THE PHILOSOPHY OF RICHARD RORTY AND THE FATE OF LATIN
AMERICA IN THE FIELD OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Luiza Lobo
FederalUniversity of Rio de Janeiro
SUMMARY:
This essay proposes to discusseses how the pragmatic philosophy of Richard Rorty can establish a new pattern for an alternative perspective of culture according to the ´here and now` in social life. It envisages new ways for the continuation and spreading of Latin American art and literature in the era of globalization. This art should aim to be autonomous from the domination of the Other (such as the First World), but, at the same time, it should be capable of interacting with other nations. The new demands of communication in relation to art and culture presuppose a shift from rhetoric and metaphysics into a new mentality and form of representation aimed at a quicker and more direct performance. To implement this shift and to comply with the new present forms of sensitivity and expression, it is very important to establish a constant exchange of experience both within and outside Latin America. These new means of communication can be the Internet, e-books, portals, virtual libraries and data bases, and could allow a superseding of old canons and old ways of thinking based on a purely rhetorical metaphysics of the absence. This new approach will allow Latin America to achieve its affirmation and spread its art and culture within the continent and around the world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Luiza Lobo is an Associate Professor of the Post-Graduate Program Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and is currently a Foreign Lecturer at AarhusUniversity, in Denmark. She has published ten books, five of essays and literary criticism, and five of short stories. She published more than a hundred articles in specialized periodicals in Brazil, Italy, France, Canada, Japan, and Germany and has lectured in more than a hundred conferences and universities, among which them, Oxford, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the Free University of Berlin. In 2001 she was a Senior Visiting Scholar there and in 2000 at the Centre for Brazilian Studies of the University of Oxford. She has also translated critical essays and about thirty books of fiction by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Katherine Mansfield, Edgar Allan Poe, James Hogg, William Golding and Robert Burns. She has also edited ten books of essays, and is currently editing two publications for the University of Nantes, in France. She is the editor of two on-line magazines: Literatura e Cultura and Mulheres e Literatura ( a page that also presents Brazilian authors in translation.
Introduction: pragmatics as a philosophy of presence
The philosophy of Richard Rorty stresses the importance of communication, observation and the assumption of a present state of affairs, rather than a purely rhetorical and metaphysical inquiry about reality. Even a dialogical or dialectical thought, as it consists of a triad based on two pairs of dichotomies, as Lévi-Strauss (1969) has already written, may still be considered as being linked to metaphysics. However, direct observation of everyday facts of life and their use in art from a pragmatic point of view, in a more flexible approach to reality, can allow for better communication in a globalized world.
Richard Rorty exposed his philosophy mainly in two of his “Philosophical Writings,” Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers. I, 1995 a), (Objetivismo, relativismo e verdade. Escritos filosóficos I, 1997a), and Essays on Heidegger and Others. Philosophical Papers. Volume 2, 1995b); in hisSpinoza Lectures (1997 b), as well as in his first book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1993), published in 1979. Rorty’s article “Feminism, Ideology and Deconstruction: a pragmatic Vision” (“Feminismo, ideologia e desconstrução: uma visão pragmática”) included in the book A Map of Ideology (Um mapa da ideologia, 1996), is also an important contribution. There he states that post-modernism or deconstruction, following Paul de Man’s denomination, is a moment in our society and that the main aim of pragmatic philosophy is to achieve a society in which there is no metaphysics, no essentialism, nor any kind of “adoration” or cult, be it towards science, literature or whatsoever (1995, p. 132, 133). This society, as it already exists in many Western nations of the First World, would have no altars, “and instead just have lots of picture galleries, book displays, movies, concerts, ethnographic museums, museums of science and technology, and so on – lots of cultural options but no privileged central discipline or practice” (1995, p. 132). Evidently, his proposition for the ideal society is a secular one.
Rorty’s ideas can be divided into two parts, the speculative, when he discusses Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Paul De Man, and the pragmatic, when he becomes more political, following Dewey and Donaldson, and is more interested in the political crisis of contemporary times. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he proposes the breaking up of the fundamental tradition of Descartes and Kant (1979), as well as of analytical philosophy, a recent development of Kant. To replace it he proposes the “edifying” philosophy of hermeneutics, including Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Gadamer. He vehemently denies that knowledge is either merely the result of the mental or linguistic representation of reality (1997, p. 7), or that it is only a representation of nature, following a statement common both to pragmatics and to post-modern thought (1997, p. 8). In “Consequences of Pragmatism” (1982) he envisions pragmatics as deeply rooted in literary criticism and in a hermeneutic approach to social sciences (see also 1997, p. 7).
