Against Bosses,.pdf

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Against Bosses,

Against Oligarchies:A Conversation with Richard RortyRichard RortyDerek Nystrom

Kent Puckett

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS

CHICAGO


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CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iAgainst Bosses, Against Oligarchies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Copyright 2002 Prickly Paradigm Press, LLCFirst published by Prickly Pear Pamphlets in 1998.All rights reserved.

Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC5629 South University AvenueChicago, Il 60637

www.prickly-paradigm.com

ISBN: 0-9717575-2-6LCCN: 2002 104696


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INTRODUCTION

We interviewed Richard Rorty for four hours over thecourse of a weekend in Charlottesville. This interview is

not only, we think, ideally timed, following closelyseveral recent publications by Rorty, but captures Rortyat his most energetic. Rortys work is well known for itsgeniality and measured tone, and, while our discussionremains always constructive, there appears in these pagesa combative Richard Rorty familiar, perhaps, to those

who have seen him in debate, but new to those whoknow him only from his published work.

Although the following conversation addressesmany subjectsRortys own intellectual history, theeffects of globalization, academic laborits first motiva-tion is the recently publishedAchieving Our Country:

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Progressive Movement and the New Deal, and suggestfor Rorty a means of thinking of America and democracyin such a way as to retain patriotism without losing onessense of justice and ones necessary anger at injustice:Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States asan opportunity to see ultimate significance in a finite,human, historical project, rather than in somethingeternal and nonhuman. In other words, the real secularpromise of America was big enough, diverse enough, and

potential enough to exceed the specific character of itsweaknesses or its mistakes. Thats not to say thatAmerica could do no wrong or that one should ignorewrong-doing in Americas name; rather, a progressivepatriotisms duty is to ensure that the rich diversityand promise of that America are protected and main-tained.

Rorty argues that against the Whitmanesquepatriot acting in the name of American potential is whathe calls the spectatorial leftist, a cultural pessimist whosees the very foundations of liberal democracy ascomplicit in a larger and slightly shadowy conspiracy

against the powerless. Once this figure has given up allhope in the larger promise of, in this case, America, heor she becomes a passive and cynical spectator, a willfullymarginal critic who sneers without suggestion and whoneither cherishes principle nor can truly practice politics.

This leftist appears in a variety of contexts throughoutAchieving Our Country, but is most clearly associatedwith the new left that Rorty suggests turned away fromthe old left and against America in the 60s. Rortys ownpolitics grew out of the New Deal sympathies of bothhis family and the friends of his family, as well as the

Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. That book,adapted from Rortys 1997 Massey Lectures at HarvardUniversity, takes as its subject the life and health of the

American left. Of course, that left is in no way a simpleor single entity and Rortys bookpart history, partdiagnosis, part prescriptionworks to understand itboth in terms of the patriotic, Whitmanesque vision thathe suggests determined and consolidated its earliestcourse, and the particular contexts (the Vietnam War,

Watergate, etc.) that seemed to allow some parts of theleft to find it absurd for Americans to continue to takepride in their country.

Rorty beginsAchieving our Country (he takes thetitle, importantly, from the last line of James BaldwinsThe Fire Next Time) with an account of the sources of hisown leftism, a political position that allows for and infact demands a sense of national pride. "National pride,"says Rorty, "is to countries what self-respect is to indi-

viduals: a necessary condition for self-improvement."Without patriotism, a progressive, effective, majoritarianpolitics is impossible and, Rorty suggests, it is the

absence of that patriotism that has rendered leftist poli-tics enervated and without direction. With this crisis inmind, Rortys book asks a series of basic questions: what

was the left and what are its sources? What does the leftlook like today? How can the left achieve the patrioticdignity to make a majoritarian leftism possible onceagain?

Rortys answer to the first question centers ontwo figures in particular: Walt Whitman and JohnDewey. These thinkers did a great deal to shape thequasi-communitarian rhetoric...at the heart of the

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name Andrew Ross or Frederic Jameson, for example)whose longing for total revolution and belief in thedeep corruption of the Western tradition make areformist politics suspect in theory and impossible inpractice. While Rorty grants that this cultural left hasreduced the amount of sadism and cruelty that the lesspowerful need experience and has made America a farmore civilized society than it was thirty years ago, itsinability to address practically issues of class and labor

has removed the left from areas where political actioncould do the most good. In other words, when specificinstances of economic injustice and unfair labor practicesare replaced with totalizing concepts like late capi-talism and ideology, the cultural left find themselvesto be practically powerless, but comfortable with theidea that they, at least, know better. Theorists of theleft think that dissolving political agents into plays ofdifferential subjectivity, or political initiatives intopursuits of Lacans impossible object of desire, helps tosubvert the established order (93). Rorty believes theyare wrong. Rorty recommends finally that the separation

between the old and new left, a rift built on conflictsdecades old, must be overcome, and that the spectatorialcultural left must return to the messy, contingent busi-ness of progressive politics. In fact, Rorty argues, thegood moral work done by the cultural left, work thatmade the lives of the less powerful better and morehumane, may be undone by this lefts inability to chal-lenge the rights largely successful and continuingeconomic onslaught. While the left has worked, willfullyit seems, to imagine itself as part of some minority,Rorty warns, the Right has, without opposition, captured

anti-Stalinist work of some of the so-called New YorkIntellectuals: As a teenager, I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trillingpublished inPartisan Reviewpartly, perhaps, because Ihad been bounced on their knees as a baby (61). WhereRortys old leftist (Irving Howe is another example forRorty) was a public intellectual passionately committedto class politics, publishing articles in journals likeCommentary or thePartisan Review, and who could be

both a fervent anti-communist and a good leftist, thenew left (think of student anti-war protesters, BlackPanthers, Tom Hayden, and Abbie Hoffman) felt thatthe old lefts irrational hatred of communism underwrotethe conflict in Vietnam and permitted the worst excessesof the Cold War. While Rorty agrees that the new leftdid what the old perhaps could not (they stopped the

Vietnam War), the continuing rift between whatremains of the old left and the new makes any majori-tarian, progressive American politics difficult if notimpossible.

More immediately, Rorty critiques the cultural

left, heirs of the new left who specialize in what theycall the politics of difference or of identity or ofrecognition. This left, suggests Rorty, maintains thenew lefts disdain for America and thinks more aboutsocial or cultural stigma than it does about the top-down initiatives and concern for class and money thatcharacterizes his old left progressive politics (inGoffmans sense, stigma are marks or handicaps thathave no essential qualities of their own, but act as rela-tional points against which society defines the normal).

These are primarily academic intellectuals (Rorty might

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examination of the grounds upon which these disci-plines make their knowledge-claims (3). He surveys thehistorical development of this philosophical tradition,and argues that while this project was important inhelping to establish the secular intellectual culture of theEnlightenment, it is one that may have outlived itsusefulness. However, Rorty does not make this argumentby claiming that philosophys conception of itself (as ameta-discipline which inspects the foundations of the

knowledge-claims made by other disciplines) is onewhich somehow misconstrues its real role, or that thisquest for epistemological foundations misunderstandsthe true nature of knowledge-claims. Instead, heproposes, we should stop worrying about the real roleof such activities and the true nature of their objects ofstudy in the first place.

Following Wittgenstein, Rorty contends thatphilosophy has conceived of its mission in this waybecause it has been held captive by the picture...of themind as a great mirror, containing various representa-tionssome accurate, some notand capable of being

studied by pure, non-empirical methods (12). As a wayof getting out from under this picture, he suggests, as

Wittgenstein did, that we view our ways of describingand explaining the world as tools which help us getalong in that world, rather than as representations of the

world which could be said to be more or less correct.Here, Rorty is talking about all sorts of linguistic prac-ticesscientific claims, mundane observations, and soon. For example, where the traditional philosopher

would describe Newtons claim that force equals masstimes acceleration (f=ma) as true because it offers an

and captivated the majority. And, if a reformist left is tohave anything to do with the achievement of America, itisnt enough to watch politics; they must be practicedand practiced progressively.

Some of the arguments put forth inAchievingOur Country are controversial rejoinders to positionsheld by many of Rortys fellow academic leftistsindeed,to some, they may seem almost willfully contrarian. Yet

this is not an unfamiliar position for Rorty. For prior tohis recent fame as a leftist commentator (a renown

which grants him the curious honor of having GeorgeWill devote an entireNewsweek column to attacking hislatest book), Rorty was well known as an iconoclasticphilosopher who challenged the precepts of his owndiscipline. Here, we would like to offer a brief sketch ofRortys ideas for readers who may not be familiar withsome of his important earlier work.

