for

philosophers or even social theorists. Rather, this

45

important task is ceded to novelists, ethnographers, and
others who produce thick descriptions of everyday life. As
Rorty presents it, the focus of such thick descriptions
would be on private, inarticulate suffering, thereby giving
this suffering a linguistic, and thus, potentially, public
form.27 In this process, writers contribute to creating the
conditions for solidarity with the victims.28 Summarizing
this position, Rorty writes:

Within an ironist culture,...it is the disciplines

which specialize in thick descriptions of the

private and idiosyncratic which are assigned this

job of [of creating human solidarity]. In

particular, novels and ethnographies which

sensitize one to the pain of those who do not

speak our language must do the job which

demonstrations of a common human nature were

supposed to do. Solidarity has to be created out

of little pieces...(CIS, 94).

In the above discussion, I have explored some of the
implications of Rorty's proposed compromise with
intellectuals in which he urges the limitation of philosophy
and social theory to the private sphere which, in his
rendering, effectively subordinates public discourse to the
task of maintaining social institutions. His acknowledged
goals are political: he describes his intentions concerning
ironist theory in terms of how, through privatization,
ironism can be prevented from "becoming a threat to

political liberalism" (CIS, 190, see also 197). Assuming a

liberal world as the best possible world, Rorty devotes

46

himself to the project of developing an understanding of
intellectual practice which would not and could not come
into conflict with liberal social institutions. The
extremes to which he is willing to go--illustrated in his
ban on concrete referentiality, whereby he cuts language,
and thus thought, off from the world, transforming it into a
self-contained sphere, capable of referring only to the
idiosyncratic needs of individuals--is suggestive of the
tenacity of his commitment to the status quo.29 Even so,
that Rorty is willing to go to such extremes in the
disabling of the intellect further implies that an
unfettered intellect must be very powerful indeed.
Alternatively, but equally to the point, Rorty's restriction
of all intellectual practice to a very narrow sphere,
indicates, as much as anything else, that the customs and

institutions he intends to defend rest on very shaky ground.

III.

RE-DESCRIBING HIEEIEEB 21931122928

I will now consider Richard Rorty's treatment of George

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty;£ont as a concrete model of a post—

metaphysical intellectual practice which, in addition to

furthering the specific claims made in Qontinoenoyi Ironyi

47

and fioiidatity, exemplifies Rorty's intellectual ideals. In
general, Rorty appeals to Orwell's legacy30 in his effort to
support his claim that literature and related genres can do
the job of developing a normative framework consistent with
the liberal goal of preventing cruelty and furthering human
solidarity that has been traditionally reserved for
foundationalist disciplines such as philosophy (CIS, 95,
185-6, 190). This appeal is combined with an interpretation
of Nineteen Eighty;£ont which treats this novel as a
concrete alternative to Rorty's own posited utopia. Through
the character O'Brien, Nineteen Eighty;£ont provides a model
of intellectual activity not informed by liberal hope, and
in this way the novelist George Orwell has proved useful to
Richard Rorty's liberalism. Indeed, for Rorty, Orwell has
provided contemporary intellectuals with a compelling
narrative that renders attractive even the most minimalist
vision of his liberalism.31

After briefly considering Rorty's reading of Nineteen
Eighty;£ont as it relates to the self-understanding of
intellectuals, I will argue that Rorty's interpretation
obscures Orwell's interrogation of the position of the
intellectual relative to the reproduction of
institutionalized social power. Specifically, I propose

that, in Nineteen Eighty—Four, Orwell articulates through

48

the character Winston Smith one danger facing intellectuals
who, by virtue of their profession, contribute to the
reproduction of their own domination, which, also by virtue
of their profession, they only partially understand. This
is significant because an interpretation of Nineteen Eighty;
Eon; which adopts this as its organizing theme is not only
truer to the text in question, but also suggests an analogy
between the resistance of Winston Smith to the Party's power
and Rorty's use of the idea of irony as underwriting social
legitimation in liberal societies. Just as Rorty claims
that irony, as the experienced awareness of contingency,
both undermines and re-establishes the primacy of liberal
institutions, Winston's half—articulated recognition of the
arbitrariness of the Party's power was the foundation for
establishing a thorough going identification with that
power. More to the point, Rorty's irony and Winston's
alienation have the same latent function of establishing the
primacy of institutionalized social power. Because of this,
I will argue, contra Rorty, that the primary danger
presented in Nineteen Eighty;£ont is not cruelty or
humiliation, but the failure of intellectuals to place their
own selves in their objective context and incorporate into
their self-understanding their own powerlessness. I will

also draw out the analogy between Winston's alienation and

49

Rorty's ironism, effectively redescribing Winston Smith as

an ironic intellectual.

Orwell's Contribution to the Self-understanding
of Contemporary Liberals

Rorty's interpretation of Nineteen Eighty;£ont revolves
around Orwell's contribution to the self-understanding of
intellectuals in a climate threatened by a loss of liberal
hope, where it seems that liberal ideals have little chance
of realization. According to Rorty, the character O'Brien
is Orwell's answer to the question of how intellectuals
"might conceive of themselves, once it had become clear that
liberal ideals had no relation to a possible human future"
(CIS, 171). The lesson of O'Brien is particularly urgent
given that Rorty does "not think that we liberals son now
imagine a future of 'human dignity, freedom and peace'"
(CIS, 181-2). The current situation is one that is likely
to favor the emergence of intellectuals like O'Brien, whose
only pleasure in life is the spectacle of other people's
pain.

In general, then, Rorty interprets Orwell's positive
achievement in the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Eonr as a sort
of object lesson, invoking it as a thinly veiled threat: in

the absence of liberal hope, intellectuals are in danger of

50

 

becoming sadistic torturers. The plausibility of this
interpretation depends on Rorty's decision to treat the last
part of Nineteen Eighty;£ont as being about O'Brien and not
Winston Smith. Involved in this decision is Rorty's
contention that the third part of the novel is fundamentally
different from the first two parts implying that Part III
can be read as an independent whole, without reference to
the entirety of the novel. He writes:

...In the last third of i984 we get something

different--something not topical, prospective

rather than descriptive. After Winston and Julia

go to O'Brien's apartment, 1983 becomes a book

about O'Brien...(CIS, 171; see also, 175).
Additionally, Rorty's focus on O'Brien, to the neglect of
Winston Smith, overlooks Orwell's consistent and
uninterrupted employment of the third person singular
perspective through which the story of Nineteen Eighty;£ont
is limited by Winston's own perceptions.”

These interpretive decisions are significant in as much
as they result in a reading of Orwell's last novel that is
difficult to reconcile with the text.33 Treating Nineteen
Eighty;£ont as a unified whole with the character Winston
Smith at its center, a reading which is more consistent with
the book Orwell presumably wrote, discloses that Winston's

resistance related directly to his position as a Party

intellectual. Placing Winston's rebellion, arrest, torture,

51

and subsequent love of Big Brother in the context of the
material operation and logic of power illuminates the
origins of Winston's rebellion in his employment by the
Party at the Ministry of Truth. Of equal importance,
Winston's failure to understand his experience of alienation
in the context of objective social processes was
constitutive of the organizing logic of Oceanic society. In
other words, both Winston's alienation-~his sense of himself
as a self distinct from other selves--and his failure to
understand the causes of that alienation were both
consistent with the demands of social reproduction within
Oceania.

On the surface, the interpretation I am proposing would
seem irreconcilable with the third part of Nineteen Eighty;
F , the part about Winston's imprisonment in the Ministry
of Love, at least if that imprisonment is understood as a
"reprogramming" or a "brainwashing." If, as I am
suggesting, Winston was already a functional member of his
society, and an integral part of the reproduction of power,
why torture him?

Richard Rorty's answer that the Party engaged in
torture for its own sake, without regard to purpose or
function, is minimally consistent with the reading of

Nineteen Eighty;£ont I am proposing. Its consistency lies

52

 

in the fact that Rorty directs attention away from what
Winston does or does not do, thinks or does not think, as
the explanation for Winston's torture. Rorty writes:

The Inner Party does not torture Winston because

it is afraid of a revolution or it is offended

that someone might not love Big Brother. It is

torturing Winston for the sake of causing Winston

pain and thereby increasing the pleasure of its

members, particularly O'Brien (CIS, 179).

