Richard Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, published in 1989, has been the most important source for my thinking on the social function of art for almost twenty years. And for almost twenty years I have been wondering why so few people in the art world have read this book.1 It makes an important contribution towards helping us understand why and how art has a part in shaping social reality. I find myself repeatedly resorting to Rorty in discussions about the political nature of art, its social relevance and its social role. And I do so often shaking my head, because I cannot see why these discussions still revolve around problems that, since Rorty, we no longer need to have and should no longer have. In what follows, I shall recapitulate Rorty’s position in order to suggest that, after him, talking about art means talking about solidarity.
The Contingency of Community
Rorty describes three different kinds of contingency: the contingency of language, the contingency of the self and the contingency of community. Contingency means that there is nothing more to be said about these three dimensions of the social other than that they became what they are not by necessity but for particular historical reasons, and in the final analysis are a product of a historical period that could have turned out other than it did. Rorty presents western culture as a long series of attempts to outwit this contingency by eminent thinkers, who assure each other that, as long as they think and debate enough, they can arrive at true and definitive statements about the world, existence and human beings – at ultimate reasons or conclusive statements on the nature of things, in short, at a “final vocabulary”.2 In Rorty’s view it was Plato who infected all his descendants with the fascinating thought that a few especially talented thinkers could manage to talk and write enough sense for their words to provide not merely a description of reality, but a description of reality as it really is.3 This double concept of reality based on a privileged access to truth and objectivity has seduced western intellectuals – from the metaphysicians of the classical world to analytical philosophers of language – into seeing more in their discussions than just the repetition and renewal of symbols and metaphors that generations preceding them have invented in order to communicate clearly with each other.
Rorty shares the fascination for Plato’s idea. But having been schooled in Wittgenstein‘s philosophy and Dewey’s pragmatism, he thinks we should ditch Plato’s thinking and curb our metaphysical enthusiasm. He believes that we4 would be better off if we swapped the concept of linguistic representation for the more modest notion that we use words to solve problems. Rorty sees nothing more in a person’s or community’s final vocabulary than their ability to formulate statements from a contingent reservoir of new and inherited propositions, with which they can for the time being identify and which they will use for as long as they function relatively smoothly. If the experiences, challenges and aims of a community or individual change, so too does their final vocabulary. They distance themselves from statements and convictions that they have grown out of, and start describing themselves and the circumstances of their lives differently to how they have up until then. Rorty’s anti-essentialism aims at freeing our understanding of our own language from the illusion that it is the product of higher instances than our own needs and purposes. He makes the case that we develop vocabularies suited to these needs and intentions, without behaving as if they represented anything fundamental.
What is true of language is also true of the self. For Rorty the self is a shifting network of idiosyncratic convictions and hopes with no objective foundations, most of which we have simply picked up somewhere. An assemblage of experiences and remembered images and phrases, some of which we are conscious of, some not, that we call our self. He understands subjectivity not as some inner human essence that can be unearthed, assuming one knew where to dig for it. “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we ourselves [and others – A.K.] have put there”.5 Rorty sees the subject’s striving for personal autonomy as a desire to appropriate the narratives in which it figures – narratives which mark the limits of its own self-understanding – in order to give them new readings. We do not emancipate ourselves from the descriptions others have made of us by uncovering some supposed inner essence of our being, but rather by reinterpreting those descriptions, modifying them and adding to them unexpected passages. The self’s redescription of itself is not the birth of the subject’s autonomous narration of itself, but rather a critique of the themes and styles of all those who have had a part in writing our story.
The same is true of community – albeit with consequences that are harder to accept than the narcissistic affront to our sense of self that contemplation of our own contingency brings. According to Rorty, communities are also founded on nothing more than changing narratives about at which point they draw the line between those people whom we call “we”, and others whom we call “the others”. For an anti-essentialist, one particular form of community cannot be privileged over another on the grounds that it can be better justified rationally or because the line it draws more closely conforms to human nature. The same is also true of democracy. Ideas of equality, justice and self-determination are not expressions of a form of reason that has managed to discover the principles of true humanity and attain the heights of a just way of life. These ideas are cultural assets that owe their emergence to a long series of social struggles and political processes, books and artworks, disputes and agreements – and not to compelling philosophical arguments that democracies embody the right form of collective organisation, arguments which non-democracies simply refuse to accept.
