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1 Introduction: What Rorty Said About Feminism

Richard Rorty, unlike his contemporaries in philosophy, showed a marked interest in and serious engagement with feminist theory; most of the engagement with feminist theory by other philosophers at this time was limited to caricature and dismissal, if they mentioned feminist theory at all.

And yet, Rorty’s foray into feminist theory was not uncontroversial among feminists. His insistence on the importance of the public-private distinction, his valorization of the prophetic/poetic voice, and his emphasis on linguistic innovation, which seemed to imply that feminist theory was destined to be yet another utopian, irrational intervention in philosophy, seemed to some feminist theorists to be a way of justifying feminist theory’s marginalization in philosophical discourse. Feminists like Nancy Fraser, Carol Pateman, and Catherine MacKinnon argued that eliding the distinction between the public and the private was essential to feminist projects.Footnote 1 While this is an important debate, it will not be the focus of this chapter; rather this chapter focuses on the lead-up to that debate, represented by Rorty’s championing of an alignment between feminism and pragmatism, his discussion of the new being – the new creation – of the category of “women,” and on the importance of linguistic innovation.

In her comments on “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Nancy Fraser suggests that this talk might represent a wooing – Rorty, arguably the most prominent critic of traditional philosophy, trying to woo feminists to the cause of pragmatism (Fraser 1991/2010, p. 48). It might be more accurate to say that he takes this opportunity to read feminism into the pragmatist tradition, pointing out the natural affinities between them. The feminist theorists that Rorty admires most are not simply pointing out that women’s voices have been missing from traditional philosophy, or pointing out the masculinist biases of traditional philosophy – they are, rather, creating new ways of being, and new ways of talking. They are utopian prophets, creating a new world, not boring flat-footed soldiers in the army of “realism” and accurate representation. Oddly enough, however, this new world would be one in which the category “women” might be otiose.

In the following, I will focus on the two essays that Rorty published that explicitly discuss the relationship between feminism and philosophy: his Tanner lecture from 1990, titled “Feminism and Pragmatism” (Sect. 2), and his essay, published in Hypatia in 1993, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View” (Sect. 3). As these essays show, the encounter between Rorty and feminist theory was very productive for Rorty’s thinking about the value of communities of resistance who practice forms of linguistic innovation as a way, not just of correcting tendencies in masculinist traditions, but as ways of creating new traditions and new visions for human forms of life.

2 Feminism and Pragmatism (1990)

The essay “Feminism and Pragmatism,” originally delivered as a lecture, opens with a quote from Catherine MacKinnon,Footnote 2 in which she expresses the hope that the new women on the Minnesota Supreme CourtFootnote 3 will understand their loyalties as aligned with those of “women as women” – that they will see themselves as accountable to that community. And though this seems troublesome – after all, we might recognize the legitimacy of the question, “what do women want?” – MacKinnon says that such indeterminacy is to be expected, since “we have no idea what women as women would have to say” (MacKinnon 1987, p. 77 quoted in Rorty 1991/2010, p. 20). Rorty seems to have been inspired by this part of the quote to think about silence or voicelessness, and to advocate for an alignment between pragmatism and feminism.

2.1 The Category “Woman” and the Prophetic Voice

Rorty, citing Dewey, says that philosophy has been, for all of its known history, a record of male concerns and interests, and that we should not expect or encourage women to try to see the world and describe it from that same vantage point. The appeal to what the world is, or what reality contains, is according to Rorty, a judgment of value, rather than a mere description, and Rorty warns that feminists should be suspicious of such appeals (Rorty 1991/2010, p. 24). This connects to the claims that MacKinnon, Marilyn Frye, and Carolyn Whitbeck are making on behalf of feminism because they are not claiming that a more accurate approach to “the real” or “the true” will give us access to women’s voices or perspectives. Rather, as women are “only now coming into existence, rather than having been deprived of the ability to express what was deep within them all along” (Rorty 1991/2010, p. 31), what feminism is doing is creating a new discourse, a new “logical space,” and a new moral identity – that of “women as women” – rather than women as an oppressed class of human beings, demanding rights that already exist but which have not been appropriately recognized. Similarly, if women are to do something other than become students of (male) philosophers, if they are to create something anew, they should recognize that their voices may not be heard as “rational” or as hewing to the epistemic and linguistic standards of the masculinist community of philosophy (recognizing here that the “masculinist community” might also include biological femalesFootnote 4).