Despite its surface plausibility, this position is out
of sync with the text in two important ways. First, there
is no textual evidence that O'Brien enjoyed torturing
Winston, at least not in the sense alluded to in Rorty's
description of a "rich, complicated, delicate absorbing
spectacle of mental pain" (CIS, 179). While it is clear
that O'Brien was challenged by the problem posed by Winston,
there is no indication of sadistic pleasure. Instead, there
is in O'Brien an enthusiastic dedication to the task at
hand, a tiredness combined with lunatic intensity (NEF, 202,
209, 216, 217). That Orwell's descriptions of O'Brien at
work echo his descriptions of Winston at work suggests that
the crucial operating emotional dynamic is not a
transgressive sadism but the far more mundane dynamic of
worker satisfaction.34

Second, Rorty's understanding of torture as a means of

increasing the pleasure of Party members, and as "the only

art form and the only intellectual discipline available to

53

sensitive intellectuals in a post-totalitarian culture"
(CIS, 180), is contrary to the telos of the Party towards an
undifferentiated totality. Sensual pleasure, even that
produced through torture, would necessitate a
differentiation between the Party as a hegemonic collective
and the individual Party member. Pleasure, like pain, is an
embodied individuating experience. Torturing for the sake
of enjoyment would be as foreign to the logic of this power,
which is a total power, as making love for the sake of
enjoyment. Both pleasure and pain presuppose an existence

external to the Party.

The.Alienation of'Winston Smith:
The Division of Labor

For these reasons, Rorty's understanding of the
function of torture is simply insufficient to the text of
Nineteen Eighty;£ont, failing to attend to Orwell's complex
conceptualization of power and the position of Winston
Smith, as an intellectual, in the reproduction of that
power. The crucial question is whether or not Winston could
have avoided imprisonment and Room 101. The first clue to
the answering of this question involves various hints in the

text that Winston's resistance was not his own; that it was

54

created by O'Brien in his work as a functionary of the
Party. For example, O'Brien explained to Winston:

This drama I have played out with you during seven

years will be played out over and over again,

generation after generation, always in subtler

forms (NEF, 221, see also, 201).

Here, O'Brien claimed agency for himself, if not in actually
creating Winston's rebellion, then in shaping it,
encouraging it, and cultivating it.

Furthermore and significantly, Winston's specifically
unorthodox feelings and actions appear always to be
initiated by external events and occurrences that were, in
principle, outside his control.35 For example, the
geography of his room, in conjunction with the young ladies
keepsake album he had bought, suggested to him that he start
a diary. That a photograph of three former Party elites who
had by then become "unpersons" mysteriously appeared among
other work-a-day documents suggested to Winston the
possibility of truth, and of documenting that the Party
histories were lies. A piece of paper, passed to him in
full View of the telescreen with the words 'I love you' on
it, suggested to Winston that he not only engage in
adultery, but that he also fall in love with a woman for
whom he had previously felt only hatred and rage. On the

basis of these clues it is conceivable that Winston's

resistance should be considered an entrapment or the product

55

of a conspiracy and Winston but a hapless puppet on a
string.36

Though such a scenario seems consistent with the text
and tenor of Nineteen Eighty;£ont, the extent to which
Winston's resistance was the product of a conspiracy is
never conclusively determined, nor is there any real need
for such a settlement. It could have gone either way. All
that really mattered was that if Winston's resistance did
not exist, it could have been and probably would have been
created. Power is as power does, and what power does is
overcome opposition. Opposition, real or concocted, is
essential to power's movement (NEF, 221).37

Why, then, was Winston arrested? And, could he have
done anything to avoid imprisonment? Recall that on the
sixth day of Hate Week, when the general delirium inspired
by the ceremonies reached its peak, it became known to the
citizens of Oceania that the country "...was not, after all,
at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia.
Eurasia was an ally" (NEF, 148). Although the Hate Week
continued "exactly as before, except that the target had
been changed" (NEF, 150), this change meant a great deal of
work for Winston and his colleagues at the Ministry of

Truth. As a matter of course, and without any external

56

motivation, Winston reported to his post as soon as the
demonstrations were over.

And for just short of a week, Winston toiled, working
eighteen hour days, sleeping in the corridors, and eating
sandwiches at his work station (NEF, 150). The history of
the previous five years required re-writing and Winston and
his colleagues at the Ministry of Truth were responsible for
the task. Less than a day after their work was complete,
Winston was arrested.

This coincidence of events seems hardly accidental, for
it is in keeping with the principles of doublethink, as the
organizing logic of Oceania, that the process through which
reality is continuously remade according to the demands of
the moment be relegated to the same oblivion as the
inconvenient details as that reality (NEF, 176-7).38
Because of this, Winston was as culpable in his conformity
as he was in his deviance. His very existence as a worker
in the Ministry of Truth was evidence of the fallibility of
the Party, for it suggested that the Party should need, at
arbitrarily decided times, to re-write its own political
history, and remake its past. Only through a remaking of
Winston himself, and, presumably, his colleagues, could the
Party remake itself as total. On these grounds, the tension

between conformity and deviance, submission and resistance,

57

 

obedience and rebellion, simply implodes. As an employee of
the Ministry of Truth, Winston was doomed, regardless of
anything he did or did not do.39

I have placed Winston's arrest in the context of his
work for the Party, arguing that this work explains
Winston's arrest. In other words, it was his very
conformity to Party expectations which made him suspect.
Attention to the inherent contradictions of maintaining a
class hierarchy in a highly differentiated, complex society
helps to clarify this point.

A highly differentiated society such as Oceania cannot
help but allow to exist a certain degree of individuation,
if only that which results from the jagged combination of
the division of labor40 necessary to the maintenance of a
complex society with the human species' diverse biological
inheritance. A form of social organization requiring poets
and proletarians, housewives and prostitutes, historians and
soldiers, intellectuals and machinists, will inevitably give
rise to people who act and feel like poets and proletarians,
housewives and prostitutes, historians and soldiers,
intellectuals and machinists. In addition to this social
division of labor characteristic of Oceanic society was a
detailed division of labor organized according to assembly

line processes of industrialized production where no single

58

 

individual makes more than a minute contribution to any
given whole. In and through these divisions are those
differentiating characteristics which are in some sense
related to human biology: the differences between males and
females, associated with the necessaries of reproduction;
the differences between those newly born into the species
and those who have been around for sometime; the differences
which result from the fragility of the biological body,
creating the potential for illness and disability and
leading inevitably towards death. And then there is that
irreducible, indivisible fact that each of the species is
its own body, enduring its own pain and enjoying its own
pleasure. Since no two bodies can occupy the same space,
each body lives out its life-span in a unique fashion and
from its own perspective.

Winston's individuation, his alienation, his sense of
his self distinct from the collective, were all functional,
a consequence of his social position and the intelligence
required of him in his duties to the Party. He could not
have rewritten history with sufficient precision had he not
developed a sophisticated historical sense, or pondered the
metaphysics of history. Moreover, because his task required
more than an arbitrary rewriting—-because it required that

his creations were consistent with Party aims and doctrines

59

 

intellectually upholding the Party in its power--his
political consciousness also needed to be highly developed.
This job requirement called for the expansion and
simultaneous contraction of Winston's historical
consciousness. Understanding the nature of power and the
relation of power to history was essential to his work.

Winston Smith was, therefore, a walking talking version
of a highly differentiated member of a complex society,
ruled by an apparently all powerful elite, fiercely
dedicated to the goal of maintaining its position. The
individual was both necessary and dangerous to the
maintenance of the hierarchical structure of Oceanic
society. The Party's intent to put an end to class
struggle, to stop history in its tracks, was first and
foremost a practical problem, namely, the problem of what to
do with surplus individuation (NEF, 170-1).41

Summarizing these considerations, attention to this
social level of analysis reveals that Winston's rebellion
and alienation were more an occupational hazard and a
function of his position in the social structure of Oceania
than a autonomous product of Winston's independent
consciousness. A complex society like Oceania requires a
degree of individuation, if only that it might continue as a

going concern. That Winston's alienation can be explained

60

 

this way does not invalidate his experiences, but it does
provide a context for understanding them. That Winston
himself did not understand his own self as a product of his
place in the social and detailed division of labor, and that
he was unaware of the consistency between his own
consciousness and the institutionalized power of the Party,
is one of the more interesting features of Nineteen Eighty
Eon; in so far as it establishes the primacy of the
intellectual dynamic Orwell famously named "doublethink" as
the organizing logic of both Winston's consciousness and
Party power.

