Richard Rorty, October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007

Richard Rorty opened my eyes. As a captive of Western analytical thought, what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call tree thinking or "arborescence" ("reality" must be rooted or grounded, with its parts connected in fairly linear fashion, while object and subject remain separate), I came upon Rorty's work quite by accident, when a classmate handed me his "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity." People nearby could probably hear the crash of enormous dogmatic structures in my brain as I read the first few pages.

I shall not attempt here to sum up his thinking, because, quite frankly, I would have to read much more of him to do so. He was a moderate postmodernist, who believed in empirical adequacy; but he was adamant that "truth" is a consensus, continually being re-forged, and that the notion of "objective reality" is unhelpful. (One can, I think, trace this idea back as far as Immanuel Kant, and his distinction between noumena and phenomena.)

Rorty was above all a pragmatist. We use language to communicate our perceptions and observations, and indeed our knowledge of "the world" is bound up in language. When the vocabulary we use ceases to work, we invent new vocabulary that works better.

Those who seek "objective" truth, or, worse, those who believe they have found it, will find little comfort in Rorty's work. I don't think I can put things any better than a Usenetter named Chris, who intervened many moons ago in a discussion I was having with someone:

[Such people believe that] language is a neutral, transparent nomenclature superimposed on a naturally occurring reality, that interpretation is a non-constructive process of simple "decoding," that knowing is culture-free, unrelated to specific forms of social, economic and institutional organization, and that facts can be dug from the earth like fossils. By this account history, if done "properly," is always the same sort of thing. Of course this runs into some problems once we start historicizing history itself as a form of knowledge production, or if we examine the theory of language supporting such views of history.

I think what frightens many people about accounts that are constructivist or which don't adhere to a reductive, foundational realism, is the idea that if a fact is constructed it is therefore entirely fictional, subjective and unreal, and that there are no criteria for judging one claim or type of knowledge better than another. This is obviously silly, although there are strains of nutty pomo thought that tend toward this. One could argue that categories like queer or African American are social constructs. This doesn't make such things unreal or subjective.

Rorty helped to open the way to a new thinking that does not require "objective" absolutes, those little pebbles and huge, terrible boulders like God that make up conservative (but not only conservative) thought. With the rather more colourful notion of "rhizomatic thinking" in Deleuze and Guattari, Rorty changed (or, rather, pointed the way to change in) my own intellectual life. And at this point I need to pay homage to my late partner, Marianne MacKinnon, who thought that way naturally. I've been very lucky.

No, then, to objective foundations and linguistic isomorphism; and a big Yes to Deleuzian rhizomes and lines of flight. For your part in this revolution in Western thinking (a revolution barely begun), I for one thank you, Richard Rorty.