Rorty first came to the attention of readersoutside of American philosophy departments in 1979,

with the publication ofPhilosophy and the Mirror of

Nature. The book was a sustained, thorough-goingcritique of the dominant analytic mode of philosophypracticed by most English and American philosophers.However, what was most compelling about this critiquefor the books more general audience was its concomi-tant deconstruction of the larger Cartesian-Kantiantradition of thought, which seeks out absolute, transcen-dental foundations for our knowledge of the world.

This tradition, Rorty writes, is concerned primarily withunderwrit[ing] or debunk[ing] claims to knowledgemade by science, morality, art, or religion through an

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philosophically relativistic as well as politicallydangerous or disabling, and Rorty has seen his fair shareof this criticism as well. To put it in a perhaps overlyschematic way, his early, more philosophically-oriented

work (which includes the two aforementioned volumes)can be said to concentrate on the former charge of rela-tivisman accusation, he maintains, which has teethonly if one believes in an objective, neutral language

which stands outside of time and place. His later work

has been increasingly concerned with engaging the polit-ical questions posed by a pragmatist outlook. As Rortyhimself acknowledges, the most powerful objection topragmatism is the consequence that:

when the secret police come, when the torturersviolate the innocent, there is nothing to be saidto them of the form There is something within

you which you are betraying. Though youembody the practices of a totalitarian society

which will endure forever, there is somethingbeyond those practices which condemns you.

(Consequencesxlii)

In other words, if we do not have any transcendent,foundational criteria for choosing between languages, or

world-views, how can we argue against, say, the Nazis?Further, if ones political and moral vocabulary is acontingent product of time and place, how can one bemotivated to defend the values of this vocabulary?

Rortys book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,published in 1989, can be viewed as a way of trying toanswer these questions. First of all, the book contends,

accurate picture of the worldand thus Correspondswith RealityRorty asks us to view Newtons formula astrue because it provides us with an effective tool foraccomplishing certain tasks in the world (such assuccessfully predicting force). Again, it is important tonote that Rorty does not claim that there is no suchthing as truth or, for that matter, that there is no suchthing as the outside world, but only that the questionDoes this description of the world accurately corre-

spond to what it describes? is one which we may wantto stop asking. Similarly, he does not claim that thecorrespondence theory of truth fails to grasp the true,

Wittgensteinian-tool-like way language really works,only that Wittgensteins model may be a more useful

way of thinking about language for our presentpurposes.

In suggesting that we change our philosophicalconversations, Rorty explicitly aligns himself with thetradition of American pragmatism inaugurated by

William James and John Dewey a century ago.Furthermore, as he noted in his 1982 collection of

essays, Consequences of Pragmatism, the anti-foundation-alist arguments of these thinkers found new relevance inthe explosion of structuralist and post-structuralisttheory which reverberated through American literaturedepartments in the 1970s and 80s: James and Dewey

were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical roadwhich analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting atthe end of the road which, for example, Foucault andDeleuze are currently traveling (xviii). Of course, thesetwo groupspragmatists and post-structuralistsarefrequently accused of purveying ideas that are both

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(94). That is, the job of building human solidarity.Hence, we might be able to characterize Rortys pragma-tist response to the Nazi question as consisting of twoanswers. First, one doesnt refute Nazis, or any other

world-view; one offers a redescription of the worldwhich makes their description look untenable. Second,and Rorty is clear that this consists more of a hope thana guarantee, the properly ironist intellectual, with her

wide range of acquaintance, will have read too many

novels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary whichimagines itself to have some privileged relationship to

Truth, and which ignores the pain of others.Yet Rorty also hesitates to claim too much for

the political uses of either redescription or ironist self-consciousness. In fact, he notes that redescription oftenhumiliates (90); that is, the act of re-casting the worldin the terms of a new language game can often havecruel consequences, as the one redescribing the worldoverwhelms and makes irrelevant the descriptions andlanguage games upon which others had based their lives(which, as Rorty explains, is what OBrien does to

Winston Smith in 1984, and what Humbert does toLolita inLolita). Indeed, Rorty cautions that while thedesire to craft a new final vocabulary which redescribesthe world apart from the language games one inheritedis a central activity of ironist self-creation, it is also one

which is largely irrelevant to public life. Thus, hesuggests that the ironist intellectual enact a kind ofcognitive public/private split: that ones radical andcontinuing doubts about [ones] final vocabulary (72),and the ensuing attempt to redescribe the world as anact of self-creation, be kept private, while ones public

the notions of criteria and choice...are no longer inpoint when it comes to changes from one language gameto another for the simple reason that such criteria andchoices may only be formulated in the terms of a specificlanguage game (6). Instead, Rorty suggests, changes in

vocabularies are more a result of the power of what hecalls redescription. Drawing upon Thomas Kuhnsaccounts of how scientific revolutions occur, Rortyreminds us that Galilean mechanics did not supersede

Aristotelian conceptions of the world because the formerwas the superior choice based upon a mutually accept-able set of criteria; instead, Galileo offered an entirelynew set of criteria for intellectual inquiry whichdisplaced those of Aristotle. Galileo re-described the

world that had been previously described by Aristotle byoffering a new language game, which made the oldlanguage game look bad. Thus, Rorty concludes,nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabularysave another such vocabulary; there is no answer to aredescription save a re-re-redescription (80).

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, is

one who makes herself familiar with as many vocabu-laries and language games as possible by acquaintingherself with as many novels and ethnographies as she canget her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomesan ironist about her own vocabulary, recognizing it asa contingent product of the time and place in which she

was born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desiredpost-metaphysical culture, novels and ethnographies

which sensitize one to the pain of those who do notspeak our language must do the job which demonstra-tions of a common human nature were supposed to do

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TOWARDS A NEW OLD LEFT

Q: Well start with an obvious question: Why did youwriteAchieving Our Country?

RR: In an inchoate way, Ive always wanted to writesomething about the left in America. Ive been buyingbooks more or less relevant to the subjectbooks on

American radicalism at various stages in the nationshistoryfor years and years. I knew Id like to writesomething about American intellectual history, but hadno very definite plan. Then Harvard asked me to givethe Massey lectures on American Civilization. I wasdelighted, because my hero Irving Howe had given them.I liked the idea of following in his footsteps. So I set asidea year to read some more, and to try to write something.

life remains dedicated to the liberal hope of diminishingcruelty and expanding human solidarity. In short, Rortysmodel intellectual is what he calls a liberal ironist: one

who continues to defend and support principles ofliberal hope, despite their lack of metaphysical guaran-tees, by distinguish[ing] between redescription forprivate and for public purposes (91).

This provocative suggestion for separating polit-ical and philosophical (or aesthetic) pursuits is also one

of Rortys most controversial, and in our interview hediscusses his responses to some of the objections to thisproposal. What is important to note here is the way thisproposal highlights his insistence that political concernstake precedence over philosophical principles, and that,if anything, the latter should be tailored to fit theformer. Indeed, as he puts it in the first volume of hisPhilosophical Papers (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth)Rorty has long argued for the priority of democracy tophilosophy.

Thus, after helping to revive American pragma-tisma philosophy he describes as particularly suited to

democratic politicsRorty has turned in his most recentwork to the more pressing concerns of those politics,particularly inAchieving Our Country. We hope that thefollowing interview will further illuminate his mostrecent political interventions, and their relation to thelarger body of his thought.

Derek Nystrom and Kent PuckettSeptember 1998


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RR:Well, all kinds of people during McCarthys peakyears were saying the same thing they had said beforeand after: that socialism was a good idea in some form orother, because unrestricted capitalism, like the man said,immiserates the proletariat. Unfortunately, theycontinued, socialism has been perverted by mad tyrantslike Lenin and Stalin, who have erected an evil empire.So now you had to fight the evil empire with the onehand, and forge democratic socialism with the other. I

dont see a lack of wiggle room. McCarthy and hispeople, of course, said that any suggestion that capi-talism needed any improvement or correction waslending aid and sympathy to the evil empire. But, ofcourse, that was not so.

Q:Why do you think that McCarthy was able to do forscurrilous right-wing anti-communism what people like

Martin Dies couldnt do?

RR: I dont know. Perhaps he was slightly moreunscrupulous. Why did Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell

suddenly make it big? How did they break out of thelittle world of the televangelists and into semi-control ofthe Republican party? I dont really know. Every once ina while fundamentalists and unscrupulous demagoguesmanage to break out of their cages and to whip themasses into a frenzy.

Q:Were you at Yale during this period?

RR: I was at Chicago until 52, and then I was at Yalefrom 52 to 56. I remember watching the Army-

Q: InAchieving our Countryyou make a spirited defenseof being a Cold War liberalthat is, an anti-communistliberaland I was wondering if you could expand onthat a little bit, because you suggest that had thereformist left been stronger they could have crafted ananti-communism that wouldnt have been the horrible

McCarthyite anti-communism. I was wondering if youcould talk a little bit more about what that might havelooked like.