At this point, it is possible to draw an analogy
between Rorty's liberal ironist, characteristic of a post-
metaphysical culture, and Winston Smith. Like Rorty's
ironist, Winston was an intellectual subject to doubts
concerning the nature of his work devoted to the production
of propaganda for mass consumption. Just as Rorty's ironist
is not troubled by epistemological doubts, Winston
understood well the epistemological status of his
intellectual activity: he knew knowledge to be a sham,
knowing well his own participation in the systematic
production of lies within the Ministry of Truth. And, just
as Rorty's ironists stoically accept their political

commitments as given by existing institutions, privatizing

61

their doubts about the foundations of those institutions,
Winston also knew politics to be a sham, even in the face of
its penetration into every aspect of existence given the
Party's monopoly on power. Of course, Winston knew better
than to publically articulate his political doubts. The
question that continued to riddle Winston and the question
which Rorty dismisses as both inappropriate to a post-
metaphysical ironist culture and irrelevant to the
understanding of Nineteen Eignty;£ont, referring to it as a
"red herring" (CIS, 182), concerned the metaphysical
implications of the Party's power to alter history. In
other words, it was the systematic dislocation of reality
itself--"the power of re-description," to use Rorty's
phrase--which Winston felt to be the final and most
disturbing consequence of the Party's practice of propaganda
in the interests of preserving its hegemonic position.

Thus, Winston writes in his diary, "I understand HOW: I do
not understand WHY" (NEF, 68). It is this question, both a
question of ultimate motive and purpose, and a question of
social legitimation which Rorty dismisses as unanswerable in
a post—metaphysical culture. Unfortunately, it was also
Winston's inability or unwillingness to answer this question

which establishes his ultimate complicity with Party power.

62

The.Alienation of'Winston Smith:
Doublethink

It is truly one of literature's little ironies that
Winston Smith's attempt to maintain a tension between his
utopian wishes for a life worth living and the dreary
futility of his everyday existence required of him a habit
of thinking indistinguishable from 'doublethink.‘ All the
key features of that habit of thinking were involved in
Winston's intellectual consciousness:

To know and not know, to be conscious of complete

truthfulness while telling carefully constructed

lies, to hold consciously two opinions which

cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory

and believing in both of them, to use logic

against logic, to repudiate morality while laying

claim to it (NEF, 32).

At the extreme, Winston's faith in the concept of resistance
in the name of abstract ideas, to which he never gave
concrete determination, led him to assent to the commission
of all manner of atrocities in the employ of the
"Brotherhood." Winston promised "to do anything which is
likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the
Party" (NEF, 142, emphasis added).

This suggests that, for Winston, resistance had become
an end in itself, as continuous and all-embracing as the

perpetual war engaged in by Nineteen Eighty;£onr's three

superpowers. Mirroring the unity of war and peace, freedom

63

and slavery, and ignorance and strength, Winston's
resistance, once totalized, became its opposite. It
therefore involved a submission indistinguishable from that
demanded by the Party.

This aspect of Nineteen Eighty-Eon; is consistently
overlooked in the commentary on the novel, Rorty's included.
For example, in the context of considering whether or not
O'Brien was an ironist, Rorty writes, "O'Brien has mastered
doublethink, and is not troubled by doubts about himself or
the Party" (CIS, 185). Rorty concludes from this that
O'Brien was not an ironist. The question which Rorty does
not consider, a neglect which is consistent with his general
tendency to de-emphasize the character Winston, is whether
or not Winston had mastered the practice of doublethink.

I propose that Winston had mastered doublethink. More
than a literary curiosity, recognizing that Winston Smith
was no amateur practitioner of doublethink provides the key
to understanding the full complexity of George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty;Eont. Doublethink was the intellectual
means through which the Party maintained itself as the
ruling elite of Oceania, because it was through this logic
that the Party was able to preserve the myth of itself as an
omnipotent totality. Doublethink was the governing logic of

the Party's power, but doublethink was more than a habit of

64

thinking imposed on a passive literati by an all powerful
elite. In Nineteen Eighty;£ont, Orwell portrayed
doublethink to be a fully ambiguous, emergent phenomena,
rooted in the division of labor and the irrational social
structure of Oceania.42

While there are many examples of Winston's daily
practice of doublethink, Winston's devotion to his work for
the Party in conjunction with his continuing indignation at
the Party's systematic distortion of 'truth' and 'history'
is particularly useful in illustrating the normal workings
of Winston's doublethinkful existence. This is because of
the structural role of this value complex in establishing
the unity of Winston's subjective consciousness with
objective social processes.

When it came to his employment at the Ministry of
Truth, Winston was no slacker, having internalized a work
ethic worthy of any dedicated professional:

Winston's greatest pleasure in life was in his

work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but

included in it were also jobs so difficult and

intricate that you could loose yourself in

them...delicate pieces of forgery in which you had
nothing to guide you except your estimate of what

the Party wanted you to say. Winston was good at

that kind of thing (NEF, 39).

This commitment to his work devoted to the rectification of

printed matter in accordance with the ever-changing needs of

the Party coexisted with Winston's outrage and fright

65

concerning the metaphysical significance of the Party's
practice of propaganda. Importantly, this commitment to his
job-—a job wholly devoted to the re-writing of history--did
not waiver even after he pledged himself, in the name of
history (NEF, 146), to the resistance. Thus, shortly after
his meeting with O'Brien concerning his entry into the
Brotherhood, Winston and his colleagues at the Ministry of
Truth were charged with the task of rectifying most of the
political literature of five years past, which, due to a
change in Oceania's wartime alliance, had become obsolete.
While the work was demanding and necessitated the utmost
exertion and dedication, Winston was not philosophically or
morally bothered by it:

It was like struggling with some crushing physical

task which one had the right to refuse and which

one was never the less neurotically anxious to

accomplish. In so far as he had time to remember

it, he was not troubled by the fact that every

word he murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke

of his inkpencil was a deliberate lie. He was as

anxious as anyone else in the department that the

forgery be perfect (NEF, 151).
In the heat of the moment, then, Winston was not concerned
with the rectification's metaphysical implications. Rather,
Winston attended dutifully to the job at hand. Clearly,

this ability to forget his internal rebellion against the

Party as he dedicated his entire being to its arbitrary

66

purposes illuminates both the degree and nature of Winston's
submission to that habit of mind called doublethink.

Winston's resistance is illustrative of the
contradictory nature of Winston's thought process at the
extremes. His attitude toward his work illustrates the
extent to which Winston lived up to the demands of Party
conformity in his everyday activity. His relations with
other humans were no less affected. For example, Winston
took minor comfort in his conviction that, ”If there was
hope, it must lie in the Proles;" a conviction which haunted
him like "a mystical truth and a palatable absurdity" (CIS,
60). The great expectations he placed on the proles were
inversely related to the low esteem with which he regarded
them. Thus Winston's estimation that the proles were
without intelligence or general ideas did not deter him from
imposing on them the burden of utopia or the responsibility
of realizing his revolution (NEF, 60—61).

This contradiction is captured in Winston's thought
that "...the proles, if only they could somehow become
conscious of their own strength, would have no need to
conspire. They need only rise up and shake themselves like
a horse shaking off flies" (NEF, 60). Winston's view here
is that if the proles had insight into their own strategic

position within Oceanic society, they would comprehend their

67

own raw power and could generate the force necessary to the
revolution. The analogy with the horse suggests that such
an event would require nothing more than a reflexive
aversion response; thus, even in their triumph, the proles
would remain mindless. Winston's willingness to entertain
the possibility that the proles might attain consciousness
was limited by his unwillingness to think beyond his own
immediate interest in the proles as revolutionary fodder.
His insight boiled down to the dubious conclusion that 'if
the proles could become conscious, they would have no need
for consciousness'.

