Remembering Rorty

On Friday I was honored to participate in Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won’t, a conference in memory of Richard Rorty and in celebration of the opening of his collection of papers in the UC Irvine Critical Theory Archive. Particular attention was given to the “born digital” materials, which are offered in a unique “online reading room,” allowing researchers access without the need to visit UCI itself.

It was a terrific conference, an intense but highly enjoyable single-day affair. I was happy to meet thinkers I’d known of or emailed with but not met, like Michael Bérubé, Iain Thomson, Mark Wrathall, Christine Borgman, and Steven Mailloux. And it was lovely to meet Mary Rorty, who was incredibly kind and gracious.

As organizer Liz Losh mentions in the first part of her blog coverage, the conference succeeded because none of us merely paid homage or respects to Richard Rorty. We did that too, I hope, but each of us also extended and challenged his thinking in our own way. My talk, for example, was about the idea of the public intellectual, and the need to extend that idea beyond political pragmatism into ontological realism.

Perhaps Rorty might seem like an unusual philosopher to embrace given my interest in object-oriented philosophy. As Graham Harman recently said at the end of a comment on Bryant’s blog, “Pragmatism = correlationism.”

But I think there’s still much to learn from Rorty, even for us anticorrelationists. For one, Rorty is a clear and cogent writer, one of the few philosophers who managed to enter the continental tradition (even if in a complex way) without adopting any of its bad habits.

For another, his pragmatism was not the “idealistic pragmatism” (if I can use that ironic term) of James or even his hero Dewey. Rather, Rorty’s pragmatism is more earnestly disinterested in using the empirical exhaust of practice to retroactively validate theory. It’s this abstract pragmatism that I think of when I talk about a “pragmatic speculative realism”, which I’m developing in the Alien Phenomenology manuscript.

For yet another, I think the concept of the ironist is underappreciated outside of political pragmatism. There’s no question that Rorty only ever intended the ironist to name human actors, but the notion of irony offers an interesting parallel to that of the withdrawn object that never reveals itself in full, and the occasionalist object that never exhausts the sensual object with which it interacts. I’ll have to think about this in more detail, but I do think that there might be something to be gained from a realist re-reading of Rorty, particularly in light of the “pragmatic” speculation I’m after. This is clearly not a course Rorty himself would have steered, but it’s also one the very principles of his philosophy would also be bound to support!

I was going to post my conference talk here on my website, but it’s my understanding that arrangements are being made to collect all of them and publish them online (and perhaps offline too?) in some form. Stay tuned for more on that. For now, many thanks to Liz Losh for organizing the conference.