RR:There was a non-McCarthyite kind of anti-commu-nism. People like Dean Acheson thought of the commu-nists in the same terms as people like Norman Thomas,or for that matter Senator Vandenberg. Before

McCarthy, people like Martin Dies and J. ParnellThomas had been trying to get what they could out ofanti-communist hearings demagoguery, but they weredisdained by many politicians of both parties. Then

McCarthy somehow managed to get anti-communismfront and center and scared the life out of everybody. Hegave anti-communism a bad name.

Q: I guess the question would be, how would it havebeen possiblemaybe if only rhetoricallyto craft astrong anti-communist and a strong socialist world-

view?

RR:Whats the problem?

Q: I guess, wheres the wiggle room, given aMcCarthyite culture?

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whereas when you took the CIAs money, you didntreally work to their orders. People like Stephen Spenderand Melvin Lasky (the editors ofEncounter) weresupposed to have known where the money was comingfrom. Maybe they did. However, I dont think they werepressured to do anything; they just did what came natu-rallyand that was exactly what the CIA wanted themto do. I think Christopher Laschs suggestion that themoney from the CIA showed that Spender and Lasky

were just as dirty as everybody else was wrong. The anti-Communist intellectuals in Europe, whose writings werepublished with the help of CIA money, were heroicfigurespeople like Silone and Kuestler and Raymond

Aron. Being anti-Communist in the late 1940s in Francewas not easy. Aron got a really hard time. I think theywere very good people, and I dont want their memoriessoiled forever by Laschs association of them with theCIA.

Q:Your account of the Cold War in the new book isprimarily about what the Cold War wasnt: that it wasnt,

as you suggest the cultural left sometimes thinks, simplythis monolithic, Foucauldian scam invented by thegovernment to keep us in line. And since this is a viewdifferent from the one a lot of us have of the Cold War,I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about what

you think the Cold War was about: what was the point,besides registering moral outrage with Stalin? And, if

were trying to re-unite the left afterwards, what are thethings you think we could learn from the Cold War?

RR: Im not sure theres anything particularly positive to

McCarthy hearings at Yale. Chicago was perhaps theleft-most American university except maybe CCNY andColumbia. When the communists took Czechoslovakiain 48, I was a member of the Chicago student senate (or

whatever they called it). I introduced a resolution ofsympathy with the students of Charles University whodbeen killed by the Communists. It was killed 40-2,because it was seen as lending aid and comfort to thecapitalists. It was viewed as red-baiting. In those days,

Chicago students genuinely believed that sayinganything nasty about Stalin counted as red-baiting. Thestudent newspaper was communist, and eventually itturned out that the editor had been registering for onecredit a quarter. He was getting paid, believe it or not,by Moscow gold. He was being paid by the party to runthe student newspaper. When McCarthy came along andsaid the Communists had infiltrated everywhere, hecould produce lots of similar examples.

But, of course, Chicago was not typical of theAmerican academy at that time. I spent my time atChicago making red-baiting remarks, as I had been

brought up to do. I became unpopular with my fellowstudents for making them.

Q: Is there necessarily a difference between what youcall Moscow gold and the funding that the CIAprovided to anti-communist groups like the Congress forCultural Freedom during the Cold War?

RR:The difference is that Stalins was a bad governmentand ours was a relatively good government. Also, when

you took Stalins money you worked to Stalins orders,

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new left did, because the old left wasnt able to fight thebattles that the new left needed to fightto stop the

Vietnam War, to push civil rights agendas, et ceterathere does seem to be a kind of Decline and Fall narra-tive. You seem to claim that, until the 60s, the reformistleft was doing the right thing, but around the 60s,things started to fall apart. The intellectual left lost itsconnection with the labor movement, and stopped

worrying so much about money and started worrying

about stigma, as you put it. One of my questions is whyyou cite the break between left intellectuals and laborhere. Others, such as Kim Moody (among others), havesuggested that in fact it was the Red Scare and purges inthe CIO that forced a lot of left-aligned intellectuals outof a close, on-the-ground connection with the labormovement. In other words, the break between the leftand labor, and between intellectuals and labor, was in thelate 40s and early 50s, rather than the 60s.

RR:That doesnt make sense to me.

Q:Well, people like Moody argue that a lot of thepeople who were arguing for a more aggressive socialunionism were victims of purges in the CIO, and what

was left were people who were more amenable to a kindof business unionism, to a kind of narrowing of theunion agenda to contracts, as opposed to being part of alarger social democratic movement.

RR: Some of that may be true, but Im not sure howmany such people there were. Certainly some peoplepeople left over from the 30s who had thought the

be learned. There was a certain amount of unanimityunder Truman. Big business, fat-cat Republicans, andthe liberals I keep citing like Schlesinger, Galbraith,Eleanor Roosevelt and the like all agreed that the battlefought in World War II to make the world safe fordemocracy had to be continued because we had run upagainst another anti-democratic evil empire. We had tostart in containing Communism. I think they were right.Like any war, the Cold War turned into an occasion for

six different kinds of corruption and deception. In theend, we got what had been the primary objective of theCold War: a chance for democratic governments inEastern Europe. But we also had memories of the assas-sination of Allende, of the Vietnam War, and otherhorrors. So like any other war, the Cold War left allkinds of ghastly things in its wake.

You can look at World War II as having had allkinds of secret agendas. (Why didnt we bomb the head-quarters of I.G. Farben, for example?) But World War IIdidnt last long enough to generate its own internalcorruptions, so it can be remembered as a fairly straight-

forward crusade. I think about half the Cold War can beremembered as a fairly straightforward crusade. Theother half consisted of opportunistic and disastrousadventures by people like General Westmoreland andHenry Kissinger. But the Cold War doesnt strike me ashaving a great big overall meaning. It was just the usualmess that any war is.

Q:Through much ofAchieving Our Country, you discussthe new left, and while you do qualify these discussionsby arguing that there were a lot of important things the

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Consider Michael Walzer, whos approximately my age,and was a student of Howes at Brandeis. I think his takeon contemporary politics and mine are pretty muchidentical. He and I thought of ourselves as on the leftboth before the 60s and after the 60s, thought of theCommunists as a goddamned nuisance who had to begot rid of, and also thought of the far-out student radi-cals of the 60s as a nuisance we had to get rid of, lestthey be used against the left by the right. Mine doesnt

seem to me a very distinctive point of viewits justplain ordinary old left.

Q: I guess I may be asking that biographically orientedquestion because it struck me, especially in that sectionofAchieving Our Country as well as in Trotsky and the

Wild Orchids that your more recent political writinghas also, it seems, been more biographically motivated.

RR: Its just a symptom of age...

Q:And your description of the reformist left circle in

which you were raised seems to imply, Why cant we goback to this? One response might be that it may not bethat easy any morewe cant just rely on an old NewDeal politics, that the ground has moved out from underthat in a certain way.

RR: I guess I just dont see what the change has been.Whats wrong with New Deal politics?

Q: One would be tremendous demographic shiftswhomakes up the working class now. Yes, in some ways, the

united front was a good ideawere loath to give up thewartime alliance with the Communists. Reuther andLewis and others did a good job of getting rid of theCommunists. They may have taken some non-Communist social activists out with them, but Id besurprised if there were very many.

Q: The argument on this version of the story, though, isthat this is where the tremendous advances that the left

made in the 30s and 40s were rolled back.

RR: I dont see that. If you thought that the US shouldhave something like the British Labour Party, as opposedto the simply ad-hoc, pragmatic compromises that thesteel, auto, and coal workers were making, then ofcourse your expectations were disappointed. But I doubtit would have made much of a difference if we had hadan analogue of the British Labour Party as opposed tounion leaders like Hillman and Reuther having the influ-ence they did within the Democratic Party. Moodysclaim that once upon a time there was a great revolu-

tionary spirit amongst the American working class andthat it was betrayed by its leaders in the late 40s seems

wrong. There was an attempt to get better wages andworking conditions, and they got some of those things.

Q: Given your somewhat in-between generational loca-tionas you describe inAchieving Our Country, you wereraised in an old left familyhow would you characterize

your politics: old left, new left, somewhere in-between?

RR: It seems to me just plain ordinary old leftism.

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THE NEW LEFT INTO A CULTURAL LEFT

Q: Im interested by your take on the genealogy of thecultural left. One of the things that I got out of that filmabout the New York Intellectuals, Arguing the World,is that members of the old left saw it as a major triumphthat thePartisan Reviewwas mixing cultural criticism

with politicsthat for people like Lionel Trilling and

Clement Greenberg, it was important that politics andculture be brought together.

