I'm not sure what Mary's referring to about Rorty's "incommensurability."
I've been reading his most recent two books lately, and I just flipped
through them again to see if I could find the word - and couldn't - so a
reference might help. If I try to apply what I understand from reading him
to Helen's post, I see him as agreeing pretty emphatically with what Helen
writes here. Discursive muddles and incommensurable positions occur when
people commit to a spectative, analytic, synoptic, Grand-Theoretic posture
rather than engaging real, specific, pragmatic problems in the world. This
is true whether the Grand Theory is post-modernism, Marxism, or religion -
things Rorty calls "conversation stoppers" and thinks belong more to a
private sphere than the doing of democracy. (Actually, he only calls
religion a conversations stopper, but other places, he says that theory in
the academic left operates in a way similar to religion.) But I have a
feeling I have got Mary's point all wrong here, and I hope she has time to
set me straight. And from what I can tell, Rorty doesn't much like Lyotard,
or any assumption that would, as Helen says,
preclude the possibility of moving towards common understandings or
> good-enough understandings to enable collective action
And he's not overly fond of the idea of "always-already there."
(I guess, since many people use this list to understand and work out
theoretical positions, a certain amount of incommensurability is inevitable.
If we wanted to move toward more solidarity, it might help to take up the
solving of pragmatic problems, rather than the sorting of fine theoretical
distinctions. I think this is what Rorty would say. Sometimes, I think
I've seen Mike pushing for this, asking what difference our positions would
make in practice. I'm reminded of David Lodge's novel _Small world_, in
which a character commits the huge faux pas of standing up at an academic
literary theory conference and asking "so what if you're right? so what if
we all agree with you? then what?" This brings the conversation to a halt.
Perhaps pragmatic problem-solving is what's been attempted by some for the
past couple of weeks.)
There's a lot of prolepsis in Mike's use of the term prolepsis. I'm
understanding him to mean the way that, when we start to post here, we
construct the others as being on a certain page with us, as having some
actual or potential intersubjective positions available, and as having some
identities that make dialogue possible. Without this futuring of the
conversation, we'd always have to start at the very beginning of everything.
When things are working right, it's the opposite of incommensurability,
right? In a medium like this, though, these things often don't work right.
Prolepsis is difficult because of the range of potential intersubjective
locations and zpds. Just like in teaching, I guess.
I could have misunderstood everybody. I guess I'm just writing this to test
whether I'm actually on the same page.
----------------------------
Randy Bomer
Language Education
Indiana University
201 N. Rose Ave.
Bloomington, IN 47405
(812) 856-8293
----------
>From: "Helen Beetham" <H.Beetham@plymouth.ac.uk>
>To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Subject: RE: not the only time
>Date: Tue, Feb 29, 2000, 6:11 AM
>
> In Rorty's case (as in Lyotard's) isn't incommensurability
> something like cultural relativism? Indicating the impossibility of
> collective action which is not always-already repressive (of some un-
> emancipated uncollectivised minority)? Discursive muddle does
> not preclude the possibility of moving towards common understandings or
> good-enough understandings to enable collective action IMHO. In my very
> unsubtle understanding of activity it seems to me precisely the category
> which enables people to move beyond discursive incommensurability.
>
>>prolepsis...and also, what Rorty is referring to in his discussion of
> "incommensurability"
>
> Helen
>
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