How can we make sense of this claim that “women” are just now coming into existence? Though he does not refer to her, we might begin with Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born a woman – that the category “woman” is not a biological, but rather a cultural and political, category that takes on different shapes and forms in different time periods and for different purposes. The fact that the Myth of Woman contains what seem to be irreconcilable paradoxes (e.g., Madonna/whore; mama bear and weak vessel) is evidence of its use as an all-purpose tool of control.

But what does it then mean to say that “women are just now coming into existence”? Perhaps what Rorty has in mind is the phenomenon that Beauvoir discussed in The Second Sex: the recognition of collective solidarity. Beauvoir remarks that such solidarity can be found among some oppressed groups, who can think of themselves as “we,” but that women have been unwilling to see themselves as connected to other women primarily because they have seen themselves more in terms of their relationship with the men in their lives. Women, Beauvoir argues, are reluctant to think of themselves in terms of the social caste of “woman” (de Beauvoir 1953/1989).

Feminists working and writing in the 1980s and early 1990s, in contrast, began to track the recognition of “woman” as a category that could support political action, a category on behalf of which political demands might be made. But even as that category seemed to be cohering, it seemed also to be disintegrating, as the category “woman” was thought by many to be inappropriately essentialist. The worry, voiced by both feminists and their critics, was that the term “woman” threatened to replace the term “human” as yet another normative construction that elided differences of class, race, and sexuality. Judith Butler puts it this way:

Within the terms of feminist theory, it has been quite important to refer to the category of ‘women’ and to know what it is we mean […] The descriptions of women’s oppression, their historical situation or cultural perspective has seemed, to some, to require that women themselves will not only recognize the rightness of feminist claims made in their behalf, but that, together, they will discover a common identity, whether in their relational attitudes, in their embodied resistance to abstract and objectifying modes of thought and experience, their felt sense of their bodies, their capacity for maternal identification or maternal thinking, the nonlinear directionality of their pleasures or the elliptical and plurivocal possibilities of their writing. (Butler 1990, p. 324)

For Rorty, the issue is the verb “discover”: The common identity need not be “discovered” – and the lack of some common essence will be a lack only if one thinks that it must be. Rather, the feminist movement can aim to create that new moral identity, and that commonality, without thinking that it must be discovered to be legitimate.

Furthermore, as Rorty seems to be saying, the problem is in how to think of this category as something other than the negation of “man,” to free it from the historical dialectics of oppressor and oppressed. Butler puts the same point this way: “Does the category of woman maintain a meaning separate from the conditions of oppression against which it has been formulated?” (Butler 1990, p. 325). Rorty sees the aim of feminist discourse as the aim of allowing women to speak “as women,” but this, he allows, may require that the feminist movement open up new “logical space” – not by appealing to the going tradition of human rights talk, nor by trying to “discover” a common identity, but by saying something new. The risk however is this: The new might be unintelligible in the terms of our present philosophical and political paradigms (Rorty 1991/2010, pp. 20–26).

It is important to note the two strands that Rorty draws together here: The first is Kuhn’s ideas about scientific paradigms and how new paradigms succeed older ones; the second is the issue about the reference for the term “women” and the question that plagued feminist theorizing in the early 1990s: whether the term “woman” could be used as a form of “strategic essentialism,” a category without ontological integrity, serving purely political purposes (Butler 1990, p. 325).

