Alterman and Rorty (was "Re: Some of what Alterman said)

[hoov]

> Jim Heartfield wrote:
> >Then it seem pretty clear to me anyway that Rorty is wholly in the
> >right, and it is here that Derrida is muddying the waters. Political
> >action is about decision, action and common goals - differance, as
> >Derrida has often said is about a deferral of decision, and about
> >rejecting common goals.
> 
> The problem is that Rorty wants us to contain the scope of 'decision,
> action, and common goals' within his narrow nationalist and social
> democratic agenda. And that's the reason why he gets along very well with
> the well-paid bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO.
> Yoshie

for Rorty, social ills in a liberal society require no social
transformation to be alleviated...he evokes Dickens, if memory 
serves, in an earlier essay to the effect that suffering and
injustice will be remedied once they become visible...what is
needed is greater curiousity...and this curiousity can be fostered,
the Rorty of _Contingency, Irony and Solidarity_ tells us, by
reading more novels and watching more docudramas on TV (p. xvi)...
back then, Rorty suggested that we could persist in seeking
some misbegotten image of a totally "other" politics or we could
sit ourselves on the sofa and watch 'socially responsible' television
programs...he's now apparently decided to get up off the couch to
tell us that he's nostalgic for the 'reformist left' (real politics)
while continuing to scold us for being impractical and unreasonable
(cultural politics)...Michael Hoover