In “Truth, Politics and Post-Modern,” a lecture presented at the Department of Philosophy in Amsterdam University in 1995, and published in 1997 as Spinoza Lectures (p. 23-52), Rorty distinguishes two projects derived from Enlightenment: the political and the philosophical. According to him, the first of these projects demanded as much freedom as possible for society, and has been completed, whereas the second, the philosophical project, remains to be completed., because it was not sufficiently radical. Thus, Rorty recognizes that Enlightenment achieved the abolition of the Idea of God, but he admits that it could not abolish the three main fundamental ideas that sustain Western society, which were left for post-modernism to complete: Nature, Reason and Truth (in 1997, p. 9). It is towards this aim that he directs his work as a pragmatist. He stresses that, in order to build a new society, one should have a much more direct approach to reality, free from metaphysics and even from dialectics, more akin to existence and to the body and its emotions, and with a keener direct observation of everyday life.
Post-modern Society: Literature and Art in the Cultural Era
We know that, partially due to the influence of the media, contemporary society is based upon the idea of an eternal unending, continuous present; we live in a world in which there is no space for abstract thought but only for shopping and acquiring material goods that we will at best throw away very soon. This same idea of the discardable may be also applied to our thought. The present crisis of metaphysical thought and the disbelief in transcendence, in truth and in the eternity of humanity goes together with this form of behavior. It is a continuation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which gained impetus with Heidegger, Derrida and the YaleSchool, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartmann, Harold Bloom and Jonathan Culler. The post-modern movement is part of a grandiose project that attempts to dismantle the fundamentals of Western philosophy as supported by the metaphysics of absence, which rests upon the idea of transcendence of the world; that is, the explanation of human life would lie outside of the immanent world itself. In the words of Jacques Derrida, this movement is an attempt to break up with “phalogocentrism,” or the centralization in patriarchal order and with the notion of identity and universal truth implied in the Cartesian logos. Derrida stresses that oral communication and repetition eternize the metaphysical idea of Truth, and proposes a revolutionary process to disrupt this order. It is this process s, tthat aims at dismantling the Western-Greek-Jewish-Christian thought that he means by deconstruction. It should be replaced by a post-modern post-metaphysical thought which would rely not on the absence but on the presence, the immanence, the ´here and now´ in society.
Such is, in my view, the importance of the pragmatics proposed by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, in the sense that it carries a positive means of reconstructing our way of thinking. In his analysis of society, he invokes a down-to-earth experience of reality and takes into consideration mass culture and the real facts of life as they present themselves in society and in people’s existences. Therefore, his philosophy attempts to find a way out of the history of transcendence, of meta-things, and to bring into light the observation of immanence and existence. He may have some points in common with Heidegger and with Emmanuel Levinas; however, both these philosophers were not as radical in their deconstruction of metaphysics as Rorty is.
One of the consequences of post-modernism and of this kind of pragmatics is the breaking up of old canons. Of course, this tendency originated in the more radical Modernist movement of the 1920s; however, it still exists today, although it is tainted with the less radical notion of hybridization of culture and homogenization of high and low cultures, as proposed by Nestor Canclini and by Cultural Studies in general. This direct approach to reality points to a major revolution in our Weltanschauung about our possibility of changing the old, by replacing the old, while, in the words of Derrida, it proposed to replace the old stagnant “metaphysics of absence” with a new “metaphysics of presence.”
wayerently and in anhat of e” boints to A whole set of preoccupations linked to the emotional, the body and everyday life follows the notion of the ´politically correct,´ the political minorities, women’s and gays´studies, gender studies, feminist studies, race studies etc. All of these new interests are not sheer rhetoric only a word of mouth but a fact, a possible action that can really be attained or performed nowadays.
The global panorama of art and literature has dramatically changed in the contemporary world, to the extent thata point where[e1] we sometimes ask ourselves if tomorrow there will still be the kind of art and literature that we know today. The large installations in the museums of contemporary art and the new forms of media are only some of the signs of these transformations. E-books and the Internet, laser machines, and the media revolution of media in general, such as digital radio and TV, all hint to this great revolution in terms of the way we can communicate thought and emotion through art. The diffusion of international cultures and experiences through the mediation of the computer, which reaches out to people apart in the globe in a local culture (the global village dreamed of by MacLuhan) signals that even in Latin America we approach a new era.
The most immediate consequence of this process of globalization is the shift from multiple views of society, mentality and culture into a unified human sensitivity with one single view of the world. Therefore, if the poorer countries do not resist, their culture will be increasingly absorbed into or invaded by the products, habits, culture and art originating in the First World countries. Culture is today the most powerful weapon of civilization and politics and allows for the creation of a new kind of empire domination which employs image, color, movement and the word. This is an empire only comparable to the Roman in Antiquity which was able to incorporate the basic foundations of Greek culture and spread itself onto Europe and Africa. Then a relatively slow process of expansion and domination of the other cultures was achieved step by step, even through wars. Colonial domination by the British Empire lasted only 20 years but has now been replaced by the media invasion in homes, theaters, supermarkets, schools. The only form to resist of resistance is to negotiate which aspects of one’s culture could be conceded and which retained.