In his discussion of feminist voices as prophetic (rather than representational, or truth-tracking), Rorty is drawing on the idea, which he takes from Kuhn, that changes in scientific paradigms resemble political revolutions: One paradigm replaces another not because crucial experiments can decide between competing paradigms, but because the adherents of the old paradigm die off, and because some adherents of the old paradigm are converted into adherents of the new paradigm. It is not a rational process, Kuhn says, because rational persuasion requires commensurability, which requires “speaking the same language” (Kuhn 1996, pp. 111–142). But the other lesson Rorty draws from Kuhn is that one paradigm cannot supplant another until it has been fairly well developed, offering a genuine alternative to its competitors. So the articulation of a genuinely feminist “paradigm” is essential to this process. Rorty puts it this way:

[P]rophetic feminists like MacKinnon and [Marilyn] FryeFootnote 5 foresee a new being not only for women but for society. They foresee a society in which the male-female distinction is no longer of much interest […] they will not see the formation of such a society as the removal of social constructs and the restoration of the way things were always meant to be. They will see it as the production of a better set of social constructs than the ones presently available, and thus as the creation of a new and better sort of human being. (Rorty 1991/2010, p. 38)

The citations at the beginning of the essay give us more insight into this claim. In a footnote, Rorty refers to the feminist thinkers Caroline Whitbeck and Marilyn Frye and cites Whitbeck’s claim that

the category, lesbian, both in the minds of its male inventors and as used in male-dominated culture is that of a physiological female who is in other respects a stereotypical male.’ See ‘Love, Knowledge, and Transformation’ in Hypatia Reborn, ed. Azizah Y. al-Hibri and Margaret Simons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 220. Compare Marilyn Frye’s reference to ‘that other fine and enduring patriarchal institution, ‘Sex Equality’ in The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1983), p. 108. (Rorty 1991/2010, pp. 38–39, fn. 2)

The problem of feminist discourse is that of creating a new being that does not depend on the old way of being. And this will be an act of creation, not of revealing an already existing reality.

The new being that Rorty endorses is, as he makes clear, a new vocabulary and a new utopian vision, one that eschews talk of maleness and femaleness as well as that of “unmasking” or “putting things right.” So a feminism that works for the interests of women as women (and not as a subset of “humans”) is, oddly enough, one that does not talk about women (or, at least, not in any significant way), since sex and gender categories, as well as those of homosexuality and heterosexuality, are still framed within a discourse in which femaleness and maleness are opposites, and are understood within a larger frame of heteronormativity. The goal of feminism, then, would be to overcome feminism, to do away with the category of “woman” which frames the demands for freedom and equality, but not in the interest of moving toward a more universal category, like “human,” but rather to do away with gender and sex distinctions entirely (Rorty 1991/2010 p. 44, fn. 41).

So the new being Rorty thinks that Frye, MacKinnon, and Whitbeck point to is one that cannot be validated or recognized by the going “paradigm” of universalism or representationalism. And it cannot be debated or evaluated in the discursive terms set for such discussions by operative political and philosophical paradigms. The new being would be, to borrow more explicitly from Kuhn here, “incommensurable” with the paradigm of male supremacy and heteronormativity – and with the practice of professional, analytic philosophy. “There is no method or procedure to be followed except courageous and imaginative experimentation,” Rorty says, glossing Dewey. And citing Frye, he says that flirting with meaninglessness in one’s writing is essential to this process “[f]or meaninglessness is exactly what you have to flirt with when you are in between social, and in particular linguistic, practices—unwilling to take part in an old one but not yet having succeeded in creating a new one” (Rorty 1991/2010, p. 30).