As Winston saw it, then, the proles would provide the
raw power necessary to the overthrow of the Party while
intellectuals such as himself would provide the ideas. In
addition to merely replicating a value system rooted in
Party doctrine and the exploitative social structure of
Oceania, Winston's evaluation of the relation between
intellectuals and the masses is exaggerated to the point
where its core lunacy emerges. Thus, just before his and
Julia's arrest, Winston contemplates a prole woman while she
hangs the laundry, pondering the world historical
significance of her female form. He thinks,

...everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable

figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing,

toiling from birth to death and still singing.
Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious

68

beings must one day come. You were the dead, theirs

was the future. But you could share in that future if

you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body,
and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two

make four (CIS, 182).

This scenario imagined by Winston is as preposterous as any
provided by the Party: A child's arithmetic problem is
transformed into "a secret doctrine" containing an insight
of utmost importance destined to save the great masses of
humankind. A woman tending to her household chores is
exaggerated in the same way, first reduced to her physical
body, the strength of her arms, and the productivity of her
womb, that body then grows enormous, a monster enveloping
all of history.

These examples are intended to illustrate Winston's
adoption of a ludicrous doctrine vis—a-vis the proles. His
attitudes towards his colleagues at the records department,
his obsessive categorizing of individuals according to his
conclusions about their Party loyalty and intelligence,
suggests further that Winston had internalized the demands
of the thought police vis-a-vis his peers. His every
interaction was colored by his speculations about any given
persons's chance of disappearing or turning him in as a
thought criminal. Winston assumed that, in principle, there

is always external evidence of one's inner life. This,

despite the fact that he took great pains to conceal his own

69

feelings from casual observation, arranging his face into an
appropriate expression, managing his presentation of self so
as not to disclose his heretical leanings.43 Of course,
Winston's powers of perception were consistently undermined
by events, in the end with disastrous consequences. Julia
was not a member of the thought police, nor was she saddled
with any thorough going orthodoxy. Parsons was as
vulnerable to thought crime as anybody else. Charrington,
the shopkeeper in the prole quarter, was in the employ of
the thought police, and, of course, O'Brien was not a
revolutionary. Still, Winston never questioned the
principle that you could tell, or even that it mattered.

The above discussion is intended to show the skill with
which Winston practiced doublethink. There was no necessary
connection between his thoughts and his actions nor was
there even a basic consistency within his internal,
reflexive thought process. Obsessed with visions of
resistance, Winston was ignorant of his own complicity.
Convinced of the profundity of trivia, insight slipped
through Winston's fingers. Unable to implicate himself in
his own thought process, Winston's essential identity with
the Party remained in tact, as obvious as the blue overalls

of his Party uniform were to the proles (NEF, 71).

7O

Moreover, it becomes clear that, for Orwell,
doublethink is more than just a form of consciousness,
abstracted from social processes. Doublethink refers
directly to the concrete means through which the ruling
elite maintained the myth of its absolute power. That the
Party was required to actively maintain this myth through
material practice necessitated a performative concession
that its power was, in fact, limited. This relates directly
to the problem of social legitimation which I defined in
terms of the requirement that the institutions being
legitimated can maintain their giveness in the face of the
recognition that they are humanly constructed. Both the
challenge to giveness and the mobilization of resources
necessary to the resolution of the challenge point to the
contradiction inherent in the requirement that the
'giveness' of institutions must be justified at all.
Applying this to the situation of Oceania, it can be said
that the Party's desire to constitute its own past required
a tremendous expenditure of resources, as did the Party's
insistence on controlling its own members. The Party's
‘willingness to thus exert itself involved entangling itself
in a core contradiction, namely, the recognition of its own
limited power. The Party insisted on the myth of its

<omnipotence precisely because it was not, in fact,

71

omnipotent. In other words, even the ruling elite of a
closed society was forced to settle. These considerations
relate directly to the meaning of Winston's imprisonment,
and thus to Rorty's question of the meaning of torture in

Even so, a brief return to the analysis of Oceanic
society is warranted. Oceania was a hierarchical society
composed of three strata. As is clearly stated in the
theoretical treatise within the novel entitled, The Iheoty
and Practise of Qlioarohio Collaotiyism, the Inner PartY's
intention to remain in permanent control could only be
achieved through continuously safeguarding the mental
attitude of the top two tiers of Oceanic society, that is,
the Inner and Outer Party which, together, comprised roughly
15 percent of the population:

The only genuine dangers are the splitting off of

able, underemployed, power hungry people, and the

growth of liberalism and skepticism in their own

ranks. The problem, that is to say, is

educational. It is a problem of continuously

molding the consciousness both of the directing

group and of the larger group that lies

immediately below it. The consciousness of the

masses need only to be influenced in a negative

way (NEF, 171).
In other words, the Party's totalizing telos was restricted
to the Party itself. Accordingly, even totalitarianism was

not total, but merely a means to the all-encompassing goal

of maintaining the existing social structure of Oceania and

72

the Party's hegemony. At issue was "the persistence of a
certain world view and a certain way of life imposed by the
dead upon the living" (NEF, 173). The maintenance of Party
power required that the Party existed as a felt presence in
its members. Its reality was to be not only assumed but
directly intuited, perceived, and experienced (NEF, 217—8).
This is because the Party had and could have no objective
existence or being external to the minds of the Party
members themselves. It was an "adoptive organization" (NEF,
173), and consequently, its preservation depended first and
foremost on the willingness of the upper two tiers of
society to voluntarily maintain their identification with
it. The issue, then, is one of social legitimation. It is
here that the meaning of Winston's imprisonment emerges, for
it is now possible to develop a concrete understanding of
precisely what happened to Winston under the tutelage of
O'Brien.

On the surface nothing seems to have happened other
than a gratuitous infliction of pain. This was made
explicit to Winston, who was repeatedly reminded by O'Brien
that he already knew what was wrong with him, that he,
Winston Smith, knew what he was to do. It was indeed true

that O'Brien did not present Winston with any intellectual

73

argument or insight that Winston had not already stumbled
over.

Even more to the point, Winston had encountered
O'Brien's arguments and positions twice, first in the stream
of his own thought process as he conducted his business
(described in part one of the novel) and second, as Winston
refined his understanding of the world he lived in,
contrasting the bleakness of his existence with the utopian
experience of his relationship with Julia, culminating in
the affirmation of his sanity via his reading of The Iheoty
and Practice of Qlioarohio Collootiyism (described in part
two). Thus, when O'Brien informed Winston that,

There are three stages to your

reintegration...there is learning, there is

understanding, and there is acceptance (NEF, 215),
This statement also applied to Winston's disintegration, as
documented in the first two parts of the novel. And, to
complete this dialectic, the final stage of Winston's
disintegration merges with the beginning of his
reintegration. His arrest was the peak of his alienation
from his society at the same time as it was the foundation
for the restoration of an identity between himself and the
Party as a collective.

Winston's arrest, then, was an individuation through

which he came into unmediated conflict with the Party.

74

Alone, he was to defend himself against the apparatus of
power, standing up against its truth in the name of his own.
Locked in its prison, and the victim of its violence, the
Party ceased to be an abstraction, concretizing itself in
the pain of Winston's body. In this context, Winston was
forced to feel his own weakness, the frailty of his body and
his mind, as his hopes and dreams, his memories and
reminiscences were absorbed in the infinite present of the
prison cell. And the first lesson Winston learned was, "In
the face of pain, there are no heros" (NEF, 197).
Consequently, it was only in prison that Winston was
able to combine his intellectual knowledge of how the Party
maintained its power, and the emotional understanding of
what the power of the Party meant, with the embodied
experience of that power. In other words, Winston was
forced in prison to incorporate his knowledge of the
mechanics of social organization and his understanding of
its significance for the conduct of life with the experience
of his own body in pain. With O'Brien as his guide, he
relived the process of his disintegration so that he could
come to identify with himself as an unimportant Party
functionary, capable of the lowest deeds, worthy of only
scorn, and thus willing to transfer his sense of himself as

a "self" onto the Party. O'Brien's task was thus to

75

penetrate the haze of doublethink for but an instant and
make Winston see himself as he was, and not as he imagined
or wished himself to be.

