" I can summarize my attempt to split the difference between Lyotard and Habermas by saying that this Deweyan attempt to make concrete concerns with the daily problems of one’s community -social engineering- the substitute for traditional religion seems to me to embody Lyotard’s postmodernist “incredulity towards metanarratives” while dispensing with the assumption that the intellectual has a mission to be avant-garde, to escape the rules and practices and institutions which have been transmitted to her in favor of something which will make possible “authentic criticism.” Lyotard unfortunate retains one of the Left’s silliest ideas -that escaping from such institutions is automatically a good thing, because it insures that one will not be “used” by the evil forces which have “co-opted” these institutions. Leftism of this sort necessarily devalues consensus and communication, for insofar as the intellectual remains able to talk to people outside of the avant-garde she “compromises” herself. Lyotard exalts the “sublime” and argues that Habermas’ hope that the arts might serve to “explore a living historical situation” and to “bridge the gap between cognitive, ethical and political discourses,” shows that Habermas has only an “aesthetic of the beautiful”. On the view I am suggesting, one should see the quest for the sublime, the attempt (in Lyotard’s words) to “present the fact that the unpresentable exists,” as one of the prettier unforced blue flowers of bourgeois culture. But this quest is wildly irrelevant to the attempt at communicative consensus which is the vital force which drives that culture.
More generally, one should see the intellectual qua intellectual as having a special, idiosyncratic need -a need for the ineffable, the sublime, a need to go beyond the limits, a need to use words which are not part of anybody’s language game, any social institution." -from Rorty’s article “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” in Essays on Heidegger and Others
First of all, guys, there is a lot here already in the quote. And I mainly post the whole thing above in order to have what I’m going to post and bounce off of to have it readily available. So it could get a lot longer. And I apologize for that ahead of time.
Secondly, this pretty much encapsulates why Rorty’s pragmatism is so dear to my heart while also justifying why I include him in my holy triad along with Deleuze and Žižek. And I would start with:
“More generally, one should see the intellectual qua intellectual as having a special, idiosyncratic need -a need for the ineffable, the sublime, a need to go beyond the limits, a need to use words which are not part of anybody’s language game, any social institution."
I have always described that “idiosyncratic need” as “depth, intensity, and lightness of touch”. There was another French term offered to me via an interview of the actor John Lithgow stolen from ballet: that which meant lifting oneself into pure air –that which is expressed in the pirouette. But, ultimately, what it comes down to is the very rock star approach to intellectualism (via philosophy (that Deleuze had to offer. Hence: my inclusion of him in my holy triad w/ Rorty in that Rorty (while maintaining a distance from Deleuze’s avant-garde approach (showed a knowledgeable respect for it in very sharp contrast to Sokal’s cheap trick and attack on thinkers like Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault, and other contemporary continental thinkers.
That said, Rorty’s main point here is a very democratic one: that it is going to take a lot of different people dedicated to a lot of different methods for different reasons to fix this: those who turn to the avant-garde in order to change sensibilities (see Lyotard (as well those who choose to accept grand narratives for the sake of social justice: see Habermas.
It comes down to Rorty’s repeated insistence that language is basically a tool with which we achieve desired effects. And under this model, we can see Lyotard’s embrace of the avant-garde and sublime as useful as Habermas’ search for a solid foundation for a liberal politics.