Fraser argues that in Rorty's worldview, the Romantic impulse ('the valorization of individual invention understood as self-fashioning') and the pragmatic impulse ('goal-directed and purposive' + concerned with 'problems solved, needs satisfied, well-being assured') contend with each other and that Rorty responds to this conflict by generating three wrong solutions:
(1) 'The Invisible Hand' solution, where Rorty adopts what Fraser calls 'the old trickle-down argument: liberty in the arts fosters equality in society,' drawing on a view of history 'figured as a succession of emancipations.' [Whiggish, no?]
(2) The 'Sublimity or Decency' solution, where Rorty pits the 'ironism' of the intellectual against a 'nonironist public culture,' Romanticism against pragmatism, sublimity against decency, strong poetry against dead metaphors, self-fashioning against social responsibility, etc. and forces a choice.
(3) The 'Partition' solution, where Romanticism and pragmatism are partitioned into separate spheres: Be pragmatic in the public, but enjoy the sublime in the private.
Fraser then explains why none of Rorty's three solutions can be valid, because, well, to begin with, the terms of 'his original dilemma' are misconceived. What's wrong, first of all, is that Rorty's problematic creates the 'abstract and unmediated opposition between poetry and politics, theory and practice, individual and community' (103). There is no reason to give radical theorizing 'individualistic connotations,' as Rorty does, making radical theory 'the very antithesis of collective action and political practice' (103). By privatizing + aestheticizing radical theory, Rorty has us believe that (1) 'there can be no legitimate cultural politics' and that (2) 'there can be no politically relevant radical theory, no link between theory and political practice; there can only be apolitical ironist theory and atheoretical reformist practice' (103). Consequently, Rorty depoliticizes both 'culture and theory' (103).
And Rorty's privatization of radical theory is linked with his assumption that there is neither fundamental contradiction between classes nor pervasive axes of domination (re: gender, race, sexuality, nationality, etc.) that demand theorizing.
Further, the neat division that Rorty posits between the public and the private couldn't be maintained, even if we were to assume Rorty's view that what matters is vocabularies and redescriptions (and not objective reality of social relations and scientific understanding of it), for discourse doesn't observe the partition that Rorty would like us to set up. And it should be obvious to any student of feminism that the equation of the 'private' with the 'cultural' + the non-political cannot but be disastrous.
Last but not the least, Rorty limits 'real politics' to those who play by the rules of bourgeois liberalism, by making those who do not play by his rules (whether marxists or social movement activists) 'non-political by definition' (104).
Yoshie