Rorty’s disagreement with Jürgen Habermas over the universality of human rights is famous in this regard. While Habermas assumes that any group of people in a situation of communicative rationality would necessarily come to the shared view that every human being is possessed of inalienable rights, Rorty sees in these rights nothing more nor less than a relatively large group of people’s normative decision to want to live in a world where such rights are guaranteed by the appropriate institutions. What is universal about them is not that they exist beyond space and time and independently of legal discourses, but that at some point a majority of people got behind the idea of unconditionally attributing them to all human beings. Rorty thinks that telling those holding contrary views that they are mistaken, and would sooner or later come round to our way of thinking if only they thought about the matter for long enough, is pointless. He replaces the distinction between right and wrong notions of how we should treat each other with the distinction between those kinds of treatment that accord with a community’s ideas of a world worth living in, and other kinds of treatment that contradict these ideas.
Many critics take the view that, in so doing, Rorty forgoes the chance of taking a firm moral standpoint from which, for example, democratic values could be defended from forms of totalitarianism independently of any historical context. What could ground our solidarity with people who are being treated cruelly by other people, when there is no firm basis from which such cruelties could be opposed? The fact is that Rorty doesn’t only believe that there are no identifiable ahistorical principles in which our words, self-image or collective bonds could be definitively grounded; he also thinks that we have no need of such principles – indeed, that to support them is to attack democracy. It is not the case that questions of who we are, what we should think and how we can act are unanswerable without recourse to ultimate certainties – rather the contrary. If we free ourselves of the desire for such certainties, then an open discussion can begin which can allow us to answer the crucial questions for ourselves, and in so doing come to the conclusion that a community based on solidarity is something we want badly enough to fight for. Why, though, should we come to this conclusion in the first place? Why should we come to the position of wanting to be in solidarity with each other, and of incorporating metaphors of solidarity into our vocabulary, if not because we are certain this position is true?6
First: Rorty describes what he sees as the most promising intellectual position for a democratic and post-metaphysical culture by introducing the figure of the “liberal ironist”.7 In Rorty’s vocabulary, ironists are people who see nothing more in their deepest convictions than contingent artefacts, and who are nevertheless willing to courageously defend these convictions. Ironists do not believe that they will find a book somewhere containing definitive and eternally valid propositions on how they should behave towards themselves and others. This doesn’t stop them from supporting particular forms of behaviour and rejecting others. According to Rorty, liberal ironists stand for the idea that a community of people in which freedom, power and wealth are as equally distributed as possible would be the best community imaginable, and that this community should include as many people as it possibly can. Liberal ironists set themselves the task of extending the number of people that they feel connected to as far as they can. The fact that this task is “just an idea” does not detract from their conviction that this idea is good enough to be declared a basic premise.
Second: Rorty suggests that in order for this to succeed we should distinguish between our own private need for autonomy and certainty – our hope for a final vocabulary that could give an unshakeable foundation to our selves and to our own feelings of belonging – and the public project of a social world in which solidarity and equality are the highest goods. He thinks it is neither possible nor desirable to bring our idiosyncratic desires, preferences and fundamental beliefs into harmony with the desires, preferences and fundamental beliefs of everyone else. He envisages a quintessentially secular culture whose members would be capable of regarding their most intimate fantasies and metaphysical longings as a private matter, and refrain from troubling others with them. Instead they would regard it as the community’s urgent task to view suffering of any and every kind as the worst thing that people can do to each other, and to work to create a form of society that minimises this suffering.
Third: there seem at present to be hardly any societies that are actually pursuing this task. Rorty had few illusions regarding the United States. In 1996 he wrote: “If I had to bet which country would go fascist next, my bet might be on the United States.”8 For our purposes, though, the crucial point is not to overcome Rorty’s view of social cruelty by finding objective, rational grounds for why it is false, but by developing a passion for the idea of living in a world where cruelty does not occur. This passion would not be sparked by other people trying to kid us into thinking they’ve found evidence for why some beliefs and ways of life are better than others. Rather, it would be sparked by a heightened sensitivity to the violence and degradation that we and others experience. This sensitivity would make it more difficult for us to think of people we don’t know as individuals who have different feelings to us and whose happiness counts for less than the happiness of our friends or neighbours.