The success of this program of establishing Winston's
identification with the Party was based on the carefully
regulated infliction of pain on Winston's body. O'Brien,
speaking on behalf of the Party, explains to Winston:

...power is power over human beings. Over the

body--but above all, over the mind. Power over

matter--external reality as you would call it--is

not important. Already our control over matter is

absolute...We control matter because we control

the mind. Reality is inside the skull (NEF, 218).
Dialogically establishing this truth, however, required that
O'Brien and Winston together agree to discount the
significance of the fact of power over the material body.
Physical brutality was necessary to Winston's acceptance of
the Party's power. O'Brien's arguments were at every turn
underwritten by his ability to cause Winston pain, and the
success of his effort to reform Winston depended on the fact
that Winston was willing to overlook his status as a
prisoner and a victim of an agent whose control over him was
total.

Thus, Winston searched his mind in vain for arguments
which would demonstrate the fallacy of O'Brien's position

that "nothing exists outside your own mind" (NEF, 219).

That he felt the need to provide such an argument suggests

76

that he was in a basic agreement with O'Brien without being
fully conscious of it. This, of course, is perfectly
consistent with the internalized practice of doublethink.
Had he not been so skilled at doublethink, the absurdity of
his efforts would have been apparent to him.“

Winston, whose rebellion could only be the most secret
of affairs, established an identity distinct from the Party
through his subjective opposition. This was his only claim
to power, and he understood it as such: "If you can feel
that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have
any result whatever, you've beaten them" (NEF, 138). Aside
from the fact that this is perfectly contradictory (as are
so many of Winston's convictions), it also points to the
degree to which Winston had subordinated all values--even
his essential humanity—-to opposing the Party's power. In
this way, he attempted to compensate for the Party's having
robbed him of "all power over the material world" (NEF, 136)
by insisting on the primacy of his own thoughts and feelings
as the source of his opposition to the Party's power.

More essential to the core of Winston's self than his
opinion of rats (NEF, 233-4), was his inability to directly
confront and accept his own powerlessness. Because of this,
Winston willingly took responsibility for the conclusions of

his own thought-process even in the face of the fact that he

77

was, in no sense, free to think otherwise. More precisely,
that Winston felt intellectually inferior to O'Brien and
could not meet O'Brien's arguments with his own, yet still
remained convinced of the mind's superiority, rendered it
acceptable to Winston that he transfer his identity onto
O'Brien, and through O'Brien, Big Brother. Winston's
inability to reconcile himself to his own limitations, his
unwillingness to accept the undeniable fact of his own
powerlessness and leave it at that, constituted the
foundation for the identification between Winston's
individual self-consciousness and the objective logic of
power. Not that it mattered. Even Winston knew his
resistance to be hardly more than a desperate act of vanity,
the effects of which only prolonged his own pain, got him a
raise in pay and a reserved table at the Chestnut Tree Cafe.
Summarizing the above considerations, I have set
Winston's imprisonment in the broad context of the social
organization of Oceania and the requirements of maintaining
the hegemonic power of the Party in that society.
Objectively, the problem appeared in the form of a
necessary, but potentially destabilizing, surplus
individuation. Subjectively, it took the form of creating
and preserving the identification of each Party member with

the Party as a collective. Unfortunately for Winston, the

78

Party was able to manage these crises tendencies by
systematically turning surplus individuation against itself,
exploiting its vulnerabilities and weaknesses for its own
purposes, and in so doing, maintained itself as a going
concern in the minds of its members. Winston's alienation
from the Party was thoroughly conditioned by his objective
dependance on the Party. It was O'Brien's challenge to
demonstrate this to Winston, to show him he was no
different. In this way, Winston's subjective identification
with the Party was solidified, allowing the Party to
constitute its own reality.

It is now possible to appy my posited analogy between
Rorty's anticipated post-metaphysical culture and the
situation of Winston Smith to Winston's practice of
doublethink. Winston's ability to re-write history was
crucial to his ability to successfully maneuver within his
society, yet stood in sharp contrast to his having been
deprived of any control over the conditions of his
existence. Just as linguistic re-description is a form of
empowerment in Rorty's View, Winston's intellectual skills
were essential to his short term survival yet did not have
any real impact on his life. Moreover, just as members of
Rorty's post-metaphysical utopia would approach their

identity and cultural productions with a spirit of

79

playfulness, Winston was forced in the interests of coping
and compensation to take a non—binding approach to his own
intellectual and emotional commitments. Winston's ability
to shift his commitments at will and in accordance with the
external demands of his situation both suggests the extent
of his ability to manipulate his own mind, as well as
replicates the dynamic implicit in the expectation that
Party members shift their political allegiances at will
according to the demands of the moment without any
experience of conflict. Furthering the analogy, just as the
liberal ironist is encouraged in Rorty's text to privilege a
discursive reality amenable to the transformative power of
language, Winston created for himself a fantastic world
where he imagined himself destined to save the masses of
humankind and preserve the human spirit. In doing so,
Winston occupied a dual universe of fantasy and reality,
experiencing his fantasies as more real than reality. Even
so, Winston never failed conform to the demands of reality.
And finally, just as Rorty promises the liberal ironist an
expansion of private freedom in return for their conformity,
Winston, too, gained his freedom. Winston's freedom--an
abstract, negative freedom which had no implications outside
his own mind was premised on his recognition and acceptance

of his contingency on the power of the Party. Thus, having

80

already faced in Room 101 the worst thing in the world, a
confrontation which established his identity with the Party
through the lived experience of his own powerlessness,
Winston sits in the Chestnut Tree Cafe. Drinking oily gin,
flavored with saccharine and cloves, Winston was free. He
was free to meet and speak with Julia, for, "He knew it as
though instinctively that they now took almost no interest
in his doings" (NEF, 239). He was free to recall a happy
memory from childhood, for he knew it to be a false memory
and false memories "did not matter, so long as one knew them
for what they were" (NEF, 243). He was free to let his mind
wander wherever it chose, and, presumably, to give voice to
those wanderings if he wished to do so. No longer compelled
to negotiate the contradiction between his inner world of
resistance and his outer world of conformity, Winston's
existence became one of indifference.

In the above discussion, I have considered the extent
of Rorty's re-description of George Orwell's Nineteen
Eighty;£ont through the presentation of an alternative
reading that I feel better accounts for the text.
Specifically, I argue that Rorty's reading fails to account
for Orwell's presentation of the role of the intellectual in
the reproduction of institutionalized social power in a

complex society. My posited analogy between Rorty's ironic

81

intellectual and the character Winston Smith is oriented
towards showing that, in both texts, it is a reflexive
understanding of the arbitrariness of social institutions
combined with a thoroughgoing powerlessness which solidifies
the commitment of intellectuals to those institutions. This
dynamic in the fictional world of Nineteen Eighty;£on; is
rooted in the institutionalized division of labor and the
intent by the Party to deny that division's individuating
and destabilizing consequences combined with the inability
or unwillingness of individuals to incorporate into their
self-consciousness their own powerlessness. In contingenoyi
Itonyi and Soiidatity the case is not so clear, given
Rorty's unwillingness to resort to such theoretical
constructions as 'the division of labor.‘ But, at the risk
of engaging in metaphysics, I think it safe to point out
that Rorty's distinction between the ironic intellectual and
the commonsensical non—metaphysician would seem to imply
something along the lines of a division of labor, if only
because it assumes that some people engage in intellectual
activity and some people do not. The next question, and the
question Rorty refuses to pose, is "why?".

The possibility of an analogy between Rorty's utopian
vision and Orwell's dystopian one suggests that Rorty's

proposals for the reform of intellectual culture (wherein

82

ironic reflexivity is privatized) might not be as consistent
with the interests of intellectuals as Rorty claims.

Rorty's implicit claim is that the privatization of
philosophy and social theory will not endanger those who
engage in intellectual activity and will enable the
preservation of social hope crucial to the legitimation of
liberal social institutions. The validity of this claim
would seem to depend on the nature of the institutions in
question. This is an issue Rorty cannot confront within the

confines of his position.

