Page 206 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

194 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

(emancipate) a ‘reality’ obscured by something called ‘ideology’ (created by
power) in the name of something called ‘validity’ (not created by power)
(Rorty, 1984:41) (Habermas again). The stress on the impossible tends in
other words, to seriously limit the scope and definition of the political
(where politics is defined as the ‘art of the possible’). A series of elisions
tends to prescribe a definite route here (though it is a route taken by more
disciples than master-mistresses). First there is the absolute conflation of a
number of relatively distinct structures, paradigms, tendencies: the
emergence of industrial-military complexes, the Enlightenment aspiration
to liberate humanity, the bourgeoisie, the rise of the modern ‘scientific’
episteme, the bureaucratic nation-state and ‘Auschwitz’. Next these
dis crete and non-synchronous historical developments are traced back to
the model of the subject secreted at the origins of western thought and
culture in transcendental philosophy. Finally an ending is declared to the
‘tradition’ thus established and the equation is made between this ending
(the end of philosophy) and the ending of history itself.
As Rorty has pointed out—and these concluding remarks on
antiutopianism are a précis of Rorty’s arguments—such a trajectory
overestimates the wider historical importance of the philosophical tradition
and especially overestimates the extent to which modern social, economic
and political structures were underwritten by models of subjectivity
‘originating’ in the context of philosophical debates on the nature of
consciousness, perception, alienation, freedom, language, etc. In this way,
the Post tends to reproduce back to front as it were like a photographic
negative, the mistake which Habermas himself makes of linking the story
of modern post-Kantian philosophy and rationalism too closely to that
other modern story: the rise of industrialized democractic societies. Rorty
suggests that the second story has more to do with pressures and social
movements external to the academy, that the idea(1) of the ‘communicative
community’ has been established through ‘things like the formation of
trade unions, the meritocratization of education, the expansion of the
franchise, and cheap newspapers’ rather than through the abstract
discussion of epistemology, that religion declines in influence not because of
Nietzsche, Darwin, positivism or whatever but because ‘one’s sense of
relation to a power beyond the community becomes less important as you
see yourself as part of a body of public opinion, capable of making a
difference to the public fate’ (Rorty, 1984:38). Viewed in this light, the
history of philosophy from, say, Descartes to Nietzsche is seen as a
‘distraction from the history of concrete social engineering which made the
contemporary North Atlantic culture what it is now (with all its faults and
virtues)’ and Rorty concludes by sketching the outlines of an alternative
philosophical canon in which the ‘greatness’ of a ‘Great Mind’ would be
measured less by reference to her/his contribution to the dialectics of the
‘Great Debates’, and by the epistemological complexity of the arguments