Fourth and last: it is for this reason that Rorty thinks philosophy will have little to contribute to a project of a community of solidarity as long as it conceives of itself as a discipline of rational justification, rather than a genre of inspirational literature. Philosophy needs to think of itself as just one kind of text among others, texts whose relevance does not consist in the fact that one of them comes closer to the truth than another, but rather that some of them inspire a passion for social change and some do not. Rorty gives more credit to novels like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and George Orwell’s 1984 for making more people sensitive to the life, passions and sufferings of others than he does to works of epistemology. This is why philosophers should stop searching in these works for clues to something that lies beyond our own ideas and actions. Instead they should dedicate their work to what Rorty calls cultural politics: to debates over which vocabulary seems more suited to implementing common social ambitions, over which forces influence these vocabularies, and how these forces can be supported or opposed. In addition, Rorty sees in “strong poets”9(his examples include Freud and Marx) the creators of new vocabularies, many of whom initially met with rejection, and some of whom have became in the course of history part of our common cultural heritage. With this, I have established the point I set out to make at the beginning of this section.
Vocabulary Politics
Rorty’s philosophical and political anti-essentialism goes hand in hand with an anti-representational conception of language and texts that we can easily transpose onto an anti-representational conception of practices and objects, including (and especially) that of the aesthetic.10 This conception amounts to seeing art as nothing more nor less than a section of the contingent vocabulary that we use to picture to ourselves who we are and what we do, and what kind of relations we have to the ideas, people and things that we encounter or produce, including those things we don’t understand. From an anti-representational perspective, I have no problem with the fact that artistic practices and objects do this in a specific way, but I cannot see why this way should lay claim to a special depth and truth – to something that is supposedly more than just a product of ourselves, a product of time and chance. Nor do I have any use for the distinction between aesthetic acts or objects that “merely describe” reality and others that “describe it as it really is”, and still others that critique, transcend, question, produce or deconstruct it, or whatever else it is that gets said about art. On the other hand, I can see a big difference between those aesthetic acts and objects that force us to confront our own and others’ cruelty, or can mobilise an imaginative capacity that is in solidarity with others, and other acts and objects that cannot or will not do this.
In other words: from an anti-representational point of view, the thing about art is that it co-authors the vocabularies we identify with, and by which we describe ourselves and our communities. These are the vocabularies that help orientate our perceptions, thoughts and actions, and they are the things that artists pick up, change, and occasionally reject in order to propose new ones. Whenever these vocabularies and the way they are used change, then the way we see ourselves and others – and ultimately how we live – also changes. That is why I consider interventions into the network of metaphors that communities use to construct images of themselves to be interventions into their reality. From the point of view of an anti-representational concept of art, the question is therefore not whether or not art participates in social processes and influences their development, but whether it does so in such a way that brings us closer to the idea of a social formation that we would sooner have than the existing one. In general, a community will be prepared to move in directions that it can already picture itself following.11 Without an imaginative horizon, a different future, a different self or a different community is barely conceivable, and very difficult to achieve. Aesthetic practices, objects and discourses have it within their power to sketch out such horizons.
So the point of the conception of art I’m proposing with Rorty is to see in aesthetic objects and practices an instance of what I call vocabulary politics.12 Vocabulary politics refers to the social conflict over contingent and contested versions of society’s self-descriptions, which ultimately represent alternative ways of living together. I believe that this view sufficiently answers the question of art’s social function and the possible ways it can be politicised. I don’t need a deeper foundation or a better theoretical grounding for art’s political nature, or for its “criticality”. I am quite content to regard the art world as one of the arenas in which our reality is contested and our future is negotiated. And I think it is extremely useful to think of these negotiations in terms of a contest between different vocabularies of subjective and social imagination – which are, among other things, apparent in the aesthetic form of works, in how they are presented and in how they are discussed. Not one of these vocabularies can be said to be more valid than another, but some we will find to be helpful and useful, others unhelpful, and still others just irritating.