IV.

CONCLUSION

Central to my discussion has been the fate of the
intellect under conditions specified by Rorty. Rorty freely
dispenses with everything traditionally associated with an
emphatic intellectual culture--historical insight, social
and political understanding, and self consciousness--in the
interest of liberal social institutions even though those
institutions, on his own account, cannot be justified. That
is to say, he can give no reason for supporting liberal

social institutions other than vague appeals to the

83

elimination of cruelty and the incomplete freedom thereby
attained. The costs are great, and the benefits unclear.

Just as the criminal of popular mythology is compelled
to return to the scene of the crime and in doing so betrays
himself, I argue that Rorty's interpretation of Nineteen
Eightyonur threatens the edifice of discourse constructed
in contingenoyi Igony, and fioiidatity. His re-description,
which flirts with the line between interpretive license and
miss-reading, irritates, creating an itch which needs to be
scratched, and, in this way, highlights the very questions
Rorty would like to quietly beg. This is because, at the
most general level, Orwell's novel is an attempt to come to
terms with the world he was living in. Failure to take
account of the social content of Nineteen Eighty;£ont
involves leaving the book mostly unread. Such an act
requires a curiously stubborn restraint on the part of the
inquiring reader, not unlike that referred to by Orwell as
"crimestop" (NEF, 174—5) or the simplest form of doublethink
involving the ability to stop short of any thought judged in
adyanoe to be dangerous.

Indeed, Orwell's interrogation of the social position
of the intellectual and the manner in which they practice
their craft is as thorough as it is disturbing. Accepting

as given that thought is not just contingent, a la Rorty,

84

 

 

but also conditioned (meaning that it is both positively and
negatively shaped by social forces and institutions, more
and less determined by situations and contexts), Orwell
focuses his inquiry on the historically specific processes
giving rise to particular thinkers and their thoughts. In
contrast, having deprived himself of the means of
concretizing his abstract notion of contingency, Rorty's
bandwagon never leaves the parking lot. His prohibition
against philosophy and social theory--the politically
charged and all too controversial effort to understand that
which shapes human experience in the here and now--prevents
that.

I would therefore like to conclude by considering the
possibilities for 'resistance' under the desperate
conditions stipulated by Orwell. At issue is the
possibility for resisting the world's process in the absence
of any means of certifying claims to difference from that
process. In other words, is it necessary to transcend the
social—historical context in order to question it, and if
humans prove incapable of such transcendence, must they
resign themselves to the way things are?

This question relates directly to the practical
efficacy of the views outlined in Rorty's Contingenoy,

itony, and Solidatity, for his underlying assumption seems

85

to be that challenges to social institutions depend for
their articulation on the ability to transcend or envision
qualitative alternatives to those institutions. Thus, Rorty
consistently and effectively invokes the dependency of
ironic intellectuals on the very institutions about which
they wax ironic, as if this knowledge alone will solidify
their commitment to and the legitimacy of those
institutions.

I think it is to Orwell's credit that his last novel
provides an inquiry into the idea of difference, alienation,
and subjective otherness, tracing it back to its origins in
recognizable social forms. As I have attempted to show in
my explication, Winston Smith was a conformist through and
through, his rebellious inclinations effectively determined
by his environment. Does this undermine the validity of
Winston's feelings of resistance? Was Winston merely
deluded?

In answering this, an analogy may be drawn with
Winston's irritation at the proles for having the power but
not the sense to realize his utopia, as if supplying the
labor power for an entire society under the most
exploitative conditions short of abject slavery was not
enough to keep one class busy. A comment by a prole woman

overheard by Winston provides a simple corrective:

86

But if you'd been in my place, you'd of done the

same as what I done. It's easy to criticize...but

you ain't got the same problems as what I got

(NEF, 71).

The suggestion is that such judgements are always dubious, a
product of arrogance more than understanding.

Applying this to Winston's situation requires that one
attend not to his evident intellectual shortcomings but to
his lifetime of emotional and material deprivation that
rendered a self-indulgent ignorance functional. The
vicissitudes of his emotional and intellectual life cannot
be understood without reference to his dreary existence of
bread crusts and victory gin and the fact that, above all
else, he was a very unhappy person. It is true that he was
no better than the proles he denigrates, hoarding razor
blades with the same spirit of pettiness that they fought
over cheap tin pots, (NEF, 43-4, 53, and 60—1), and that he
took the same satisfaction in the illusory promise of love
provided in his relationship with Julia that the proles took
in the illusory promise of wealth provided by the lottery
(NEF, 124 and 73).

Nor was Winston much different than O'Brien or any of
the other characters in the novel. This is indicated after
his arrest, in his first meeting with O'Brien, when in lieu

of a greeting, he cried "They got you too!" O'Brien

responded, "They got me a long time ago," (NEF, 197) hinting

87

 

that all have been gotten, and as such, all have been had.
Members of the inner Party, too, were obliged to operate
under the sign of the irrational, behaving according to the
laws of individual survival. In a society like Oceania,
where there was no effective agency, no possibility for
doing what one would choose if things were otherwise, all
were on a moral plane determined by necessity. Successful
adaptation, or prudence, replaces morality as the logic
governing individual behavior.

Thus, there is intimated in the novel a deep
universality where all were equal in their misery and no one
could be said to benefit from the organization of power in
Oceanic Society. There were differences in status and there
were differences in consumption habits, yet these were minor
compared to the pervasive sameness extending through the
hierarchy. Even O'Brien's bourgeois private life, luxurious
by standards common to Oceanic society, was as disappointing
as the wine Winston tasted for the first time on his visit
to O'Brien's Airstrip One flat (NEF, 141). Set against the
work O'Brien did for the Party, the cushy carpet and the
clean white wainscoting of his apartment could hardly be
considered adequate compensation, nor did it provide any but
the most superficial basis for class differentiation. An

essential equality existed through the hierarchy, an

88

equality which required brutal torture and manifest
irrationality for its suppression. That is, it was
precisely because the inhabitants of Oceania were
essentially the same that unfreedom and repression were
necessary to the maintenance of the hierarchy. It was
precisely because the institutional arrangements of Oceania
had no rational connection to the way humans were, even in
that society, that widespread irrationality was necessary.

This, then, is the basis for resistance provided by
Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty;£ont. That Winston's
resistance was the product of the very social institutions
he resisted underwrote its truth. That his rebellion was an
expression of a greater conformity, that even his alienation
was not his own, facts which made torture and repression
integral to the operation of the system, provides the basic
reason for revolution. In the first analysis as well as the
last, it is the experience of deprivation which legitimates
the claims of the individual against institutional social
power, a legitimation which always refers to the experience
of the body for its foundation.

Finally, Winston's fatal flaw was not his inability to
transcend his immediate situation or his inability to ground
his utopian hopes in something immune from social processes,

but, rather, his having bought into the mystification that

89

he should have. When, under the guidance of O'Brien, he was
forced to identify with himself as he was and not as he
wished to be, he could not recover. His betrayal of Julia,
despite the fact that it occurred under the most extreme of
circumstances and had no practical consequences, destroyed
his belief in himself as some how different. The sad irony
is that he fell before the same harsh though faulty
judgement that he employed against the proles: He felt

himself to be less than human for not being superhuman.45

ENDNOTES

1. Rorty does not use the term "social legitimation". My
framing of the various ideas contained in Contingenoyi
itonyi and soiidatity in terms of this problematic is thus
an interpretive act. For a full consideration of the
relation between the problem of social legitimation and the
problem of knowledge, see Peter L. Berger' 8 and Thomas
Luckman' s The Social Consttuotion of Reality (1966). Jurgen

Habermas, in Legiti_ation Ctisis (1975), provides a
technical discussion of the problem of legitimation in

contemporary capitalis societies.

2. The distinction between ironists and commonsensical non—
metaphysicians corresponds roughly to a distinction between
intellectuals and the general population. For a discussion
of the elitist tendencies of this distinction, see Roy
Bhaskar's Philosophy and Eteedom, (1991, 85). For Rorty's
own approach to elitism, see his "Three Cheers for Elitism"
(1995). For Rorty's perspective on the intellectual as an
intellectual, see his "Habermas and Lyotard on

90

Postmodernity" (1985, 174-75).