RR: I dont think it was a major triumph. I think all thatwas important was that high culture ceased to be seen asan enemy of leftist politics. People like Nicholas MurrayButler, the President of Columbia in the 20s, andPresident Lowell of Harvard wanted to use high cultureto support social conservativism. They did not think

Jews and radicals could have high culture. What Trilling,Howe et al. did was to take what we now call literarymodernism and claim that thiswas high culture, and thatit belonged to the left. Actually, many great modernist

writers were fascist, just as C.P. Snow said. But thatdidnt matter, as long as the study of the high culture ofthe day was associated with the left rather than the right.Bringing culture and politics together was somethingelse.Partisan Review had two kinds of articles: questionson the relation between Pound and Eliot, and questionslike Shall we ally ourselves with the Communists? orShould we break with the Trotskyites? The two topicsdid not really have much to do with each other.

Q: I wonder in that case if we could see thePartisan

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New Deal was able to mobilize diverse elements of theworking class, but it was almost all European ethnicswho were organized, and now its a lot more difficult todo that when you have a more multicultural workingclass.

RR: I dont see that. Why should the difference betweenthe Poles, the Italians, and the Irish be thought of as lessthan the difference between the Vietnamese and the

Mexicans? Why are we supposed to be more multicul-tural now than we were in 1910? The Poles didnt muchlike the Irish, even though they had Catholicism incommon. If you tell the Chinese and the Vietnamesethat they have Buddhism in common, that doesntdiminish the diversity and the antagonism.

Q: On the other hand, in some accounts of the failure ofthe AFL-CIO, like Mike DavisPrisoners of the AmericanDream, the idea isnt that multiculturalism is a newphenomenon, but rather that the AFL-CIO couldntdeal with or understand the rank-and-file multicultur-

alism they already hadthat divisions between blacklaborers and white laborers...

RR:That isnt multiculturalism; its straightforwardracial prejudice. Why use the term culture for some-thing like anti-semitism or racial segregation? The oldleft tried to get organized labor on the side of civilrightsto support the anti-poll tax, anti-lynching, andanti-segregation laws. With some unions they succeeded,

with other unions they failed. It seems much the samenowadays.


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worries may recede.

Q: One of the things I found most interesting inArguing the World were the accounts that NathanGlazer and Daniel Bell gave of how they felt when thestudents took over Columbia in 68; in some ways they

were quite on their side and yet they were furious thatthe institution of the university was being attacked. Iguess things were slightly different at Princeton, but I

was wondering how your own institutional locationaffected the way you experienced that period.

RR: I can tell you one story. The night after the studentshad occupied Columbia there was a meeting of purport-edly left faculty in the house of a millionaire professor ofhistory. We were all to discuss the question of why ourstudents were so complacentwhy hadnt they occupiedPrincetons buildings? I thought this was the stupidestthing I had ever been asked. Obviously this guy hadmade a big mistake in asking me to the meeting. Imanaged to keep my mouth shut, because I was the only

person there who thought they shouldnt occupy univer-sity buildings. Eventually some students did occupy theadministration building. They were served coffee anddonuts, and eventually went away.

The faculty at Princeton, like the faculty every-where else, organized groups with names like FacultyAgainst the War in Vietnam. I was their treasurer, orsecretary, or something of the Princeton group. We

would go to New York and march through Central Parkand stuff like that. But most of us had no interest in thestudents taking over the university. Every once in a while

Review, with its attention to both politics and culture, asparticipating in a kind of politics of difference? Thatis, were these New York Intellectuals trying to consoli-date a cultural identity for themselves in a way familiarto academic or cultural leftism?

RR: I dont see the analogy. The politics of differencetends to emphasize the cultures of the oppressed. Youmay not realize it, but the slaves after spending their

sixteen hour day had this terrific culture going; theChicanos, after their sixteen hour day had their terrificculture going. This kind of thing has nothing to do

with the oldPartisan Review, which typically made fun ofthe idea of proletarian culture. After theyd broken withthe Communist Party they had no use for socialistrealism, proletarian art, the culture of the oppressed, oranything of the sort. The group identity that they wereinterested in was the group of New York Intellectuals.For the first time in American history, there were Jewishintellectuals in America as there had been Jewish intel-lectuals in Germany. That was a big enough identity for

them to set up.

Q:They were, though, intimately worried about how toconnect culture with politicsa question that intellec-tuals seem to keep worrying about...

RR: Intellectuals only worry about that question iftheyve read enough Marxism to worry about the exis-tence of things called bourgeois ideals, bourgeoisideology, bourgeois culture, bourgeois intellec-tuals, and so on. I think as Marx fades away, such

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in the neighborhood. I wonder if you would see that asa case not of outsiders coming into the universitysetting, but of the university overstepping its bounds.

RR: No. The university was just doing what it had doneforever. The radicals just looked for anything that wouldmake the university look bad. The pretexts were trivial.

Q:There seemed to be two ways of looking at these

events which are not necessarily contradictory. On theone hand, Bell and Glazer were telling the students thatthe university is one of the best institutions of democ-racy; dont attack that part of it. Critics such as BarbaraEhrenreich have written, though, that some of Bell andGlazers anxiety could be seen as a kind of class anxietythat the university was also the source of their middle-class authority, and by attacking the university, andclaiming that the university is complicit in the warmachine, the students were attacking the ground of Belland Glazers cultural authority.

RR: Sure. I dont think they should have attacked thecultural authority of the professors. It was hard-earned,

well-earned authority. Those were the best allies thestudents had.

Q:A lot of people who were new leftists claim thatcultural leftists have nothing to do with the new left. Imthinking here of Katha Pollitts attack after the Sokalaffair on Andrew Ross and the Social Textcrowd, and herbeing quite upset that this is what passes for leftism now.

the students would take over or barricade somethingsome center that was financed by the DefenseDepartment, doing classified researchso we would goand bail them out. But it was just a series of ritualgestures. I think the reason why Princeton wasnt likeBerkeley or Columbia was the absence of street people.If you werent a university student or rich you simplycouldnt afford to live in Princeton. Whereas Columbiaand Berkeley were near places where people without

money could live.

Q:Are you suggesting that this made the political ques-tions there a little bit more vividthat there was some-thing more urgent about politics there?

RR: Every drop-out from college in the 60s had amotive for staying around the university, and being in onuniversity life by taking part in student demonstrations.It was a culture, if you like, perhaps the most interestingpolitical culture available. If you dropped out of school

you just didnt leave Telegraph Avenue, or the Upper

West Side, or wherever. Nobody knew who was astudent and who wasnt, so so-called student protests

were usually a mixture of students and former students.

Q: But the particular thing about the demonstrations atColumbia wasnt so much that people from the outside

were coming into the university and threatening itsauthority, but that the university actively and perhaps

wrongfully exerted its authority when they moved eastinto Morningside Park and began construction inHarlem without any notification whatsoever to anyone

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Q:Another of the fairly controversial arguments of thebook is your suggestion that the left drop Marxism andthe vocabulary of Marxism. The first question I have is,

what about socialism? Is that a term you want to getaway from as well?

RR: Irving Howe asked, years ago, whether if wedropped that term it make any difference to the policies

we advocated. Lets not worry too much, he said, about

whether we call ourselves socialists. I agree with Howethat socialism was the name chosen by the most impor-tant leftist movements of the last 150 years. But now theterm has become radically ambiguous, as demonstratedby the way the British Labour Party split over thenationalization clause. The old guard said: We cant callourselves a socialist party and sing The Red Flagunless were for nationalization. Blair and Kinnock said

yes, we can. Howe was, in effect, saying yes, we can.And if you dont want to call it socialism, dont call itsocialism. Dont get hung up on whether its socialismor not.

Q: One of my concerns is that I dont know how we candrop Marxism without dropping a lot of writing that we

would want to hold onto, especially certain kinds ofdissident Marxisms that have been really useful in tryingto think of how we might build something like a socialistor a social democratic movement.

RR: Like what?

Q: Like Gramsci. Thered be a weird kind of repression

RR: I agree with her.

Q:Yet inAchieving Our Countryyou seem to argue thatthe cultural left is of a piece with the new left.

RR: I didnt mean to. The argument I wanted to makewas that the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the loss ofpublic confidence in the presidency and the governmentall conspired to move the student radicals into non-

majoritarian politics. In other words, the Marxist claimthat the system isnt reformable came together with the

widespread post-Watergate feeling that the Americangovernment is hopelessly corrupt. This made it very diffi-cult for leftists to think of themselves as Americanpatriots, hoping to achieve their country. But unless theleft wraps itself in the flag, it hasnt got a chance of prac-ticing a majoritarian politics. Before the 60s wrapping

yourself in the flag when you did leftist politics was asnatural as breathing. But that became unnatural after the60s.

