How to Be an Intellectual: The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross
Williams, Jeffrey J.
ARTICLES How to Be an Intellectual The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS In the Fall 1991 issue of Dissent, Richard Rorty published an essay called "Intellectuals in...
...He attained his public position primarily from his academic work and was not notably involved in party politics as were those who built the Democratic Socialists of America, for example, or like Howe, who founded Dissent, and he did not write on class or politics before the late 1980s...
...Though Rorty castigated the "academic left," he was its creature, and he imagined his audience as something called the "academic left...
...While it is heady to legislate from above, our job is more modest...
...Rather than expressing nostalgia for the old model of a job with one firm over a career, he advocates "a guaranteed income or social wage, decoupled from the circumstances of employment...
...Part of his argument followed from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: it is less useful to appeal to general, if not metaphysical, categories like "the human" than to argue concretely that Americans should not suffer hunger...
...Rorty's reply helped explain some of his animus: Ross's 1989 book No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture had criticized the New York Intellectuals for ignoring a range of cultural injustices as well as for cheering along the Cold War imperium...
...The controversy tarnished Ross's reputation— though it should be noted that, in his own writing, Ross does not make arguments about science per se, but rather about the social uses of science...
...The article was obviously poorly vetted, and Ross's defensive response, complaining of a breach of academic faith on the part of the author, merely lent weight to charges of cultural studies' shaky scholarly grounding...
...In some ways Rorty became a man of letters and, though he debunked the special status of philosophy, he claimed a distinctive status for criticism...
...But through the 1970s he underwent a metamorphosis, investigating continental figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, who were not considered seriously in the analytic tradition, and returning to the American pragmatists, especially John Dewey, who were considered quaint or outmoded...
...Rorty probably had more influence on those who did "advanced literary theory" than on those in his home discipline, philosophy, and by the 1980s was taken as an exemplar of postmodern theory in his debunking of "foundational" concepts...
...They suggest a far-reaching contract, as he describes it in Nice Work: "In return for ceding freedom of movement to workers...
...These gave Ross a reputation as a purveyor of cultural studies, a movement that had appeared in Britain in the 1970s but only gained a toehold on these shores around 1990...
...His 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature announced Rorty's pragmatist turn, arguing that philosophy had been misguided in creating a theory of mind based on reflection...
...It is often remarked that the sixties generation revolutionized academe, but it was an earlier generation that first reaped the benefits of enhanced intellectual leisure and created most of the new discourse of criticism, theory, and philosophy...
...Ross had started in a standard way for an English professor, as a critic of modern poetry...
...Rather, they benefited from what I've called the welfare state university, when there was relatively opulent funding for research as well as tuition...
...according to new Modern Language Association statistics over 67 percent in English...
...the current generation has been squeezed between the poles of overwork and underemployment...
...Ross was quickly taken up as a representative of his academic generation, as it migrated from literary to cultural studies through the 1990s...
...Ross investigates two trends in particular...
...He exemplifies one way contemporary critics might organically deal with politics in their work...
...Goodman was trained in literature and his dissertation, subsequently published in 1954 as The Structure of Literature, bore the theoretical stamp of the so-called Chicago Critics, prominent at mid-century...
...The postwar generation was golden, but it grew under golden conditions...
...I was also a socialist, a dues-paying member of the party of Debs and worked with Committees of Correspondence to do things like protest the first Gulf War or ally with janitors in their struggle to organize...
...The first is the way that the workplace has been reconfigured in more flexible ways, celebrated in books like Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class that promote the freedom and progressive nature of the new knowledge industries...
...He took to task a young Princeton professor, Andrew Ross, finding him guilty of celebrating popular culture indiscriminately, embracing postmodern theory rather than engaging with the concrete conditions of the downtrodden, and switching "attention from electoral to cultural politics...
...In the last chapter, Ross criticizes the New York Intellectuals for their disconnection from popular concerns, citing James Rorty among a group of more well-known names...
...His move in 1982 from Princeton, where he was a mainstay of the philosophy department, to the University of Virginia as an at-large professor of the humanities symbolized his evolution...
...They were fast-tracked into a booming academic world...
...With heightened competition for jobs, there has been a speed-up of publications and a general ethos of pressure and insecurity rather than leisurely reflection...