Richard Rorty thinks that literature and philosophy should be keptleft[e2] apart, as two separate disciplines. Their only proximity lies in the fact that both have to exert themselves in the search for the canon through the study of history. Which authors should be selected to be studied in a course? In science, the criterion of choice is more obvious, since it relies rather on the importance of its subject matter proper and on the most recent discoveries rather than on sometimes highly controversial human figures. Therefore, science employs a much more detached and distant approach to its subject matter than in the humanities, in whichwhere including an author in a syllabus immediately represents an ideological choice relying on taste and subjectivity. Due to deeper subjectivity than in the sciences, the humanities are much more susceptible to criticism, censorship or appreciation than the sciences. For Rorty, the canon is deeply dependent on one’s perspective, and he posesposing questions such as: Where do you speak from? What is the good of your speech? For him, there is nothing like a general canon nowadays – it depends on who construes it, why and how (1998: p. 49-75).
[e3] Printing activity today, except for best-sellers, is almost entirely dedicated to books clearly marked with a didactic, professional, informational or technical profile. Any work linked only to art or literature can be rejected by publishers, sold as any ordinary product, or is so highly priced that it does not circulate. At the same time that the book has become an object of consumerism and a practical tool for information, one should not forget that it might very well also be “an efficient vehicle for the transmission of culture,” according to Roberto Reis (in Jobim, 1992, p. 72). At the same time, for centuries books have also been powerful tools for the domination exerted by individuals of a certain class on lower social groups.
In the present financial climate I consider that the only possibility for art and literature to survive in contemporary Latin America is by the employment of new media, such as the Internet, or other several new resources that would minimize expenses. These forms of communication would enable Latin American art and culture to spread and be known within the continent as well as around the world. And this also applies to any African, Asian or other marginalized cultures.
The Internet represents an opening for a great number of virtual worlds, and it attests to the huge range of possibilities that can multiply our up to now “real” but limited world of knowledge. It makes it possible to recreate reality in a much broader world opening new portals in a new Internet era of communication that expands knowledge at a much faster rate and with increased capacity to communicate. In other words, the Internet represents a new Gutenberg revolution – provided of course that it will not be dominated only by business transactions. In the Third World, the distribution of this knowledge would lead to an ethical and balanced form of sharing culture between the rich and the poor, the public and the private, the local and the universal. Provided that the internet is installed, few resources are needed for its functioning, which makes it financially viable to establish a constant dialogue between the periphery and the First World. .[e4] However, these powerful markets do not First Worldnecessarily lie in the First World anymore. Geography is constantly beingen redesigned, not in terms of real space but rather in terms of lines of exchange, negotiation, communication and a new distribution of power and income – such as has recently happened with financial expansion in China and India.
Mass communication and mass culture, since their creation during the Second World War, have cannibalized art and literature. They have complied with a “society of the show” (société du spectacle), as Guy Debord (1997) so aptlyply put it. They have transformed the history of “fine arts” into a history of low and hybrid culture, in the words of Nestor García Canclini in his Hybrid Cultures (Culturas híbridas, 1997). For Canclini, art and literature spread in the same way as any other forms of communication; therefore it is irrelevant whether they are high or low forms of art. They dispense with institutions for their expression and can be produced even by popular artists in street markets. Notwithstanding some defenses of high forms of literature, such as Leyla Perrone-Moysés’ latest book, Altas literaturas (2000), the fact is that only when a book or art object has reached notoriety or that it has achieved a response, a reception can it be known to a wider audience or public. I propose in this paper that the Internet should be employed as a powerful ancillary means of journalism and mass media communication for art and literature. Its low cost, and its potential to reach the public through the installation of computers in cyber cafés, schools, universities, libraries and the like, allow it to bridge all gaps and unite all forms of intertextualities, be they news, information, art, film, music, books, debates, and many we may not yet be aware of. The very fact that the Internet normally does not demand a critical body of experts to select and judge beforehand what it will exhibit is the key factor in the exposure of a work of art, unlike the established institutions of art. Because a work of art is from Latin America might mean that it could be badly received or not received at all by one of the institutions above mentioned. It would hardly find a way to be printed, were it a book, or to be accepted in the highly valued markets and galleries of New York or any other First World centers, were it a work of art. This would happen not only because Latin America lacks the prestige that only economic power can lend it, but also because it lacks the material and financial support from the media and other sponsors that First Worlda works of art have. Beginning in the 1920s, these[e5] committees have become increasingly institutionalized and dependant upon the Capitalist idea of profit. A work of art represents commercial profit, especially when supported by the press, and therefore becomes a happening or a fact of marketing. The idea of its having an intrinsic aesthetic value according to Kant is hardly ever taken into account by present critics of art and literature.