Rorty and Pynchon

[Sojourner]

At 05:01 PM 8/3/97 +0200, Thomas Eckhardt wrote:
>A few weeks ago in the German newspaper taz an interview with Richard Rorty
>was published. His argument was in favor of a "more practical, more
>economically based left-wing approach to politics". He said that the
>contemporary left-wing movement in the USA would focus too much on
>ethnic-minority- and gender-issues, affirmative action etc., which made it
>easy for people like Buchanan to dismiss them as crazy extremists, confused
>postmodernists, homosexuals and atheists. (A very strange argument, I think,
>because what is Rorty's agenda? To become friends with Buchanan?) 
>

I just scanned through the Internet to brief myself on the RailRoad man, and
I found there is quite a lot more dough to chew on than I presupposed.  For
the internet-empowered and the curious:

http://noc.pue.udlap.mx/enoweb/rorty.html

http://odin.english.udel.edu/gweight/prof/web/rorty2.html

Among which I found (in part) this in description of RR's beliefs:

1. Irrationalism - You begin by recognizing that there is a kind of
contingent character of the context of any kind of
inquiry. A consequence of this contingency is that you're not so much
"discovering" truth in inquiry, but "making" it,
using the tools given you by your frame of reference.

2. This kind of antiessentialism is applied to the language that we use for
things that philosophers try to describe in
*noncontingent* terms - that is, notions like "truth" and "language" and
"morality".


	"The sun spotlights the inner thigh of a boy sitting in shorts
	  on a doorstep, his legs swinging open, and you fall in 
	  spasms-sperm spurting in orgasm after orgasm, grinding 
	  against the stone street, neck and back break . . . now lying 
	  dead, eyes rolled back, showing slits of white that redden 
	  slowly, as blood tears form and run down the face.."

		--WSB


ps. You will in looking into RR find that he and Brian Eno are apprently
      like-minded buddies of the highest order.