...No Respect is more about intellectual positions toward popular culture than popular culture itself, and its central argument is a correction of intellectuals who typically assume a "legislative posture in the name of the popular," seeing it as what Rorty calls "schlock...
...This genre is often still called 'literary criticism.'" That is why he singled out literature professors in particular in "Intellectuals in Politics," rather than philosophy or sociology or political science professors...
...In place of philosophy providing Truth, literature provided inspiration...
...Such charges were not entirely new, but Rorty went an extra step and named names...
...The contest, then, was not only over the importance of culture but over the legacy of the New York Intellectuals...
...Over the last decade, Ross has come to focus especially on labor, beginning with his participation in the anti-sweatshop movement, for which he edited the collection No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers (1997), and in the academic labor movement...
...As he observes in a 1996 essay, "Cultural Studies and the Challenge of Science," the funding and development of fighter planes (and also commercial aviation) derive from social institutions, public policy, and political decisions, not objective, scientific ones...
...Like Rorty, Michaels has attacked the focus on cultural or identity politics at the expense of class, but his argument does not arise from his connection to any actual political group...
...While one cannot ascribe his shift to Rorty's advice, in a recent essay, "The Case for Scholarly Reporting," Ross recounts retraining himself to listen to people...
...A better distinction might be between abstract and practical politics...
...Ross's career did not proceed on a predictable track, and his work is unusually prolific and varied...
...Academics probably tend toward the culturally liberal segment of the spectrum, typical of the professional-managerial class, although it's questionable whether they are socially liberal—consider that the largest major is now business, with nearly a quarter of all students, so progressively more academics teach in that...
...Ross's departure from literary studies was confirmed by his move to the American Studies department at New York University in 1993, and later to help found a Department of Social and Cultural Analysis there...
...Gross cites several letters from Rorty's parents commenting on his absorption in his academic career...
...The recent work of Walter Benn Michaels exhibits a similar tendency...
...He was typical of his generation, too, insofar as he attained academic reputation and position on relatively few publications...
...controversies that have no interest to anyone outside the philosophical profession" and those that build a new vocabulary "to make us happier, freer, and more flexible...
...It was not a profile of model figures but something of a jeremiad, castigating American intellectuals for their disconnection from politics and standing by while the rich ripped off the poor...
...instead they were intent on internecine pursuits like "advanced literary theory...
...After attending the University of Chicago (B.A., 1950...
...This creates a precarious way of life for workers, even previously secure professional workers, and Ross predicts that it augurs the future of work, when most jobs will be short-term and people will have many through their lives...
...To that end, we should keep in mind both clauses of Goodman's title "Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals...
...Rorty's generation was the one that produced "advanced literary theory...
...With the exception of "The Mental Labor Problem," it is hard to find a signature essay that encapsulates his view or crystallizes his style...
...His gravitation toward literature culminated in his 1989 book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which argued for the power of narrative over logic to deal with problems such as human suffering and found models in writers like George Orwell...
...He suggests a new image of the academic-intellectual, one who can do it all...
...Goodman, like Ross, was responsive to the pulse of his time and inordinately productive, writing a range of literary, cultural, and social criticism, as well as fiction and poetry...
...Ross's work on science figured in a later chapter of the culture wars when, in the mid-1990s, he was attacked because of his editing a special issue of the journal Social Text on the role of science...
...Though he went against the grain of philosophy, he was in many ways typical of his academic generation, buoyed on the rich waters of the postwar university...
...For No-Collar, Ross set up shop at two high-tech companies in New York for a year and a half, and for Fast Boat to China he studied Mandarin and moved to China for a year...
...Jeffrey J. Williams is an editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2nd ed., 2010) and was editor of the minnesota review from 1992 to 2010...
...He had also gained a good bit of celebrity—including a picture in the New York Times Magazine...
...It is a paradox that most people who come to be seen as examples of a discipline or critical movement are anomalies...
...I think that we need to turn more to questions of policy...
...1958...
...Ross argues instead that intellectuals should "learn from the forms and discourses of the popular...
...For Rorty, it should instead present useful "redescriptions...
...Ross pointed out the relevance of culture to politics (cultural factors like gender and race help "explain how structures of wealth and power are maintained and reproduced from day to day") and noted Rorty's skewed depiction of his academic work (about his representing literary theory, he noted, "I am not Rorty's man...
...That assumed a metaphysical foundation— that there was a core Truth that philosophy attempted to divine...