3. As others have pointed out, Rorty is typically vague when
it comes to defining which institutions and traditions he
intends to defend. His use of such terms as Liberal
Democracy, North Atlantic Democracies and the Western
Intellectual Tradition is compatible with all sorts of
institutionalized practices. For example, Michael Billig
explores the underlying Nationalist themes of Rorty's post-
modern liberalism (1993, 69-84); Richard Bernstein takes
issue with Rorty's reliance on political rhetoric
reminiscent of the Cold War (1987, 538-63); Nancy Fraser
points out that Rorty's willingness to cleanse public
discourse of controversy is consistent with the position of
a technocrat charged with the administration of public
policy (1989, 104); and, Charles Anderson argues that many
of Rorty's positions depend on metaphors relating
intellectual activity to a classical liberal free market
(1991, 366).

4- Roy Bhaskar, in W:
provides a description of Rorty's idea of a final
vocabulary, and raises some questions concerning its
coherence (1991, 88-9).

5. Keith Toppler in "Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and the
Politics of Re-description" provides an account of Rorty's
views on the role of narrative in the maintenance of liberal
democracy (1995, 957).

6. This issue of privatization, and the separation of
"public" and "private" such a strategy depends on, has been
the subject of much discussion in the commentary on Rorty's
specifically political writings. While most of the
discussion focuses on whether such a distinction can, in
fact, be drawn (see especially, Fraser [1989, 311-13] and
Bhaskar [1991, 82-5, 87]) I am assuming, with Rorty, that
not only can it be drawn, but is drawn, as a matter of
course and all the time. This is not to deny the numerous
theoretical problems with the separation, but to point out
that such problems have a way of working themselves out in
practice. In other words, the practical problems arising
from the public/private divide can themselves be, and
typically are, privatized.

7. Jo Burrows in "Conversational Politics: Richard Rorty's
Pragmatist Apology for Liberalism" provides a description of
Rorty's usage of idea of contingency, raising various

91

questions concerning it (1991, 325—9). Additionally,
Toppler analyzes Rorty's use of the concept of
"contingency", focusing on Rorty's use of the concept in two
opposing ways (1995, 958-9). Rorty's tendency to equivocate
vis a vis contingency is, as I hope to make apparent, one of
the more interesting and disturbing features of Contingenoyi

Irooyi and Solidarity

8. Rorty's appeal to the sympathy of liberal ironists is a
variant of an appeal to self-interest because, in his
presentation, liberals define their selves in terms of their
desire to avoid and diminish cruelty. Their willingness to
subordinate their intellectual practice to the ends of
preventing cruelty would thus be motivated by the desire to
maintain the coherence of their identities.

9. Rorty's appeal to the self—interest of intellectuals
generally occurs at the periphery of his presentation. I am
thus actively and insistently reconstructing an argument
which occurs at a sub—textual level and thus vulnerable to
the charge of mace-representing Rorty's views. I think the
consequences of those views are serious enough to justify
the risks I am taking.

10. Charles Anderson, in "Pragmatism & Liberalism,
Rationalism & Irrationalism: A Response to Richard Rorty,"
describes Contindenoyi_Ironyi_and_Solidarity as "RortY' 8
first systematic effort to link his 'foundationless' ~
philosophy to political theory" (1991, 358), suggesting that
with this book, Rorty ceases to address an audience
primarily composed of professional philosophers focused on
technical questions and thus subjects his work to the
judgement of "a new community of inquiry and against new
standards" (1991, 358-9).

11. I am following Richard Bernstein in his focus on
Rorty's stylistic practices (1987, 552-3), such as Rorty's
reliance on global terminology (1987, 545—6)and his tendendy
to articulate altnernatives in dichotomous terms (1987,
549). At issue is not so much what Rorty says, but how he
says it and the effects of this 'how' on the position
itself.

12. Rorty does not use the phrase "weak poet".
13. My interpretation here is Slightly different from that
of commentators who take the liberal ironist to be a model

or ideal resident of Rorty's liberal utOpia (see, for
example, Toppler [1995, 958], and Anderson [1991, 365]) As

92

I claimed in Part I, Rorty explicitly states that the bulk
of the general population would be 'commonsensical non-
metaphysicians' and not ironists. Only intellectuals would
adopt an ironic attitude and it is this attitude which is
the key difference between the intellectual and the general
population. This is related to Rorty's distinction between
a strongly poetic and a weakly poetic model of identity in
so far as ironism would characterize the intellectual
tendencies of the strong poet while weak poets would tend to
be commonsensical non-metaphysicians. Both strong poetry
and irony are contrary to communal impulses and thus neither
could be considered attributes which ought to be
characteristic of the general population. They would,
however, be tolerated in a liberal utopia. Nancy Fraser's
discussion of Rorty's positions concerning the intellectual
in unrnly Eiaotioes provides a helpful summary of Rorty's
varying attempts to deal with the tension between irony,
strong poetry and requirements of communal stability.

14. Again, it is appropriate to mention that this intention
to avoid metaphysics relates to the arguments contained in
Rorty' 5 Ph iiosoph y and the Mittor oi Natnr re (1979). On the
other hand, in Contingencyi Ironyr and Solidarity RortY' s

anti-metaphysical stance takes on a life of its own, seeming
to have cut itself off from its origins in a philosophical
position.

15. It is important to note that I feel this understanding
of truth is implied by Rorty's reliance on the habits and
conventions of the relevant community to give his coherence
theory of truth some substance. Whether or not Rorty would
recognize this view as his own is an open question.

16. Rorty tends to treat 'the world' as an undifferentiated
totality, referring to everything and anything which does
not take a linguistic form. The implicit contrast is with
'our world' or the specifically human world which always
takes a discursive form.

17. I do not think it to be much of an exaggeration to say
that Rorty's position seems to be something like the
following: the acceptance of the fact that the shape of each
individual's consciousness is the product of random events,
a crystallization of a seemingly infinite web of
occurrences, includes within it the realization of the fact
that no single individual is any more essential than any
other. All can be free because no one matters. No one
matters because, having only language with which to create

93

theit world, all are powerless in the face of the world. It
is only within this greater unfreedom that cultural freedom
finds its home.

18. Cornel West, in The American EyaSion' of Philosophy
provides a discussion of Rorty's distrust of theory (1989,
209).

19. The first narrative tells a tale of the connection
between conceptions of truth and historical events.
Occurrences such as the French Revolution and the rise of
Romantic poetry created a division within philosophy between
those faithful to an Enlightenment scientific notion of
truth as out there, a property of the world, and those who
insisted that truth is a human creation, a property of
sentences (CIS, 3). The second narrative retells the tale
in terms of linguistic practices changing at increasing
speeds, making the constitutive activity of language visible
to the naked eye, and thus undermining the idea of an
absolute truth external to human activity (CIS, 7).

Finally, Rorty describes the history of philosophy as a
history of substitutions: Beginning in the seventeenth
century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of
god...Beginning in the eighteenth century we tried to
substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific
truth...(CIS, 22), suggesting that the history of ideas can
be understood as a succession of idols, all of which were
eventually knocked down.

20. Cornel West makes a similar point when he writes, "To
tell a tale about the historical character of philosophy
while eschewing the political content, role, and function of
philosophies in various historical periods is to promote an
ahistorical approach in the name of history" (1989, 208).
Berstein also comments on a "hidden ahistorical
essentialism" (1987, 548) characteristic of Rorty's work.

21. Roy Bhaskar provides a helpful discussion of Rorty's
treatment of morality (1991, 92—4)

22. Fraser, makes a similar point (1989, 103-5).

Describing Rorty's understanding of abnormal discourse, or
radical theory, she writes, "Radical theory...gets inflected
as a sphere apart from collective life, a sphere of privacy
and individual self—fashioning. It becomes aestheticized,
narcissized, and bourgeisified, a preserve where strivings
for transcendence are quarantined, rendered safe because
rendered sterile" (1989, 103). I am extending this
observation to include all theory.