What can be debated is what we should consider helpful and what irritating. I can very well imagine an (art) world in which this debate is played out and in which no one thinks any longer that it is about anything other than comparisons, revisions and additions to existing vocabularies and their respective potentials to further our social ambitions and visions. Rorty does not think it would be either helpful or possible to try to settle conflicts between competing and mutually incompatible vocabularies by reducing them to the common denominator of such supposedly objective principles as historical development, rational consensus or human reason. For him, the antagonism between the proponents of different social imaginations and aims is irreconcilable. This is also how Chantal Mouffe sees it,13 who like Rorty has described it as the merit of democratic cultures to be able to accept antagonisms and institutionally legitimise them. For Mouffe, democratic dissent turns opposing sides into opponents rather than enemies by enabling them to resolve their conflict without violence in a commonly recognised arena, instead of beating the hell out of each other somewhere.
As a liberal ironist and anti-essentialist, Mouffe agrees with Rorty that an emancipative vocabulary politics cannot consist of much more than the attempt to foster strong feelings and passions for the ideals of solidarity, and of making one’s own liberal, pluralistic vocabulary attractive enough to have the chance of being accepted by others. It is here that the concept of vocabulary politics finds its true purpose. What will determine whether metaphors and visions based around solidarity prevail in our negotiations over our future prospects is whether a sufficiently large number of people can mobilise their imagination and passion for such visions, and whether we use metaphors capable of encouraging this mobilisation. Rorty’s view is that we make progress towards this when we describe a more just world using words and images that are moving, engaging and plausible to so many people that they no longer want – and perhaps no longer can – imagine a world that is less just. And that they think, act and organise accordingly. At the same time, we need to find a language to describe both our own cruelties and those of others that ensures we never want to commit them again. Those working in and observing the art world should regard the mobilisation and dissemination of such visions of solidarity as an urgent task, one that takes precedence over everything else.
Resolidarisation
Those who suspect that my case for mobilising solidarity puts the horse of aesthetic practices before the cart of communitarian propaganda need not worry. I hope to use Rorty to remove precisely this kind of misapprehension. Though art may be a tool of vocabulary politics, I have no intention of instrumentalising it, nor should it dictate to us how we ought to live. And nor do I think that we will get anywhere by distinguishing between works that promote solidarity as such and those that do not – any more than I believe that we could or should do so. Nevertheless, members of a post-metaphysical culture who regard their own vocabularies and social forms as contingent should be able to decide what kind of art they consider to be good and proper, useful and meaningful, and what kind they don’t. For anti-essentialists, this decision can only be based on their own needs, convictions and purposes. Anti-essentialists who are also ironists refrain from giving conclusive reasons for this decision, and do their very best to reach it autonomously. (Anti-essentialists who have read authors such as Freud or Foucault would add that this capacity for self-determination has its limits). Liberal ironists will make a case for an art that brings them and others closer to the aim of being more fair-minded, more considerate, and less sadistic; they will consider good and meaningful those artistic forms and modes of expression that concur with their ambitions for solidarity, and will regard all the others as unnecessary or irritating.
That is why I said at the beginning that to speak about art after Rorty means, for me, to speak about solidarity. Not because art and solidarity automatically go together, but because I believe that they ought to. For if our reality depends on our imaginative capacities, if our imaginative capacities depend on the vocabulary available to it, and if it is we who make vocabularies, in part by means of art, then the same must be true of our reality – and then every expression of solidarity in the reservoir of social imagination is a step towards a world without cruelty. And in my view, that is what emancipation aims at. I feel that Rorty’s anti-essentialism entirely accords with the way that increasing numbers of people see things today. Few people now would seriously deny the contingency of language, the self and the community. And I would suggest to those who do that they spare the public their longing for universal certainty, and treat it instead as a private matter. However, not everyone will agree on what the consequences of Rorty’s position are. They mean a change in perspective in how we relate to art. Much of the discourses and products of art, along with the texts and discussions that address them, remain essentialist in nature. Questions such as: what the true essence of art is and its relationship to reality, what constitutes a work’s real political meaning or its genuine quality, what it is a work is “about”, or what its maker “had in mind” – according to Rorty, we should understand these questions as attempts to obscure what it is our arguments and relations are really about, and to stifle discussion of them by demanding objective statements, definitive answers and conclusive vocabularies.