...To this genealogy Rorty added, nearer to our time, the New York Intellectuals, and he maintained a high regard for figures like Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe, whose criticism balanced literary, moral, and political reflection...
...The strength of Rorty's model is his incisive clarity...
...Philosophy was not systematic but an ongoing conversation, and its purpose was not to reveal Truth but to be edifying...
...Rorty's connection to the New York Intellectuals explains some of the heightened charge of "Intellectuals in Politics...
...The early 1990s were the height of the culture wars, and the exchange played out the left version of them, along the fault lines of traditional versus cultural or identity politics...
...The day the issue came out, the article was exposed as a hoax, which spurred a stream of attacks on the vacuity of postmodern theory and cultural studies...
...But he himself, born in the thirties and whisked to college in 1946 at the age of fifteen, was very much an academic product, and his authority came not from his political but from his philosophical work...
...The dominant current was analytic, focused on technical issues, largely of language, and on fields like formal logic rather than large existential questions or the history of philosophy, as those in the discipline strove for the precision of a science...
...Seeing philosophy this way prompted Rorty to become more of a historicist, reworking the "conversation" of philosophy, and to find a new value in literature...
...It didn't hurt that he was young and hip, wore a few earrings, and lived in New York...
...His route was not the standard one through the Ivies or Oxbridge (Aberdeen, M.A., 1978...
...Coming of professional age during the 1980s, it encountered the post-welfare state university—reduced state and federal funding, greater focus on private money, higher tuitions and unprecedented student debt, and dwindling full-time professorial jobs...
...In my view, that is the weakness of the model Rorty represents...
...The Spring 1992 issue of Dissent carried a response from Ross and a rejoinder by Rorty...
...That migration, though it brought along the vocabulary of theory, was also a departure from the "advanced literary theory" that had dominated literary studies in the 1970s and early 1980s...
...Although I have little patience, like Rorty, for much academic posturing, academic politics is not a world apart, and particularly since the 1990s, it is frequently union politics...
...ARTICLES How to Be an Intellectual The Cases of Richard Rorty and Andrew Ross JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS In the Fall 1991 issue of Dissent, Richard Rorty published an essay called "Intellectuals in Politics...
...Eliot to John Ashbery through the lens of psychoanalytic theory...
...Goodman represents an alternative strand of the New York line, less focused on high culture and more oriented toward social commentary and activism...
...To both I would add the imperative of practical proposals...
...But Goodman turned to a range of social and cultural issues, most notably in Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society and in collections like Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals...
...But Ross has found a way to bridge those spheres, and his "scholarly reporting" brings criticism down from the heights of theory to everyday experience...
...This is good advice, but in fact many academics had already done that during the 1990s, when they focused on academic labor...
...Curiously, he observes that "no-collar employees emulate the work mentality and flexible schedules of disinterested research academics," or, as he shows in an influential essay included in Low Pay, "The Mental Labor Problem," of artists and musicians...
...These books depart from the usual purview of cultural studies to more sociological terrain, but they emphasize the culture of work and how it has changed...
...Gone is the relaxed, privileged way of life, whereby one got a job because one's adviser made a phone call, and one received tenure on the basis of two or three articles and had a decade to mull over a book...
...Hired to teach theory, I might have been sent from central casting to fit Rorty's bill...
...rather, it is literally an academic argument, over terminology and research trends, rather than an argument about policy or a report on working class experience...
...They were often trained at elite universities, and they adopted the pro-American liberalism of the fifties without the tendrils of a communist past...
...They had given up on ordinary politics...
...In the larger media sphere, he cited a Newsweek editor, Larry Martz, but it was in the academic sphere that he himself inhabited that he drew blood...
...It has affinities with investigative journalism and ethnography...
...Rorty's scheme placed me in something called "the academic Left...
...But, even though he was in his mid-thirties, he had published five books and written on a wide range of topics, many of them outside the traditional bandwidth of literary studies...
...He has also regularly made forays to public venues, writing for the Nation and producing a column for Artforum through the 1990s...
...The postwar years produced a new cohort of intellectuals...
...Rorty conceded that culture does have political relevance, but observed that the exchange demonstrated a "fairly sharp generational difference...
...From Rorty we can take his style and focus, the way he has of boiling points down to a graspable distinction...
...In a hyper-specialized time, he crafted a pragmatic style that speaks to those outside the quadrants of a discipline and offers conversational distinctions with which to understand obscure concepts and disparate traditions...
