Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty (review)

ness, as the author resorts to breathless recitations of technologies, names, exhibitions and references. The book is written in two parts. Part 1 covers chapters entitled "Technics and Art", "The Machine Age and Modernism" and ''The Electronic Era and Postmodernism". The first chapter reviews the well-known arguments about the role of photography in influencing and defining parts of the modernist agenda. Chapter 2 reviews origins of current ideas in Constructivism , the Futurists, Duchamp, the Bauhaus and Pop and Op art. Chapter 3 reviews the art and technology activities of the sixties, with emphasis on experiments in art and technology , concluding with a discussion of the cross-currents of post-modernism. Lovejoy's thesis is that emergent electronic technologies are creating the new period tentatively named Postmodernism. This analysis fails to convince me. Part 2 includes chapters on the copier, the computer as dynamic imaging tool, video and future currents; an appendix on the merging of computer and video technologies closes the text. This part of the book is its strength, being up-to-date and giving extensive coverage to artists using copier machines and to artists' books. The weakness is an emphasis on American artists, particularly New York artists. It is hard to understand why three illustrations of work by Keith Haring or others by Andy Warhol , Roy Lichtenstein and David Salle are included. These artists are surely not even footnotes in the age of electronic media. Lovejoy seems keen to find evidence for art world acceptance of the new art forms while providing all the arguments necessary to show that the art world as we know it is incompatible with artmaking transformed by the electronic media. The preface indicates that the author views this book as an extension ofWalter Benjamin's 1936 essay ''The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Unfortunately , in the haste of summarizing the broad field she has chosen, ideas are brought up but never fully developed. Margot Lovejoy is an artist herself, creating multimedia installations among other types of artwork. It is refreshing to find an artist's view of many of the developments described. Her descriptions of technological systems are also accurate. Although the sections on contemporary music are 248 Current Literature shortest, Lovejoy's determination to view the electronic arts in their totality reflects her own knowledge as an artist and as an observer of how computers and electronics are providing new connections between art forms. I recommend this book to all those trying to understand how the electronic media are shaping the arts of the future ; I look forward to Lovejoy's next book on a narrower subject and with more development of the ideas underlying this review of people, places and events in the electronic arts. CONTINGENCY, IRONY, AND SOLIDARITY by Richard Rorty. Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, NY, U.S.A., 1989. 201 pp. Paper, $10.95. ISBN: 0-52136781 -6. Reviewed by Elmer H. Duncan, Department ofPhilosophy, Baylor University, Waco, TX 76798-7247, U.S.A. Not long ago I attended a conference made up of papers presented on the 'process' philosophy of Charles Hartshorne . I confess I understood little or nothing. At conferences where papers on the philosophy of Kant are read, I understand somewhat more. Since many of my teachers were Deweyan pragmatists, I find that philosophy still more congenial. Many-perhaps most-philosophers think it possible to find some way to decide which of these metaphysical positions (process, Kantian, pragmatism , or one of many others) is correct or true. There should be some way to get beyond (above, below, or something) these varying philosophies to find a neutral (more basic, more logical?) position on the basis ofwhich the others may be judged. There should be some long-sought logical arguments to show which is right. The late Stephen C. Pepper spoke of such differing metaphysical views as 'world hypotheses'. They were to be understood as similar to ordinary scientific hypotheses, except that they were much wider in scope. The idea, again, is that these 'world hypotheses' could be evaluated in something like a scientific way. Richard Rorty's recent work is based on the conviction that all of the above is mistaken. There...