Anyone interested in the political nature of art should have nothing to do with this. The art world would be utterly different if it threw overboard the heritage of a discourse of rational justification, as Rorty has done for philosophy, and base itself on anti-essentialist and anti-representational premises. Then its members would simply change the discussion every time something came up that we would normally consider to be profound, fundamental or basic. Questions such as “what are the limits to painting?”, “how realistic is a documentary film?” or “is Jeff Koons really a good artist?” would then become hollow. I don’t think we miss out on anything crucial by leaving them essentially unanswered. This doesn’t mean that we won’t be able to think of any differences between what is and what is not painting, between documentary films and reality or between good and bad artists. I just think that – for the reasons given above – we shouldn’t rack our brains about whether these differences are of a fundamental nature. If we find ourselves losing sleep over these kinds of questions, then we should discuss them with our friends.
On the other hand, we could and should talk about how, for example, we are able to distinguish between a sculpture by Jeff Koons and the social aims it pursues, and whether we agree with those aims. I think that arguing with each other this way about what kind of art we think is good and what kind we don’t is a brilliant idea. It could be useful to have a social history of art – or even a history of its solidarity – for this kind of thing; something that might help us understand how particular forms and styles, and ways of seeing things and behaving came into the world, what form of society they supported, why they prevailed and why we eventually got used to them. And how, should we ever think it advisable, we could get rid of them. The way we should approach artistic works and practices, how we relate to them and discuss them, should be like this: which forms of social organisation do they promote? Do they bring together people and things that would generally have nothing to do with each other, appear strange to each other, are hostile to each other or supposedly belong to different groups – do they leave them where they are, or do they drive them apart?
I look forward to an art world whose members passionately discuss what forms of expression make a world they want imaginable, instead of a world they don’t want. This seems not only desirable to me but also urgent. For it is clear we are currently living through a crisis of solidarity, which is putting many of us at risk, and which demands new ways of seeing and acting, new vocabularies and metaphors that expand, rather than contract, the radius of people who see each other as a community. It is clear that the existing models of social representation and practices and feelings of solidarity are no longer adequate to the changes of the last decades, of which the most important seems to me to be the establishment of a global finance feudalism that is destroying social cohesion while simultaneously having to construct an ever more oppressively powerful bureaucracy. There are many reasons why we are passing through a historic period in which our sense of community is becoming liberated, and abandoning historic apparatuses and institutions of control. Family, faith community, class consciousness, citizenship: all these centres of gravity for common feelings of belonging and practical support are losing their power of attraction. I think we would do better not to mourn this process as one of desolidarisation, but rather to welcome it as an epochal upheaval, and work to move it towards an era of resolidarisation.
By resolidarisation I do not mean repairing broken social bonds and their old organisational forms, but rather transforming them. Solidarity, empathy, the need for belonging, a readiness to cooperate and sense of community are not disappearing. They are resettling in temporary environments, in new communicative practices, projects and technologies, in a variety of new private and public ways of relating to others, and are finding all kinds of new reasons for doing so. They are changing their horizon and their focus, their criteria and their form of organisation, their locations and their temporality. At present all these things seem to be in transformation. The contingency of community is an experience that is being shared globally by increasing numbers of people (many of whom are inclined to join backlash movements for precisely this reason); these people are looking for, and finding, other points or reference and narratives as a way to reorientate their desires and capacities for solidarity. Such phenomena as the Internet, the Occupy movement or current migration movements offer occasions for long digressions on how the social fabric of the planet is to be reconstructed. What will emerge from this remains uncertain.