...And has Ross borne out or absolved himself of Rorty's charges...
...In contemporary criticism we are typically trained to spot the error or the contradiction in a writer's thought...
...Reduction is often derided in contemporary criticism and complication praised, but Rorty's gift was his ability to reduce complicated issues to useable, conversational distinctions, like "rich and poor...
...The second trend is the globalization of labor, celebrated in books like Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which promotes its inevitability as well as its modernizing effects...
...Ironically, a good part of his reputation derived from his walking away from philosophy or at least from the mainstream of philosophy departments in the postwar era...
...One of the articles he accepted was a postmodern account of physics, claiming, among other things, that gravity is a social construction...
...And though he eschewed the top-down nature of foundational thinking, Rorty's rhetoric in "Intellectuals in Politics" is that of the bully pulpit—leading by upbraiding rather than by example...
...Ross pitched his tent with Williams rather than the Arnoldian stance of the New York Intellectuals...
...Department of Education...
...In a sequence of books, including No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs (2003), Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor (2004), Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai (2006), and Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times (2009), he has reported on the high tech workplace and the effects of globalization...
...The difference is that academic jobs have been casualized: now, a majority of those teaching are part time (over 50 percent in 2007 according to the U.S...
...But Ross quickly left literary studies behind, moving on to write about intellectuals, technology, ecology, and other topics, in a string of books including No Respect, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (1991), The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (1994), and Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice (1998), and a stream of articles...
...He has crafted a way to bridge the academic and the everyday, using his scholarship to speak to issues in the world...
...Given his passing in 2007, this is a fitting moment to take stock of how Rorty fashioned himself first as an academic philosopher and then as a public intellectual...
...As a fan of George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," I would ban "academic Left" from good English...
...A key difference with the newer generation was its position on the Cold War, which older intellectuals thought was a good war, whereas younger ones did not...
...To be an academic no longer means a life of leisure and contemplation but one of compulsory hyper-productivity...
...Even with the increasing publication expectations of the current university, his seventeen books (ten are monographs, the rest edited collections) in two decades after graduate school are extraordinary...
...In 1991 Andrew Ross was an untenured assistant professor...
...Kent, Ph.D., 1984), and he held a visiting position at Illinois State University before landing a more prestigious berth at Princeton in 1985...
...he had no practical proposals...
...But it is hard to separate his defense of patriotism from the views that gave credence to the past decade's American wars...
...It seems an obvious category error: one might be of the socialist Left, or the liberal Left, or the Maoist Left, but I know of no Academic Party that might generate political positions...
...Along with the culture wars, the 1990s also saw the celebration of the figure of the public intellectual...
...And, unlike Rorty's style, which has a crisp brevity, Ross's style can be winding rather than direct...
...M.A., 1952), he went to Yale for his Ph.D...
...As Neil Gross shows in his recent biographical study, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (2008), Rorty deliberately set out to refashion himself from the late 1970s on...
...Rorty typically held *In his reconsideration of Rorty in the Winter 2010 issue, Richard Wolin focuses on two books, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Achieving our Country, whereas I see Rorty's progress occurring in a broader frame and his shift to politics occurring more markedly with Contingency...
...Ross's generation has experienced markedly different conditions than those of the postwar era...
...Though taken as representing cultural studies, he has moved across various fields, most recently urban and labor studies...
...Jeremiads occasionally have their use, but I favor examples like Adolph Reed's proposal for free tuition at public universities, made in these pages in Fall 2001 ("A GI Bill for Everybody...
...Although Rorty had a gift for crisp discriminations, his dividing real and academic politics seemed an obvious straw man...
...In one of his essays in Dissent, and to my mind his most elegant political essay, "Back to Class Politics," Rorty tells the heroic story of the American labor movement in the twentieth century, its split with intellectuals in the sixties, and urges "academics to get back into the class struggle...
...But he wasn't quite right...
...The price of such a disposition, though, is sometimes durability, and that is a weakness of the model Ross represents...
...It's also seen as an embrace of the popular, but Ross's stance toward the popular has been more analytical than fanlike...
...Rorty typically argued in a matter-of-fact, unruffled tone (in person, his signature gesture was the shrug), but part of his crossness, I would speculate, was because Ross's book No Respect hit close to home...
...What models of the intellectual does each present...
