Locating Rorty: Feminism and Poststructuralism, Experience and Language

many contemporary pragmatists reject Richard Rorty’s views because they think he neglects an important, if not pivotal, aspect of the classical pragmatists’ thought: experience. His claim that Dewey’s metaphysics of experience unwittingly perpetuates foundationalism has been met with both incredulity and frustration among contemporary scholars who are interested in revitalizing Dewey’s work. Similarly, one of the main reasons feminists have offered for their hesitance to ally themselves with the neo-pragmatists, focusing their efforts instead on the allegiances to be forged between and the resources to be borrowed from the classical pragmatists, is the former’s neglect of experience. For example, in Pragmatism and Feminism, Charlene Haddock Seigfried rejects Rorty’s work because she thinks it “unacceptably narrows the resources pragmatism has to offer feminist theory” (5).¹ In this paper, I explore pragmatist and feminist tendencies to reject Rorty’s views because of his “linguistic pragmatism” by comparing the experience-language debate among pragmatists with feminist debates about poststructuralism.² Viewing the former debate through the lens of the latter reveals that Rorty’s views are often misconstrued. This is because feminists and pragmatists alike focus too much on Rorty’s similarities with poststructuralism, rather than his similarities with pragmatism. Or, to put it another way, both feminists and pragmatists tend to neglect Rorty’s later cultural-political work, which is where the question of experience is raised again most forcefully. By bringing the later political work into view, we can see that Rorty takes what I call a “combinatory approach” similar to the combinatory approach taken by some feminists in response to poststructuralism.

The specific debate that I will use as a lens to explore the experience-language debate revolves around the work of historian Joan W. Scott, who takes a poststructuralist approach to the discipline of history. Kathleen Canning, in her 1994 essay “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” helpfully outlines three typical feminist responses to the poststructuralist position developed and defended by Scott. The first response is to embrace poststructuralism as a source of valuable tools useful for sidestepping the problems of essentialism that have plagued feminist efforts. The second is to reject poststructuralism outright as something that undermines the political efficacy of feminism. The third is to attempt to show that feminism and poststructuralism each have valuable tools that can be used to compensate for the theoretical deficiencies or shortcomings in the other. In the sections that follow, I review each of these positions in order to relate them to positions taken up by pragmatists involved in the experience-language debate. After these reflections, I will conclude with some thoughts about how seeing the debate through this feminist lens helps us, first, to categorize Rorty’s position more accurately, and second, to find reason to move beyond the experience-language debate in pragmatism.

Feminism and Poststructuralism

In “The Evidence of Experience” (1991), Scott interrogates the evidential role of experience as it appears in the work of historians who seek to uncover the stories of the overlooked other in conventional histories. Such historians of difference have presented their project as “an enlargement of the picture, a correction to oversights resulting from inaccurate or incomplete vision” (Scott 776).³ Scott worries that the legitimacy of such historians’ appeals to experience as evidence shores up the “epistemological frame of orthodox history” rather than criticizing it (777). In other words, historians of difference entrench the traditional epistemological frame by assuming that experience—in this case, the experience of the overlooked other—acts as evidence for a more complete or accurate historical narrative. The “difference” in which such historians are interested—how it arises and is sustained—becomes a self-evident given or the material out of which oppositional narratives are constructed, rather than an object of critical interrogation. Scott contends that, if the historian of difference’s project is simply to lay bare the hidden or silenced stories of the overlooked other, then it does not go far enough to criticize the ideological structures that give rise to the identity categories that shape the experiences of differently situated others...