Nancy Fraser points out that to make feminist prophecy a political program, we cannot understand this linguistic innovation as something practiced by the isolated individual, the outcast poet, or the prophet. Fraser’s commentary notes that Rorty’s vision of discursive space in his work in the 1980s seemed to leave “no place for […] social movements that contested dominant discourses” (Fraser 1991/2010, p. 50). Though, as Fraser says in her response to Rorty’s lecture, the fact that Rorty had taken the opportunity to talk about feminism in his Tanner Lecture was very welcome as a way of helping feminist theory gain legitimacy in philosophy (as it already had, with great success, in anthropology, literary theory, and history), perhaps the most significant aspect of Rorty’s lecture was the way in which paying attention to feminist theory had changed his ways of thinking about politics and discourse. Fraser sees a decisive change from private irony to collective prophecy. According to Fraser:

There was no place [in the framework worked out in Rorty’s work of the 1980s] for genuinely innovative political redescriptions rooted in oppositional political solidarities. There was no room for what some of us knew actually to exist: the contemporary feminist movement […] When Rorty takes up the question of feminism […] we meet a discursive practice that involves far-reaching redescriptions of social life and thus has all the marks of the sublime, abnormal, and the poetic, yet is simultaneously tied to the collective political enterprise of overcoming oppression and restructuring society. (Fraser 1991/2010, p. 50)

2.2 Pragmatism, Discourse, and Poetry

For Rorty, the goal of feminist activism should be not accommodation to the demands of professional analytic philosophy, or appeals to its theories or justificatory standards. The goal of feminist activism should be a determined rejection of that discourse and its rules – though not in favor of history or literary theory or any other academic discipline. The goal, he says, is to talk in new and different ways, to project a vision for a new being that might seem crazy, that will fail to convince critics through argument, but can convince them by showing what that vision is and inviting invidious comparisons with our present world. He thinks that pragmatism is a better “home” for such efforts than is (traditional) philosophy.Footnote 6 Pragmatism’s endorsement of socially progressive ideas, and its recognition of the rhetorical aspects of intellectual discourses, makes it a useful partner for feminists (Rorty, 1991/2010 p. 23).

Rorty’s lecture drew on, approvingly, thinkers who were often thought of as “radical feminists,” a label applied to theories that identified the oppression of women by men as, in some sense, rudimentary to all forms of oppression. Radical feminists were criticized for their appeal to the category “women,” and some feminist theorists responded to those criticisms by trying to locate a foundation for some commonality that could ground the concept – the possibility, for instance, of shared experiences, either cultural or embodied.

But this is where Rorty’s appeal to pragmatism comes in: We may admit that there is no ontological integrity to the concept “women” – we need not try to track its correct referent, or try to establish its reality or its ontological unity. The demand for such integrity is a relic of universalism, Rorty argues, and thus may be legitimately ignored. Letting go of that expectation puts feminists in line with “historicists like Hegel and Dewey” and also shows that “moral progress depends upon expanding [the logical space necessary for moral deliberation]” before justice can be “envisaged, much less done” (Rorty 1991/2010, pp. 20–21). The goal of MacKinnon’s feminism, according to Rorty, is not to find a new set of principles that fit already existing data; it is to change the data, and to help people change the way that they respond instinctively and emotionally, so that they now feel anger where once they felt resignation.

This kind of work is the kind of work that calls not for philosophizing, Rorty thinks, but for poetry, fiction, and imaginative work – that is, the visionary work that tries to create new standards or new ways of seeing. This means, Rorty argues, that feminists need to create a new language, which includes “not just new words but also creative misuses of language—familiar words used in ways which initially sound crazy,” and as these new ways of speaking become more popular, they will allow people to see injustice where they once saw the results of a “natural lottery,” or justice where they once saw “reverse discrimination” (Rorty 1991/2010 pp. 21–22). The counsel that Rorty offers feminist activists is that pragmatism can offer the possibilities of “changing the data” and opening up logical space for the creation of new linguistic practices that universalism and realism cannot. Rorty offers this paraphrase of Dewey in his advocacy:

do not charge a current social practice or a currently spoken language with being unfaithful to reality, with getting things wrong. Do not criticize it as a result of ideology or prejudice, where these are tacitly contrasted with your own employment of a truth-tracking faculty called ‘reason’ or a neutral method called ‘disinterested observation.’ Do not even criticize it as ‘unjust’ if ‘unjust’ is supposed to mean more than ‘sometimes incoherent even on its own terms.’ Instead of appealing from the transitory current appearances to the permanent reality, appeal to a still only dimly imagined future practice. (Rorty 1991/2010, p. 30)