...I reported on recent books on academic labor in the Fall 2009 issue of Dissent...
...In their prag-matist habit, they do not describe a utopia for which to strive or an absolute standard from which to measure...
...But I think that problems are for solving, and I prefer criticism that is useful...
...Rorty was right to say that he and Ross represented different intellectual generations, a difference that has become clearer in the years since 1992...
...Other than a brief ellipsis in the military in 1957-1958 (he was assigned to the signal corps and evidently bored), he was on the academic fast track, teaching and earning tenure at Princeton...
...The exchange, like most such exchanges, probably served to entrench each side rather than persuade the other, but it also brought to center stage two of the more prominent humanities intellectuals of the last two decades...
...It was the first time I'd heard the phrase, and it has always mystified me...
...Ross, to his credit, has been involved in these strikes, supporting in various ways the Yale and the NYU graduate students, with whom he co-edited the 2008 collection The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace...
...Rorty indicted two groups in particular, journalists and literature professors...
...I was a new literature professor, in my second year at an outpost of the North Carolina university system...
...The strength of Ross's model is the original way he has fashioned a criticism that engages concrete social issues and problems...
...they see it from the perspective of their training and job search, when graduate students were ushered into decent jobs and had not yet become fodder for the part-time mill...
...out the better hope of American democracy, which led to one of his most controversial statements in the late 1990s, when he scolded American intellectuals for not being patriotic in a New York Times op-ed (reprinted in Achieving Our Country...
...Much of the activism has centered on the graduate student union movement, notably the Yale strike in 1995-1996 and more recent strikes, such as at NYU in 2005...
...From Ross we can take his keen sense of observation and his critical engagement with people on the ground...
...Cultural studies is often seen as synonymous with popular culture, but much of Ross's early work focused on science and technology rather than, say, television and videos...
...It is a kind of democratic argument, and follows Raymond Williams's redefinition of culture as "a whole way of life" rather than the rarefied sense of "the best that has been known and thought...
...By the late 1980s and through the 1990s, he embraced a role as a public intellectual, with pieces in the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and Dissent (including "Education without Dogma" [Spring 1989], "Campaigns and Movements" [Winter 1995], and "Back to Class Politics" [Winter 1997], as well as "Intellectuals in Politics...
...This latter phase of Ross's work crystallizes a distinctive blend of social and cultural criticism that he calls "scholarly reporting...
...His historical perspective prompted a steady stream of essays looking at figures from both Anglo-American and continental philosophy, many of them gathered in his 1982 Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980) and the four volumes of his Philosophical Papers (1991-2007...
...The philosopher was reborn.* Rorty's writings on politics have a refreshingly straightforward stance and plainspoken style, boiling down an issue to its basic terms, like the rich "ripping us off...
...It is often remarked that the supply of Ph.D.s has outstripped demand, but that's a shibboleth: enrollments of students have continued to increase at a relatively constant rate, and faculty has expanded...
...They were not like the earlier and scrappier generation of New York Intellectuals, who "argued the world" in the legendary lunchroom of City College, often held a variety of jobs in journalism and elsewhere before landing in academe, and traveled the fraught path of 1930s left politics...
...This switch, in Rorty's eyes, was characteristic of the "contemporary academic left" and "represents attitudes that are widespread in American literature departments...
...Many of its leading members, such as Harold Bloom, Fredric Jameson, and Stanley Fish, were born in the 1930s and whisked through academe in similar ways...
...He also published Achieving Our Country (1998), praising American democracy and urging intellectuals to take more pride in their country, and a trade paperback collection of essays, Philosophy and Social Hope (1999...
...They had a special obligation, conferred by this tradition, to provide a moral perspective on politics...
...His choice of the New York Intellectuals was something of a return, since his parents had frequented left circles in New York: his father, James Rorty, a founding editor of New Masses, was involved in Communist Party and Trotskyite politics in the early thirties...
...Academic work sometimes seems schizophrenic, a sphere apart from politics or real world concerns...
...He charged that journalists failed the tradition of Lincoln Steffens by not properly educating the electorate and that literature professors failed to "remind voters of their ideals...
...Ross provides a concrete description of labor, but he too doesn't focus on practical proposals...
...These conditions have spurred a wave of activism as well as critical analysis of "academic labor...
...Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity was also Rorty's bid to become more of a public figure, commenting on our common lot...