Q:This is the certainly the sort of thing with whichmany readers will take issuethis exhortation to patrio-tism.

RR: One of them already has, actually. I just got agalley of a review by Joel Rogers and Josh Cohen forLingua Francawhich says basically, Who needs patrio-tism if you have moral principles? My response is thatmoral principles are terrific in Ethics 101, but not asspurs to political action.

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completely irrelevant to what eventually happened. Whykeep it up?

Q: Is it worthwhile, though, to look to some of theanalytic Marxists, or people who are interested in main-taining Marxism, but in a more pragmatic spirit? That is,to take a Marxist line of thought and turn it into some-thing with which to make social policy. Im thinkinghere of that series that Verso puts out, Real Utopias,

which includes works by Erik Olin Wright, and JoelRogers and Josh Cohen. Theyre interesting in bothcases because they seem to position themselves in a

Marxist tradition, but offer local solutions to particularproblems.

RR: Do you think theyd be any worse off if they didntposition themselves in a Marxist tradition?

Q: In a vacuum, no, but since theyre speaking in acommunity of other politically minded people who iden-tify themselves as Marxists, and who understand a

Marxist vocabulary...

RR:Who are these people? Do people buy bookspublished by Verso?

Q:Yeah.

RR:Maybe, but even if there are still ten thousandpeople who will continue to say, as Derrida says, wemust read and re-read Marx, they are fluff on thesurface. Its an amiable exercise in nostalgia.

involved if we just said, lets talk about Gramsci withoutever mentioning the fact that he was a Marxist.

RR: Liberal protestants can still quote fanatics likeLuther with a perfectly good conscience. I dont see whysocial democrats cant quote Gramsci, or for that matter

Marx, with a perfectly good conscience. But it seems tome the kind of leftist who says we must never desert

Marx cares more about his own authenticity than about

what might be done. Loyalty to Marx has become afetish.

Q: In some places youve criticized Marxist thinking forbecoming too much like a science, like Althussers work,

which claims to offer something totalizing, pure...

RR: I havent the foggiest idea what Althusser meant byscience. His book seemed to me bullshit from begin-ning to end. Ive got no conception of what turnedpeople on in Althusser. There were a lot of people whofound him important. But he completely baffles me.

Q: But even the people who arent even Althusseriansthe people who say that what Marxism does is give us ascience of society, a science of historyobviously thatsone of the things that, as a good pragmatist, you wouldprefer we stop talking about.

RR: It would have been nice if we could have had ascience of society or of history. But for the last couple ofhundred years people have been building philosophies ofhistory and social theories that turned out to be

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Marxists. You have two reasons for forgetting it. First,its become a distraction. Second, its acquired a badname.

Q: On the other hand, though, you argue in theopening section ofAchieving Our Country that, in thesame way that a person needs dignity to understandthemselves, so does a nation. And I thought of E.P.

Thompson, who quit the Communist Party in 1956

when that made sense, but remained a Marxistandthat was a way for him to maintain his political dignity.I wonder what youd say to people for whom Marxism isthat language: the language of dignity and the politicallyhumane. Is it worth maintaining it so as to be able tonarrate your past, and thus to think effectively about thefuture?

RR: Perhaps its important for Thompsons generationto hang on to Marx. I hope that the next generationdoesnt have to. I dont see why this has to be passedalong to our children.

THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE

Q: In the first chapter of Achieving Our Country, youdescribed your desire to encourage leftists to see ourcountry as Whitman and Dewey did: as a community in

which the state and social institutions existed only forthe purpose of making new sorts of individuals possible.

This sounds to me like a community devoted to encour-aging difference, and the proliferation of difference, yet

Q:Yet these texts, in particular, situate themselves in apolicy context and are ostensibly marketing themselvesboth to humanities marxists and political science types.

Theres some sense that in the crossover market, byhaving quotable bites of Marxist-influenced policyadvice, they could actually influence public policypeople.

RR: It seems a cheap thrill to have readers in both

English and political science. Now if you had readersboth in labor unions and in Congress...

Q:My main question, though, is what do you say topeople who would argue that what Rorty is asking us todo is to repress a Marxist tradition.

RR: How about not repressing it, but taking it fairlylightly? You can argue that if it had not been for Marx,Engels and their friends, we wouldnt have gotten the

welfare state. Bismarck wouldnt have been so scared,Lloyd George wouldnt have been so scared, and so on.

You can argue analogously that had it not been forLuther and Calvin we would still be buying indulgences.Both claims are probably true, but do you really want tobother about whether youre maintaining a Lutheran ora Calvinist tradition?

Q: So you see it as a ladder we have climbed so that itmay be discarded afterwards?

RR: Its a ladder that is covered with filth because of themarks of the governments that have called themselves

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home, should leave people free to say: I used to be aVietnamese-American, or a Baptist, but now Im past allthat. They dont have to say this, but I dont see whythey should be expected to have any particular loyalty tosuch groups.

Q: But its not just loyalty; its that this is part of theblind impress...

RR: No, it isnt. The blind impress is your unconscious.Group identity is what your parents tell you about

what we Vietnamese suffered on the boats, for example,or what we Irish suffered before they took down theNo Irish Need Apply signs. You can remember thatsuffering, or you can do your best to ignore itits up to

you. Whatever a left politics is, it shouldnt have viewson which choice a person should make in that situation.

Q: But isnt this what the politics of difference isaboutclearing a space for that kind of choice? Clearinga space for people to have an association with various

kinds of group identities, and even if they are still goingto call themselves Americans, that American identitydoesnt get conglomerized into just one banal identity.

RR: It seems to me the politics of difference grows outof the notion that there is something called the White

Anglo-Saxon Male Heterosexist culture which was (a) apretty lousy culture, and (b) has insisted that everyonebecome a member of it. I find this an unrecognizabledescription. It wasnt a bad culture at all. It had quite alot of room for all kinds of religious and ethnic identi-

in other sections of the book you chastise the culturalleft for relying on a politics of difference.

RR:Thats because Im thinking of individual differencerather than group difference. I dont care whetheranybody thinks of themselves as Vietnamese-American,Italian-American, or Baptist. I would just like them tobe free to make up their own lives, in a goodNietzschean manner.

Q: Bruce Robbins, in a recent article in Public Culture,Sad Stories in the International Public Sphere: RichardRorty on Culture and Human Rights, offers an inter-esting description of culture and difference which maybe useful here: Culture signifies both membership andidentity on the one hand, and a loose, relativized, self-problematizing relation to membership and identity onthe other.

RR: In the ideal case it does...

Q: So you think thats only an ideal case?

RR:Well, its a very hard balance to maintain.

Q:Yet in the more sophisticated versions of the politicsof difference, the idea seems to be precisely that we dotry to craft our own individual identities, but we do sobecause were part of different communities.

RR: Often we just put the communities behind us.Going to college, growing up, or getting away from

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done a good job of melting ethnicities together intoshared citizenshipbeing Irish is no longer a stigma, andbeing Hispanic is ceasing to be. But it has done a verybad job of lifting the bar to black-white intermarriage,

which seems to me the only way in which black-whiterelations are going to be improved. It has been no betteror worse than any other country in its treatment of

women, gays, and lesbians. But these groups dont needrecognition of their cultures; they just need not to be

pushed around.

Q: Id like to get back to this idea that group identity issomething one can either embrace or walk away from. Inthe Robbins article I mentioned earlier, he describes thissituation a bit differentlythat ones relationship to onesculture is going to be both identification and a ques-tioning of this identification. For example, a person willidentify herself as a black person, and yet have a wholebunch of issues about what counts as blackness. There

will be many situations in which she would say, unprob-lematically, Im a black person, but in a lot of others

where thats going to be problematized. And this isnt justsomething intellectuals dothis is something everybodydoes. So when were talking about the politics of differ-ence, we have to acknowledge that sophistication.

RR:Yeah, ifwere talking about the politics of difference.But why arewe talking about the politics of difference? I

just dont see what was wrong with the politics of individ-uality, conjoined with the usual attempt to repeal this orthat law, overcome this or that prejudice, and so on.

ties, associations, parades, things like that. The sensethat there was this vast pressure for homogenizationseems to me a real leftist myth.

Q: So descriptions of, say, women in corporate Americasaying, I have to change the way I act as a woman, toconform to a masculinist corporate ethic...

RR: Oh, sure, thats perfectly true. When the Irish went

to college in my fathers generation, they had to wear thesame clothes the WASPs wore. I just dont find this inter-estingly oppressive and homogenizing.

Suppose you have a rhetoric of letting people haveas much space as possible for their individuality, but one

which simply ignored groups. That, it seems to me,would do as much for women in corporations, or theIrish or the Vietnamese going to college, as any rhetoricthat paid attention to groups.