Mobilisation
In this situation, (the) art (world)14 is in a position to bring new definitions of different alternatives for living together into the arena of vocabulary politics, which could accelerate, rather than retard, a mobilisation of solidarity. Rorty’s reminder of “strong poets” of the past makes a useful contribution towards this. He reads authors such as Nietzsche or Proust as people whose desire for personal autonomy enabled them to study books and events of the past not ever more closely and “philosophically”, but rather ever more imaginatively. And they did so to the extent that they were able to redefine these books and events in a language that served their own purposes, and which had ever less to do with the past and ever more with the demands of a new era that was searching for its own language – a language that was first assembled in texts like those by Nietzsche and Proust before being taken up elsewhere. If we were to find an equivalent to this notion of strong poetry in the visual arts, then we might think of the work of such artists as Paul Cezanne or Vladimir Malevich: both attempted to get rid of old vocabularies of representation by changing them and adapting them to new challenges, until each finally found himself in possession of a new vocabulary, a new tool, that was better suited to the contemporary situation than the old tools, and which therefore caught on. Rorty borrowed from Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions15 the idea that, in this process, new tools not only served existing purposes better, but also brought new purposes into being, because things could be done with them that would have been unimaginable before.
Such “revolutions” or “poetic moments”16 that we would today probably describe as performative, and which would formerly have been termed avant-gardism, change the way some people, and later perhaps many people, see and describe each other. According to Rorty, such moments arise primarily in situations when things no longer function properly, when what has been the common language up until then ceases to be effective, and everything is suddenly up for grabs at once, including language itself.17 In these crisis situations – and we find ourselves in one today – “people begin to toss around old words in new senses, to throw in the occasional neologism, and thus to hammer out a new idiom”.18 Initially no one can say what the idiom is for, until it comes to seem plausible and useful enough to increasing numbers of contemporaries who they adopt it as their own, and at some point it becomes common sense. Rorty’s idea of strong poetry may reproduce an outmoded concept of the author, and makes no attempt to hide its Romantic origins. Nevertheless, it can be useful in the context of the current ongoing processes of resolidarisation. And it gains momentum if we relate it to the few passages from Rorty’s work where he mentions philosophy, art and aesthetics in almost a single breath.
Rorty rejects the humanist idea that our sense of community could ever actually extend to include the whole of humanity, let alone anything beyond it.
According to him, it is unlikely that we would ever come to stop distinguishing between people we share particular views with and whom we consider to be part of our own community, and other people whom, try as we might, we simply cannot understand and who in our eyes are not one of “us”.19 Reconciling ourselves with this fact and making every effort to strive within existing conditions for “an ever better reorganisation of existing human relations and institutions, that is, one based on a human life worth living” is what Rorty calls the (political and moral) beautiful. On this view, the beautiful in art would be the most harmonious organisation possible of aesthetic things and moments, one that makes these relations and institutions more comprehensible, and criticises, improves or reshapes them in a manner that lies within the scope of what is possible (and sayable) for us. Another word for this notion of the beautiful is reformism.
In contrast to this, Rorty sees in the sublime something similar to the radicality of revolutionary events: “the search for people and institutions of a kind we cannot describe in any detail, because they are not subject to the conditions that we still cannot imagine life without”.20 This means that the distinction between reformism and radicalism, between the beautiful and the sublime, “more or less coincides with the dividing line between (…) participation in forms of social behaviour whose norms one understands, and invitations to turn one’s back on these forms of behaviour.”21
That is, invitations to performative moments of which Kuhn would say that they bring new points and purposes, new passions and forms of organisation into the world. This is why, for the mobilization of solidarity I envisage, it is precisely the sublime in art that holds out the promise of aesthetic acts by a universal We, by an ineffable community of equals, by an ungroundable solidarity somewhere beyond existing norms and forms of behaviour. A solidarity whose practices, objects and metaphors would appeal to nothing more basic than the longing many of us feel to find ourselves repelled by the kinds of cruelty and segregation that we still cannot imagine life without today, and which too many of us accept as normal.
Published in: Paul Buckermann, Anna Jehle (Ed.), Kinship in Solitude – Perspectives on Notions of Solidarity, 2017
Notes
1 That I have so far come across so few people in the art world who share my fondness for Rorty has perhaps to do with the fact that the American intellectual declared himself a liberal, which in the European context would be equivalent to a social democrat, and today people understandably expect little good to come from a political affiliation of this kind. Perhaps another thing that puts people off him is that he barely wrote a single word about visual art; his point of reference was literature.