...His father was also a poet, which might explain some of Rorty's residual regard for literature, as he suggested in an essay in Poetry magazine before he died...
...rather, they give useful or inspirational examples...
...In a late essay, he remarks that the customary distinction between analytic and continental philosophy is the wrong one...
...His first book, The Failure of Modernism: Symptoms of American Poetry (1986) offers interpretations of major poets from T.S...
...In "Intellectuals in Politics" Rorty identifies with the Old Left, those who cut their political teeth in the thirties and had a palpable sense of how the rich rip off the poor...
...He gives it this estimable genealogy in "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture" (collected in Consequences of Pragmatism): "Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macaulay and Carlyle and Emerson, a kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor episte-mology, nor social prophecy, but all these things mingled into a new genre...
...Scottish-born, he settled in the United States in 1980 because of Margaret Thatcher's cutbacks to higher education...
...His side represented the Old Left and people like "Lionel Trilling, John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Sidney Hook, and Daniel Bell"—in other words, the New York Intellectuals and what Rorty took as the traditional readership of Dissent...
...By the early 1990s, Richard Rorty was widely regarded as the leading American philosopher...
...Moreover, the attribution of an "academic Left" played into the hands of arch-conservatives of the time, confirming their frequently revived anthem of "God and Man at Yale...
...Thus, it was odd that Rorty, himself subject to many attacks on his postmodern or relativist positions, would attack someone like Ross, with whom, on paper, he would otherwise be allied (he notes that he and Ross would likely vote the same on many issues...
...Especially over the last decade, Ross has become a kind of social reporter...
...Even though Ross began by criticizing the New York Intellectuals, he has more in common with them than one might expect...
...He has written on student loan debt and policies to solve it in past issues, and he regularly contributes to Dissents blog, Arguing the World...
...It is also a good time to consider Ross's career, because he was only starting out in 1991 but has subsequently built a sizeable body of work...
...You don't have to be tied to a desk but can do your work in a coffeehouse any time you want...
...it should be between analytic and conversational philosophy, or between "scholasticism...
...After doing research in China for a year, Ross found it "a much more insidious process, especially for employees who are expected to collude in the effort to upload the contents of their brains...
...The contribution that he's most known for is reinserting pragmatism in the anthology of philosophy, but perhaps his most striking intellectual contribution is his style...
...One of the lessons I learned in the New South was that participating in politics is humble rather than heroic...
...I have a distinct memory of reading "Intellectuals in Politics" when it first appeared, because it seemed Rorty was talking about me...
...While Rorty tacked toward Lionel Trilling's model of the liberal literary critic and his tone of moral seriousness, Ross has tacked toward less buttoned up and more radical figures like Paul Goodman or C. Wright Mills...
...What was usually meant by the term, though, was not someone like Irving Howe or Michael Harrington, whose statements arose from a long engagement in political work, but rather an academic who made a foray to the public sphere...
...Who would claim the latter, effectively saying she did fake politics...
...Though he had yet to publish a monograph, in 1967 he cemented his reputation with an influential anthology, The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method...
...In his range and some of his concerns he resembles Goodman...
...Doing graduate work and taking his first academic job in the 1950s, Rorty earned a reputation in analytic philosophy with a handful of articles on distinctions like the mind-body problem...
...So-called "knowledge transfer" allows outsourcing, thus driving down wages and making jobs inherently insecure...
...Rorty had walked away from this heritage while building his academic career, but his later eschewal of philosophy was a kind of prodigal's return...
...It is the downside of reporting...
...This has changed the experience of working as an academic...
...He resisted the mire of academic qualification and quibble, and he reinfused intellectual conversation with a colloquial American idiom...
...employers can claim ownership of ideas that germinate in the most free, and downtime, moments of their employees' lives...
...Those of the earlier generation, like Rorty, have difficulty recognizing academe as a site of labor...
...Ross is a good deal less sanguine, noting how these new arrangements allow work to permeate all your time...
...Rorty took the high ground...
...I return to it now not to resuscitate those quarrels, but to look at Rorty and Ross and their respective careers...
...This is consistent with his view in No Respect that intellectuals should attend to the popular, but it departs from his earlier work in focusing less on academic argument and engaging more directly the actual experience of those working...
...To put it more contentiously, if Rorty was throwing stones, what kind of house did he live in...
...We pounce on what we find "problematic...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