I want to distinguish sharply between culturaldifferences and stigma. Women have always beenoppressed by men, and gays by straights, but not because

they have a distinctive feminine, or gay, culture.Oppression of groups is a matter of picking out a groupby possession of some ineradicable stigma and thenhumiliating, enslaving, etc., members of that group. Theproblem for stigmatized groups is not to get theirculture accepted, but to get the stigmatizers to stopthinking that lack of a penis, black skin, or whatever, is ashameful thing.

So it seems to me a mistake to put stigma andethnicity in the same boxto blur the difference betweenthem with the term cultural diversity. America has

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want, you have to have this dignity, you have to be ableto narrate your story, which will involve telling the storyof the group youre from, the specific things you had toovercome to become the individual you are; and thatstory is going to be inflected, markedstained in somecasesby the group you come from...

RR: I dont see what you mean by marked, inflected,and stained. You cant write your autobiography

without mentioning the stigma you inherited, but thestigmas were somebody elses idea, not yours.

Q: But what about the very simple fact that, in theculture we live in, your group identity is marked, and

your life chances are limited or expanded as a result ofthat identity, and that theres got to be some kind ofgesture of recovery to say, Im going to embrace thisidentity that Im told Im supposed to be ashamed of.

This is a rather powerful tool towards achieving somekind of political and social equality.

RR:Thats one tool among others. You can forget aboutit; you can embrace it; you can do various things inbetween. I guess what bothers me about the politics ofdifference is the suggestion that you have some duty toembrace it rather than forget about it.

Id say, talk about prejudice rather than groups.Before we knew that there was an African-Americanculture, or a gay culture, or a female identity, we talkedabout blacks, gays, and women getting an unnecessarilyhard time because people were prejudiced against them.I guess Im not sure that discovering theyve all got

Q: The question is that if one opens up this rhetoricalspace you suggest, where individuality is central, howdoes one, outside of a politics of difference, narrate thestory of affiliation, disaffiliation, connection, individu-ality? How do you get the dignity to call yourself anindividual in the way that youd like without coming toterms with this group identity first?

RR: By telling stories about how people walked away

from their identification with this or that groupEmersonian type stories.

Q: But that story will be very particular in every case, sothat even though the happy ending is individuality, thenarration itself necessitates a politics of difference.

RR:Why not narrate a politics of contempt for groupdifference, a glorification of individual difference?

Q:That space is available; the politics of difference sayswe dont have to be fixed, that you can be an individual

and this group identity can be something you leavebehind, but the shape of that story is one that will never-theless evoke the earlier difference.

RR:Why is difference now such a big deal? We alwaysknew there were Irish and Italians and Vietnamese andgays and what-not.

Q: I guess its a recognition of the kind of trials peopleundergo in being able to achieve their identity. In theprocess by which youre going to get to the place you

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but for the rest of it, he was creating George BernardShaw. He was quite aware of what the English had doneto the Irish as Joyce or anybody else in Ireland. It takesDaedaluses as well as Shaws to be sure, but I dont reallysee that theres any particular reason to go one wayrather than the other. Some people are more likeDaedalus; some people are more like Shaw. Of course,for a black American, it is awfully difficult to wrenchoneself out of the oppression of the blacks in America,

and simply be a free Parisian intellectual, thoughWright, Baldwin, and others did try it. Sometimes itworked, and sometimes it didnt workbut it was alwayshard. It was much easier for an Irishman because theoppression wasnt as intense, the humiliation wasnt asgreat. So, depending on just how beat up youre likely tobe qua member of the group, it is going to be harder oreasier for you to fashion yourself without reference tosome group. But the people who dont give a damnabout the group are as intellectually and morally respon-sible as the people who do give a damn about the group.

Q:This discussion of the politics of difference remindsme of the fact that, before you started talking about the

American left in general, you focused pretty specificallyon feminismyouve written a number of articles aboutfeminismand it seems to be a politics that youreparticularly attached to.

RR: One is always struck when one finds oneself guiltyof taking things for granted. I was raised phallogocen-tric, homophobic, all the rest of it, and it took decades ofpropaganda to make me realize Id been raised wrong. If

cultures, or encouraging them to have cultures, hasadded anything.

Q: Could one say that individual identities come from aself-fashioning out of various group identities, and that

you cobble together the things from traditions that youlike, and leave behind other things that you dont like,and continually maintain a double consciousness orironic relationship to...

RR: Whygroup identities? Consider the heroine ofSinclair LewissMain Street, growing up in Sauk Center,carving an identity out of the books in the library. It isnta bunch of other culturesits just Keats, Baudelaire, andthe like. I agree with the argument of David Bromwichsbook,Politics by What Means. Bromwich says that in theold days our sense of ourselves was modeled on SinclairLewiss heroes and heroines, or Stendahls young manfrom the provinces. We used individual models to createa self for ourselves. But now, for some reason, we aresupposed to worry about this other thingwhat culture

do we come from? What is our relation to that culture?

Q: What about the model of Stephen Daedalus at theend ofPortrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or RalphEllisons narrator inInvisible Manpeople who feel thistremendous push to embrace something they comefrom, and also transcend it and recreate it in a new way?

RR: Yeah, Joyce offers one model, but there are others.Consider George Bernard Shaw, a contemporary ofStephen Daedalus. Shaw wrote one play about Ireland

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and more feminist books. There were dozens of themlying around the house, so I began reading them. If Idbeen single, God knows whether I would ever have readthem.

THE CULTURAL LEFT

AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Q: I wonder if your criticisms of the cultural lefts theo-reticism, its need to theorize, is more of a philosophicalobjection than a political one. For your main critique ofthe cultural left seems to be that they are concernedmore with naming the system than with craftingspecific reforms. But I wonder if we cant see that thisnaming the system is similar to what the right did fromthe 60s on. Sure, they had a whole bunch of policy posi-tions, but they also concentrated a lot of energy oncultural strategy, on changing the terms of debate,changing the ground on which we argue about public

policy. And this is perhaps what the cultural left istrying to do for the reformist left or with the reformistleft, if anythingthat naming the system may be a wayof naming lousy vocabularies in which were conductingour public conversations, and making some suggestionsabout new vocabularies or new conversations that wouldbe more amenable to the kind of public policy decisions

we would want to have happen.

RR: Its a nice idea, but I cant see what new vocabu-laries have been suggested. My feeling is that theres

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Id been raised in Europe between the wars, it probablywould have taken decades of post-war propaganda tomake me realize that they shouldnt have raised me to bean anti-semite. When you have the sense of your eyesbeing opened, you tend to write about how nice it is tohave your eyes open. Thats why I wrote about femi-nism. But it isnt that I think I have anything special tosay about feminism.

Q: But theres been a particular interest of feminists inyour work.

RR: Not much. Thereve been some angry replies, but Idont think any feminists have picked my stuff up and

waved it as a banner.

Q: Except for Catherine McKinnon.

RR: No. I just stole her stuff and wrote it up in a slightlydifferent form. She hasnt used me, Ive used her.

Q: I thought that at a certain point she had drawn onyour anti-foundationalism for some of her work.

RR: She read me before I began writing about feminism,but I dont think it was a big deal for her.

Q: Is there a story behind when you decided to startwriting about feminism, or is it a more gradual process?

RR:The influence of my wife, if anythingI suspectshe was the principal stimulus. She began reading more


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phenomenon. As you say the Republicans have beenbrilliantly successful at doing this. But I cant see it as anargument for the use of theory. Do the Republicans havea theory?

Q: I guess if you agree that this has been a successfulstrategy that the Right has employed, then we have torecognize that, to be vulgar about it, super-structuralchanges that the Right has enacted have in fact altered

the economy, have shifted the way money works. Cantwe argue, then, that theres room for a cultural left,which I would like to think could also work on thatmodel?

RR: How about saying theres room for a rhetorical left?But the question is: what rhetoric do you use? I thinknothing is going to happen until you can get the massesto stop thinking of the bureaucrats as the enemy, andstart thinking of the bosses as the enemy. I suspect this

will only happen if theres a great, huge recession. But Idont see the cultural left as doing beans to bring about

this shift in the masses thinking.

Q:To take it from another angle, what about some ofthe impulses of the cultural left to seize upon this suspi-cion of bureaucrats as one thats not entirely misguided,and redirecting it towards a left agenda as opposed to aright agenda?