94

23- Roy Bhaskar, in his Rortyl Realismi and the Idea of
Eieedom (1990, 225-30) provides a technical discussion of
Rorty's treatment of "freedom".

24. See Bhaskar (1991, 97).

25. Goodheart, in commenting on this aspect of Rorty's
work, suggests Rorty's acceptance of the fact that his
liberalism is indefensible is rooted in Rorty's complacency
concerning the prospects of liberal democracy (1996, 234).

26. In The Edit Nat Did Not Take Eiaoe, Jean Baudrillard

refers to the logic behind this as the "paradox of
deterrence." Referring to the deterrent effect of the
proliferation of weapons, he writes: "It is like
information, culture or other material and spiritual goods:
only their profusion renders them indifferent and
neutralizes their negative perverse effects. Multiply vices
in order to ensure the collective good" (1995, 70).

27. Toppler discusses 're-description' as a vehicle for
political change (1995, 962-4).

28. See Anderson (1991, 369-70).

29. Anderson observes that a tendency towards closure is a
general characteristic of liberalism (1991, 366).

30. In the literature on Orwell and his literary and
political writings there is an unusually high degree of
self-consciousness concerning the tendency for thinkers of
widely divergent political and intellectual persuasions to
claim Orwell's legacy as their own. For example, Harold
Bloom contends that Orwell and Nineteen Eighty1Eonn have
been absorbed into the culture industry (1987, 4). John
Rodden, in The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989),
provides a detailed analysis of the history of commenting on
George Orwell.

31. In his essay, "Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia
Today", Krishan Kumar, with reference to Rorty's
Contingencyi ironyi and Solidarityi describes both the
thinness and sense of weary resignation characteristic of
liberal attempts to envision utopia even after the much
publicized collapse of Communism and the death of other
grand narratives, such as Truth, History, Progress, and
Reason. While these developments are considered by many to
be desirable, they have not issued "a sense of a new
departure, a new freedom now that the scales of illusion

95

have fallen from our eyes. Instead, we are invited to take
a purely pragmatic or ironic stance towards the world, to
avoid public commitment and devote ourselves to the pursuit
of our private purposes" (1995, 207). In general, the
current situation "brings no pleasure and promises no
happiness...it seems not to make much difference whether we
look with foreboding to a dismal future, or proclaim our
good luck at the way things have turned out" (1995, 205).

32. Sue Lonoff, in "Composing Nineteen Eighty;£onr: the Art
of Nightmare" points out that Orwell's use of this
perspective filters the reader's perceptions of Oceania and
the events of the novel (1991, 35).

33. Others have questioned Rorty's practice of textual
interpretation. For example, Goodheart (1996) argues that
Rorty equates interpretation with appropriation, an equation
which tends to be coercive (1996, 228-9). Bernstein
comments on Rorty's tendency to project his own concerns
onto his readings of others (1989, 545-6). Also relevant
here is the point made by David Hall, a commentator more
sympathetic to Rorty than those just mentioned, concerning
Rorty's endorsement of Harold Bloom's notion of a 'strong
misreading' (1994, 5). For Rorty's understanding of this
idea of a strong misreading, see his "Nineteenth—Century
Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism" (1982, 151-2).

34. My interpretation here is very different from that of
many commentators, even different from the general tendency
of Orwell's own writings. Orwell, particularly in his
polemics against left-leaning intellectuals, frequently
relied on metaphors derived from, what were in his view,
deviant sexual practices, including sadism, homosexuality,
vegetarianism and that horrible pox on the visage of
humanity, wearing sandals. Of the devices used in Nineteen
Eighty-Eon; to create distance between the perspective of
Winston Smith, as not quite credible, and that of the
reader, is Orwell's attributing to him a masculinity which--
within the framework of the novel--is 'degraded' or
'distorted,' as indicated by, for example, Winston's
homoerotic attraction toward O'Brien and the suggestion that
Winston was impotent within officially sanctioned relations
and, perhaps, infertile (although this latter point may be
an interpretive stretch on my part).

35. Daniel Kies, in "Fourteen Types of Passivity:

Suppressing Agency in Nineteen ElQhL¥2EQutl analyses the
various techniques Orwell uses to deprive Winston of agency,
conveying the futility of Winston's existence and his

96

essential powerlessness (1992, 48).

36. The important secondary character, Parsons, a
conformist in thought and deed, further illustrates the
claim I am making. Having been turned by his daughter for
talking in his sleep, Parsons was no more successful in
escaping the thought police than was Winston. While Parsons
was not conscious of having committed thoughtcrime, he did
not question the integrity of his daughter as an informant,
nor did he doubt his own guilt. The mere fact of his arrest
proved his guilt, for it was unfathomable that the Party
arrest an innocent man (NEF, 192-3). Of course, Parsons was
right in assuming his culpability, for the only issue at
stake was that he think of himself as a thought criminal so
that his Party loyalty could be recreated as a product of
the Party's doing rather than his own. Even the most
conforming of souls must be re-worked, lest they take credit
for their subservience, and in doing so, challenge the
Party's omnipotence. Parsons, to, must feel the wrath of
the Party, if only because he was too happy to obey its
demands. In other words, Parsons was no rebel, yet he was
arrested. This corroborates by analogy the suspicion that
Winston's defiance was not the determining factor in his
arrest.

37. Orwell seems to be relying on a conception of power
similar to Max Weber's, who defined power, famously, as
"...the probability that one actor within a social
relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will
despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this
probability rests" (1978, 53).

38. Orwell's reliance on temporal imagery which echo the
origins myth in the Book of Genesis is suggestive of the
claim that I am making.

39. The character Winston is thus anticipated by Boxer, the
horse of Orwell's earlier work, Animal Fain. Boxer's
loyalty and commitment to the revolution, in whose name he
labored tirelessly and (unlike Winston) without question,
led him straight to the glue factory.

40. While a detailed discussion of Orwell's characterology
is beyond the scope of this paper, it suggests all of these
divisions. Orwell gave quite a bit of attention to the
social structure of Oceania, including gender relationships,
class relations, the geo-political situation, the
structuring of work, and etc. Still, he never, to my
knowledge, uses the term division of labor in Nineteen

97

Eighty;£ont. My employment of the concept is thus an
interpretive act. Harry Braverman, in Laoot and Monopoly
gaoital (1974), provides a thorough theoretical treatment of
the division of labor in late capitalist society.

See also, Berger and Luckman for a consideration of the
relationship between social complexity, the division of
labor and legitimation problems (1966, 92-116)

41. Orwell does not use this term.

42. Even a cursory, denotative look is suggestive of this
claim. According to the principles of Newspeak, supplied by
Orwell in his famous appendix, doublethink means 'very
thoughtful.‘ This can be understood as the practice of
thinking taken to its extremes, where thought turns back on
itself and is transformed into its opposite. Doublethink
thus means both 'thoughtful' and 'not thoughtful' at the
same time, and is descriptive of thought taken to be
absolute. Of course, thought is not and cannot be absolute.
Thought is always conditioned, hence brutality is necessary
to force the issue even as such brutality admits its own lie
by constituting itselt as thought's first cause. This may
very well be Orwell's point.

43. Julia provides a contrast to this attitude in her's and
Winston's discussion of the Party's sexual education
efforts. She said, "I dare say it works in a lot of cases.
But, of course, you can never tell; people are such
hypocrites" (NEF, 110). Her assertion that people are
hypocrites assumes a difference between a person's inner-
life and outer appearance, thus implying the need for a
certain amount of skepticism.

44. Winston was in agreement with O'Brien's position that
the significance of the objective world was secondary to
that of his own personal subjective experience. This is
established earlier in the novel where Winston insisted
that, "Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters
inside your skull" (NEF, 26). Winston took refuge in these
sorts of convictions even though he knew them to be futile
in the sense that he knew that his own personal thoughts and
feelings would have no objective consequences.

98

 

45. I am leaning heavily on, and distorting,

Richard Ree's

criticisms contained in his 1962 essay, "All or Nothing"

where he suggests that Winston's and Julia's

(and thus

Orwell's) real trouble was that "they could not forgive them
selves for not being superhumanly brave" (1984, 217).

99

 

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