The projects for which feminist activism and pragmatism are suited are not those for which philosophy is suited, Rorty argues. While philosophy can be used to remove obstacles, like old and tired vocabularies, the work of creating a new world, and of imagining it in its details, is the project on which pragmatists and feminists can work together. Once the contingent nature of all vocabularies is exposed, Rorty points out, we still need to choose one – and that choice will be made on the basis of affect, emotion, and imagination, not because one vocabulary (or view of the world) is judged better according to neutral criteria. There are no such criteria – traditional philosophy is political and partisan, as are feminist interventions in it (Rorty 1991/2010 pp. 36–38).

3 “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View”

While “Feminism and Pragmatism” was Rorty’s attempt to establish pragmatism as the best platform for feminist politics, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View” extends this argument by arguing that philosophy, especially in its guises as deconstruction and critique, is not very good for achieving political ends. At best, philosophy can help make room for large-scale political change.

While the argument in this chapter echoes that of “Feminism and Pragmatism,” it also introduces a relatively new line of argument.Footnote 7 Rorty first argues that the idea of “exposing ideology,” where ideology is taken to be a false or misleading characterization of the social world and social life, is indebted to either a matter/consciousness contrast, or to a reality/appearance contrast, neither of which feminists should be eager to employ (Rorty 1993/2010, pp. 104–107): The first contrast, Rorty argues, invokes a difference in kind between material forces and ideas, or between material and nonmaterial causation. Rorty argues that the Marxist analysis of ideology in terms of the history of changes in the mode of production cannot be made to fit the situation of women; in a footnote, he sides with Catherine MacKinnon in arguing that male supremacy has been the rule throughout changes in the organization of production. Unlike other social arrangements that might be said to have changed as the organization of the means of production has changed, patriarchy has maintained its hold, even, at certain times, resisting incorporation into the dominant modes of production. So the Marxist attempt to catalyze changes in consciousness by changing the material conditions of production has not worked in the case of patriarch, according to Rorty.

The second contrast – that between reality and appearance – is just as troublesome when deployed by feminist deconstructionists as it is when deployed by realists and universalists, in Rorty’s view. Rorty’s arguments against the appearance/reality distinction appear in many of his essays; essentially, it is an argument against the idea of privileged representations and vocabularies. So, Rorty argues, the use of language of “unmasking” or “exposing the truth about x” is a discourse that is, at least implicitly, beholden to realist commitments.

The exposure of what Rorty refers to as the “play of difference,” which, he claims, appears to be the quarry of feminist deconstruction, involves feminists in the project of analyzing and critiquing old practices, rather than visualizing new practices, and such work can only be “a mopping up job,” he claims. It cannot substitute for the project of prophecy, which is the creation of new visions and practices and the attempt to persuade others to embrace these new ways of life (Rorty, 1993/2010, pp. 108–110; see also Adams 2010, pp. 95–97).