RR: Foucault coming to the aid of Bob Dole? Watch outfor the secret meshes of power?

been a tacit collaboration between right and left inchanging the subject from money to culture. If I werethe Republican oligarchy, I would want a left whichspent all its time thinking about matters of group iden-tity, rather than about wages and hours. I agree that theoligarchy managed to make the term liberal a bad

word, and thus shifted the Democratic Party toward thecenter. It was a rhetorical triumph. The left hasntmanaged anything of the sort. What it has done is to

capitalize on the success of the civil rights movement,and to get more and more breaks for various oppressedgroups over the last twenty-five years. It seems to methat all the work of getting those breaks was done

without notions of culture. It was done using the kindof rhetoric Martin Luther King used, modified for theuse of women, gays, and what not. King was not inter-ested in African-American culture. He was interested ingetting African-Americans the life-chances that whitesalways had.

Q: I guess were disagreeing on what the term culture

means. I guess when I say cultural strategy, I mean, forlack of a better term, an ideological strategy thatpresents a world view from which certain decisions canbe made. Over the past 30 years, the Republicans havebeen very good at saying, instead of imagining the

welfare state as this thing we have to ameliorate poverty,see it as an extension of Big Brother.

RR: I dont want to question the need for bringing apurer sense to the words of the tribechanging the

vocabulary used by the masses to describe this or that

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baiting when red-baiting was unpopular. Because it wasso unpopular, it was done in a sort of cynical, sarcastictone. Its not a very pleasant tone, but I grew into it, andby the time I started in on this recent stuff it was theonly tone I had. You could probably have a nicer andmore effective tone, but its too late for me.

Q: But how about the other side of this equation,though? That perhaps if the cultural left didnt do all

this posturingwhich Robbins describes nicely as areaction formation to their very political irrelevance...

RR: Its also just a plain ordinary power struggle withinthe academy for who gets the tenure slots. If you dontmake a helluva lot of noise, the chance that any of yourgeneration is going to get anywhere in the business isfairly small. So you have to exaggerate the importance ofthe difference between you and them, just as Howesgeneration had to pretend that all things had becomenew when we became modern, that human nature reallyhad changed in 1910, that literary modernism was a new

birth of timenot really true, but useful for purposes ofbreaking into the system and getting a place in the sun.

Q: One of the significant differences between yourselfand many on the cultural left is that your writing seemsdirected toward those who are, relatively speaking,powerful. The questions you ask often take the form of,How should we residents of rich North Atlanticdemocracies, or we liberal intellectuals who have somecultural capital, act? In other words, the concern is withhow the powerful should act toward the less powerful. In

Q: I dont know if we can see this as purely falseconsciousness if someone who is a welfare client findsthe welfare state to be invasive as well as helpful. Theresa certain way we can build upon this...

RR: Of course they find it invasive, but what do youexpect?

Q:A less invasive welfare state? Why not draw from

some of this populist fear of large bureaucratic structuresand craft a less statist kind of leftism that can still do thekinds of things that we want the welfare state to do?

RR: Does anybody know how to run a non-invasivewelfare system? I dont think you can. Youre just goingto have to settle for lots and lots of Foucauldian webs ofpower, about as weblike and powerful as they always

were, only run by the good guys instead of the bad guys.

Q:Without discounting the significant substantivedisagreements between you and many on the cultural

left, I keep wondering if its possible that, to some signif-icant degree, the conflict is the product of tone andrhetoricthat you dislike their revolutionary posturing,emphasis on righteous anger, and infatuation with theo-retical language, and they dislike your casual, laidbackand some would say even complacent tone. In addition,

your rhetoric tends to be on the debunking, simplifyingside, and theirs on the complexifying side. Do you thinkthis is a significant part of it?

RR: Oh, yeah. I think so. Remember that I grew up red-

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Q:And this is reflected in bothAchieving Our Countryand articles like Two Cheers for Elitists, your reviewof Christopher Laschs last book. In these places, youmake an unabashed defense of top-down initiatives. But

what about the idea that all knowledges are partial,imminent knowledges, and that the things you thinkshould be done are in part a product of where yourespeaking from?

RR:The masses always knew that. The intellectualsalways knew that. Everybodys always taken this forgranted. The first thing you say when you hear a polit-ical speech is something like well, thats what it lookslike to him. But I cant see that Foucault or anybodyelse has given us new insight into the tediously familiarfact that your views are usually a product of yourcircumstances.

Q: How can one acknowledge this point in ones writingand still say something useful, though?

RR:Why bother? Why not let my audience acknowl-edge it for me? Everybody knows that Im an overpaid,privileged humanities professor. They knew it beforethey read my stuff. Why should I bother with self-flagel-lation?

Q: This reminds me of the labor conference atColumbia a few years back. It seemed to me that thepoint of that conference was to bring intellectuals incloser contact with the labor movement.

contrast, a lot of leftist cultural studies work seems towrite from the other side of the equationwriting insolidarity with the less powerful. Whatever the pitfallsand shortcomings are of this position, it seems to resultin a different kind of politics. In other words, youregoing to end up with two very different kinds of politics,depending upon which audience you feel you are writingfor. I was wondering if you could imagine writing anessay which is more concerned with arguing what the

less powerful should do, not how the more powerfulshould act toward the less powerful. Is it possible to

write with that kind of solidarity, or does it seem like afalse kind of solidarity?

RR: Roosevelt said early in his first administration that,If I were working for an hourly wage, I would join alabor union. This was a very important moment in thehistory of the labor movement. Was he speaking fromthe side of the less powerful? No. I could say to the

janitors at the University of Virginia, for Gods sake joina union. Would that be speaking from their side? No.

But its good advice anyway, even if it can be viewed ascondescending.

This whole idea of solidarity with the oppressed onthe part of the bourgeois intellectual strikes me as one ofthe many phony problems that we inherited from

Marxism. John Stuart Mill didnt worry about whetherhe was solid with the women or the workershe justgave his views. The Marxist trope of Jones is just abourgeois intellectual never did anybody any good. Itisnt something anybody should spend their time

worrying about.

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give up on group identity, and was furious at the sugges-tion that he switch from race to class.

Q: One of the things I found most interesting aboutRogers speech was his set of answers to the question,What can intellectuals do for the labor movement?Pretty much everything that came out of his mouth afterthat was, if youre a sociologist, or a political scientist, ora researcher in labor relations, here are things you can

do. But the thing you dont want to do is deconstructfairy tales, which is what they do in English depart-ments.

RR:This review by Cohen and Rogers says, Hes justtalking to Humanities teachers, and I read that andthought, Of course I am! Who did they think I wastalking to? Humanities teachers are people, too.

Q:Another point about the conference that youremarked on inAchieving Our Countrywas the booing ofOrlando Patterson, and the way that pointed up a

tension between different sides of the left concerningwhat we should do in the age of global capitalism: doyou keep borders open, or do you close them?

RR: Right. Do you save the working classes of theadvanced old democracies by protectionism, or do yougive up protectionism for the sake of the Third World?Do you try to keep the standard of living in the olddemocracies up in order to prevent a right-wingpopulist, fascist movement in the USA, or do you try tore-distribute the wealth across national borders? You

RR: No, I think the point was for Sweeney and theAFL-CIO to get some media attentionattention theyneed and deserve. The only way to bring intellectualstogether with the labor movement is for the AFL-CIOto tell the professors, for example, that Senator Whositshas introduced a bill to change the NLRB rules forrecognition of unions to incorporate the recommenda-tions of the Duncan commission. That then gets theintellectuals to bang the drums, mention the Whosits

Act every time they turn around, drag it into everyconversation, and so on. Thats about as much bringingthe intellectuals together with the union workers as youare going to get. The intellectuals are supposed to give

voice to desirable initiatives. In the past, theyve giventheir voices to the repeal of the anti-sodomy laws andthe equalization of male-female wages. So now let themgive voice to the Whosits Act, because the NLRB is amess. I dont really care about whether theres solidaritybetween these two social groups, as long as they areserving the same ends.

Q:What was your own sense of the conference?

RR: Id agreed to give a paper in Colorado the secondday of the conference. So I didnt see much of it. You gotthe tensions you would expect: between people like JoelRogers who are out there getting people to run forschool boards and city council, all involved in the nittygritty, and people like me and Patricia Williams. We juststay in our studies and compose ever more effective littlebits of rhetoric. The tension between Todd Gitlin andRobin Kelley was another thing. Kelley was not about to

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cant get really excited about how much money the TAsget. I can get upset about employing adjuncts. It seemsto me that for the three or four years that you are a TA,the university says that in exchange for starving for thesethree or four years, youre getting a chance at a bettercareer than you would have gotten if you had taken a jobfor real money. Maybe thats a fair trade. Its not a veryconclusive argument, but its an argument. I just donthave strong views one way or another. Adjuncts, on the

other hand, seem to me quite capable of wrecking thesystem. You could de-professionalize higher educationby hiring enough adjuncts. You could eliminate facultycontrol, take away the role of the universities as sanctu-aries of the left, as sanctuaries of tolerance...all the rolesit has played in post-war America. If you completelycommodify academic labor you can get all the teachingdone for roughly a third of what you can get it done fornow. But I hope they dont completely commodify acad-emic labor. It would proletarianize the faculty, and takeaway whatever cultural and political clout universitiescurrently have.