But perhaps also the other reason why the proponent of neo-pragmatism has so few followers in the art world is that barely anyone has read him. To this today his name is as rarely to be found in the relevant art and theory bookshops as it is in the footnotes to the writings on sale there. This is remarkable, given that in the United States he is considered one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century, on a level with Habermas, Derrida and Foucault.
2 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1989, p. 73 ff.
3 Rorty, Richard, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”, in Philosophy and Social Hope, New York, Penguin Books 1999, p. 9 ff.
4 The editors of this text have repeatedly asked me who exactly I mean when I use the word “we”. I think my answer comes down to the same as this text: I offer a point of view that I would like to be able to make attractive to as many readers as possible, and I use “we” normatively to stand for a group of people whom I hope would see things in a similar way to me. Since my argument closely follows Rorty’s, it is natural to represent this group of people as the anti-essentialists and liberal ironists whom we both imagine as the inhabitants of post-metaphysical cultures.
5 Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1982, p. xlii.
6 Here I am leaving out the major subject of empathy and its evolutionary and neuronal background. No doubt there are reasons why we feel solidarity with others. And the same reasons also contain arguments for why it is easier to feel solidarity for smaller, closer groups of individuals than for larger and more distant groups of individuals. However, recourse to the biological or psychological basis for solidarity would change nothing about the general thrust of my argument, and at worst it could be read as an attempt to bring essentialist justifications into it.
7 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1989, p. 93 ff.
8 “Emancipating our Culture” in Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty and Kolakowski, in Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders eds., Editors Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences Westport, CT, Praeger 1996, p. 29.
9 Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1989, p. 28 ff.
10 Rorty himself does not complete – or barely completes – this step. This has always seemed to me a shortcoming, since the real relevance of his position for art only becomes clear when his arguments are transferred from the field of philosophy and literature to the field of art. And this has its own dangers, which is why I would rather Rorty himself had worked on them.
11 See Castoriadis, Cornelius, Gesellschaft als imaginäre Institution, Entwurf einer politischen Philosophie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1990.
12 See Koch, Alexander, “Kunstfeld 4. Die Privatisierung der Subjektivation und die taktische Öffnung des Feldes” in Beatice von Bismarck and Alexander Koch eds., Beyond Education. Kunst, Ausbildung, Arbeit und Ökonomie, Frankfurt am Main, Revolver 2005, pp. 145–164.
13 See Mouffe, Chantal, “Deconstruktion, Pragmatismus und die Politik der Demokratie” in Chantal Mouffe ed., Dekonstruktion und Prgamatismus, Vienna, Passagen Verlag 1999, p. 26 ff.
14 I find it increasingly difficult to distinguish between art and the art world (or the field of art). For all kinds of reasons I am finding it increasingly hard to distinguish between aesthetic objects and the social use that is made of them.
15 Kuhn, Thomas S., Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp 1973.
16 See Rorty, Richard, “Deconstruction and Circumvention” in his Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol 2, Cambridge, p. 88.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Rorty has rightly been criticised for declaring the values and aims of his own community of liberal United States Democrats to be the social fantasy that has done more for emancipation than other fantasies, and should therefore become the model for all others. Obviously we should promote those metaphors and convictions that we consider to be great achievements, such as equal rights or freedom of expression, in order to convince others of their importance. But it is not enough to declare oneself the member of a community whose ideas one feels closest to, no matter how great one may consider it to be, and make these ideas palatable to others.
20 Rorty, Richard, Die Schönheit, die Erhabenheit und die Gemeinschaft der Philosophen, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. p 33.
21Ibid., p. 16 f. Invitations of this kind have been made by writers such as Bruno Latour, who has suggested that we should reconceive the distinction between subject and object such that we come to think of objects – buildings and cities, technologies and algorithms, the increase in sea levels, the hole in the ozone layer and much more besides – as social actors and subjects with whom we interact and to whom we relate. If we combine this invitation with the idea that we are living in a period of resolidarisation, the result is an unfamiliar but promising horizon for the question of how broadly we draw the circle of those we refer to as “we”, for example, how wide the radius is of all those things and events of which we are part.