Indeed, Rorty argues, the idea that philosophy and theory could do the pathbreaking work that only prophecy can achieve is itself a logocentric view of intellectual work from which he thinks feminists should distance themselves. The valorization of the nonphilosophical discourses of poetry and prophecy and the concomitant rejection of disputes about “real” and “ideologically motivated” representations are themes to which Rorty returns. Drawing explicitly on Kuhn, he argues that “the most efficient way to expose or demystify an existing practice would seem to me to be by suggesting an alternative practice, rather than criticizing the current one. In politics, as in the Kuhnian model of theory-change in the sciences, anomalies within old paradigms can pile up indefinitely without providing much basis for criticism until a new option is offered. ‘Immanent’ criticism of the old paradigm is relatively ineffective” (Rorty 1993/2010, p. 104). Deconstruction cannot help us decide which vision of society we ought to embrace, once we realize that all social arrangements are historically contingent. If feminism is to be something other than a simple program of modest reforms, Rorty says, then feminists must recognize that philosophy will not be able to do the heavy lifting. Rather, he says, feminists must be willing to see philosophy not as the key to unlocking deep truths or revealing the workings of ideology, but as something to be used as needed, and to recognize the rhetorical aspects of those uses (Rorty 1993/2010, p. 109).

4 Conclusion

One way to read the two essays discussed here is to see them both as examples of Rorty’s attempt to root out metaphysics: The Tanner Lecture focuses on linguistic practices and on the category of “woman,” as well as championing pragmatism as a form of discourse that can do without realist assumptions about truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The dominant theme in this essay seems to be the importance of rhetoric to social movements and social change, specifically “prophetic” voices which aim to speak in new ways. While “Feminism and Pragmatism” was Rorty’s attempt to establish pragmatism as the best platform for feminist politics, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View” (published in Hypatia) extends this argument by arguing that philosophy, especially in its guises as deconstruction and critique, is not very good for achieving political ends. At best, philosophy can help make room for large-scale political change.

The Hypatia essay on ideology and deconstruction emphasizes Rorty’s distrust of, and attempt to do away with, metaphysical arguments grounded in a distinction between appearances and reality. The moral of both stories is this: “philosophy is not, as the Marxist tradition unfortunately taught us to believe, a source of tools for path-breaking political work. Nothing politically useful happens until people begin saying things never said before—thereby permitting us to visualize new practices, as opposed to analyzing old ones” (Rorty 1993/2010, p. 108).

Understanding feminist political practice on the analogy of the practice of “strong poets” or prophets comes at a price, though, as Nancy Fraser notes in her comments on “Feminism and Pragmatism”: “feminists—like Marilyn Frye and myself—are not philosophers. Granted, we are something bigger, grander, more important—prophets; but […] I can’t help think that the division of labor between pragmatism and feminism that Rorty is proposing is yet another way of putting women on a pedestal” (Fraser 1991/2010, p. 49).

Another possible objection is that Rorty seems to be appealing to a philosophical theory (the antimetaphysical impulses we find in the logical positivists and that some see as a Wittgensteinian legacy) in his criticisms of feminist practice – that is, he is using theory to judge practices, rather than, as he himself suggests, thinking in terms of the usefulness of particular practices. Here we might say, “is the right question one about whether feminist philosophers are invoking the reality/appearance distinction? Or is the right question whether philosophical discourse and the appearance/reality distinction is useful for feminist social change?” Rorty claims that appeals to reality are just ways of paying tribute to old theories, and so discourses of “unmasking” continue to draw on and reinforce the binary of reality and appearance – and thus retain, to some extent, the old theories. And yet we find this comment in “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction”: “The picture of philosophy as pioneer is part of a logocentric conception of intellectual work with which we fans of Derrida should have no truck” (Rorty 1993/2010, p. 109). This claim seems to be an “unmasking” claim (“the picture of philosophy as pioneer is part of a logocentric conception of intellectual work”) with an action recommendation as a conclusion (“with which we fans of Derrida should have no truck”). Rorty’s criticisms of feminist philosophy might seem to be in danger of committing the very same error that he thinks feminists should avoid: using philosophy as the master narrative and standard for political practice.

Whether we think that Rorty’s attempt to draw feminists away from philosophy is much needed, much to be regretted, or just muddleheaded, it seems clear that it is of a piece with his attempts to elide the distinctions between philosophy and rhetoric, philosophy and literature, and philosophy and poetry and is connected to his metaphilosophy and his distrust of metaphysics.