Q: Wasnt it Dewey who helped found the AAUP? Iwonder if there are other organizations that we need toinvent to try to stem this tide?

RR:The AAUP is a really difficult topic, and somebodyshould write a history of it. It has less clout than it hadbefore the 60s. In the 70s it went out on all kinds oflimbs, and it left its membership way behind. The

AAUP got in the hands of 60s radicals who staked it outin positions which lost it huge sections of its member-

probably cant do both. I wish I knew how to resolve thedilemma, but I dont.

When I was a kid, I knew just what I would doin foreign and domestic policy if I were President.Nowadays I dont. I think this is a fairly widespreadphenomenon. Forty years ago, you could believe that theU.S., through the U.N., could export democracy,squeeze the evil empire to death, create industrialization,and promote a rising standard of living throughout the

world. I dont believe that anymore. It cant be done.How do you save the Asian economies without giving allthe money to American and Japanese banks? I have noidea. Or consider Mexico. We in effect ruined the

Mexican middle class by paying off American banks.There ought to be a way to avoid this, but I dont knowwhat it is.

Q:The Columbia labor teach-in had been preceded, bya few months, by a labor struggle which caught theattention of a lot of academics: the Yale TA strike. I

would be curious to hear your response to this event,

especially given your comments about the relationshipbetween labor and intellectuals, because this is onemoment where the intellectuals are labor. Now assomeone who has been in the academy for quite a longtime now, Im wondering what your reflections are on

where were going and what sort of things can be doneto improve the state of higher education, to improve thestate of the laborers in higher education: faculty, gradstudents, and other university workers.

RR: The adjuncts worry me a lot more than the TAs. I

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non-academic employees. The idea would be that youcouldnt raise the faculty 3% and raise the non-acade-mics only 1%, and you couldnt have a median wage forthe staff that was less than half of the median for thefaculty. There must be some such set of rules that youcould institute. If such rules became a custom among theprivate universities, it would probably spread. The facul-ties of the big powerful state universities would say, Imembarrassed to be teaching here at Berkeley where the

ratio is 3 to 1 instead of 2 to 1, as it is at Harvard orStanford. Id like the universities to be a moral example.

Theyd be more of a moral example if they fixed it sothat janitors with 20 years experience didnt get paid lessthan assistant professors, then if they doubled the payfor TAs.

Q: Lets return for a moment to the stigma vs. moneyquestion, because this seems to be an important point inAchieving Our Country. The first obvious question is, canyou imagine talking about both at the same time?

RR: Sure.

Q: So its not as if what youre arguing for is that westop talking about stigma.

RR: No, but we might divide our libidinal energy inhalf.

Q: Or even maybe not dividing it in half, but talkingabout both at the same time.

ship. I would love to bring the AAUP back to the powerit once had, but I dont know how Id do it. Bennington

would have been inconceivable in the 50s. Now theuniversity presidents are so contemptuous of the AAUPthat they say ah screw it, censure me. They reallydidnt say that then.

Q: But, getting back to your earlier point, one of thereasons why TAs are so angry is that we can no longer

justify four years of starvation because of the ratheruncertain promise of an academic job.

RR:The TAs who accept four years of starvation inexchange for a one in ten chance of getting a job usuallyhave parental support. I think one reason why we getthe graduate enrollments we do is simply the savings ofthe parents of the current crop. The next generation

wont have those parental savings to draw on. So wewont have all these applicants for graduate study.

Q: Thats one of the other things that worries a lot of

us. The next generation of academics will only consist ofpeople who had enough money for graduate school. So

we wont have a next generation of working classscholars.

RR: The universities do have the chance to do some-thing for economic equality. Eric Lott, Susan Fraiman,and Nelson Lichtenstein held a rally a while back for thenon-academic employees at the University of Virginia.Sometime I want to write out a proposal that the facul-ties of the universities tie their own wages to those of the

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RR: Fine, if you can do it, do it. But offhand, I dontknow how to run the two together.

Q: It seems that thats what the recent work on white-ness studies is trying to do.

RR:Whats that?

Q:This idea that you start talking about whiteness as a

racial identity just like any other racial identity.

RR: [groans] God.

Q: Think about the quote from DuBois about thewages of whitenessthe idea that white workers wereconvinced that, while they were oppressed, they werestill better off than the blacks. So they were encouragednot to align themselves with the blacks, because of thebenefits derived from their white skin.

RR: That was what Gompers said about the Irish. Its

an age-old technique: dividing the oppressed into hostilegroups so they wont vote against you.

Q: Fred Pfeil has a piece called Sympathy for theDevils: Notes on Some White Guys in the RidiculousClass Wars, and the interesting thing there is that helocates the absence of whites from these conversations inthe same way that you do, and what he ends up saying is,lets try to understand why a militia politics happens.

The idea is that theres some way that you can get toclass through a more fully articulated discussion of race,

RR: See, thats the thing. Whenever I say this to NancyFraser, she says, You dont seem to realize that ques-tions of race and gender are inseparable from economicquestions. I always reply, Of course theyre sepa-rable. For example, lots of white males dont get goodenough jobs. So if you want a majoritarian politics then

you may want to separate talk about the level of theminimum wage from talking about race and gender.

The dream of the left, particularly after Marxism

seemed to have given us such a beautiful way of tyingthings together, is that we can integrate all of ourconcerns into a single consolidated vision. But usually

we cant. We have to say one thing to one audience atone time and other things to other audiences at othertimes.

Q: One of the arguments that seems rather persuasive tome is that, given the racial composition of the workingclass and the poor, if white intellectuals interested inclass are silent on race, or at least hold that these issuesare separable, it will look like a class movement being

crafted for white workers only. The danger is that blackswont feel that theyre part of the movement.

RR: And the danger of the academys concentration onrace and gender is that white workers think they werebeing neglected by the academy. So youre going to loseeither way. The white workers are being neglected.

Q:The question is, some people argue that it is possiblethat we can do this, that we can talk about both at thesame time.

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not sure that the Roman plebes didnt know that. I thinkthe idea that Marx burst upon an astonished world withthe thought that the rich were ripping off the poor is

weird.

Q: But isnt it more than just the rich ripping off thepoor? Its that its being done in a certain way, so to stopit, were going to have to address the certain way itshappening.

RR: But he didnt address it. He said that nothing couldchange without a total revolution, one which abolishedprivate property, created new ideals to replace bourgeoisfreedom and bourgeois independence, and so on. Therhetoric was entirely one of No piecemeal solutions.

The left got hooked on this no piecemeal solutions idea,and on the claim that if you do propose solutions theydbetter be integrated in a general theoretical package. Butmost of the good has been done by piecemeal initiativesthat came out of left field. Stonewall came out of leftfield. Selma came out of left field.

Theres a new book coming out by Richard Posner,in which he talks about the difference between academicmoralists and moral entrepreneurs. Its sort of a polemicagainst Dworkin and other Kantian moral philosophers.He distinguishes academic moralists, who have a moraltheory which tells us that we must do so and so, frommoral entrepreneurs, like Catherine McKinnon. She ishis paradigm of a moral entrepreneur. She doesnt have atheoryshe has a polemic. Most of the good is done byopportunistic moral entrepreneurs, who have a veryspecific target, call attention to a very specific set of

because theres a way to talk about what it is that thesepeople are missing, and whats offered in its place in themilitias.

RR: Consider Clintons last State of the Union Address:something for everybody, no overall integration ofpolicy: just I propose this and I propose that. Thatsabout as much integration as politics needs. I think ofthe intellectual left as dominated by the notion that we

need a theoretical understanding of our historical situa-tion, a social theory which reveals the keys to the futuredevelopment, and a strategy which integrates everything

with everything. I just dont see the point. I dont seewhy there shouldnt be sixteen initiatives, each of whichin one way or another might relieve some suffering, andno overall theoretical integration.

Q: It might be that some of this thinking is that the leftisnt quite sure what those initiatives should be, and that

while the theorizing may occasionally become a fetish, itcan also be a way of stepping back to one remove from

the situation in order to get a clearer view, so we canthen see what the more specific initiatives should be.

RR: It never worked before. Why should it work now?

Q: But what about the Marxist insight of taking a stepback from the economy and saying, the economy in abig way works this way, thus our specific local practicesshould be unionizing the workers and organizing them.

RR: It didnt take Marx for that. Cobbet knew that, Im

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raphy. When I mentioned ethnogr

Against Bosses,.pdf

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Transcript of Against Bosses,.pdf