Dylan as a Rortian: Bob Dylan, Richard Rorty, Postmodernism, and Political Skepticism

Bob Dylan was never really the leftist he was thought to be. He has always been an evasive, protean figure, like a true postmodernist should be. This brings him in the vicinity of Richard Rorty, who can be called “a postmodernist thinker.” Like Rorty, Dylan is a liberal ironist and a strong poet who recreates vocabularies. Like Rorty, he is a political skeptic, someone who is wary of the grand narratives of politics. But both men are/were constructive skeptics; they did not reject politics altogether but took now and then a firm stand on given, well-defined political issues. Just like Rorty, Dylan is skeptical of the very idea of truth, especially the notion of political truth. But Rorty wanted to keep the private and the public clearly separated. Dylan blurs the distinction between the private and the public in his songs. Further, he uses artistic means to help do away with the Left-Right-dichotomy and recreate our political vocabulary: to create a vocabulary free of any rigid dichotomies, including those between the Left and Right. Had he used arguments instead of singing, talking in a provocative way, and using provocative body language, Dylan might have been stuck in the old vocabulary. Artistic means are often the best tools we have for recreating political vocabularies, showing the political world in new, fresh manner.

Being a postmodernist means mixing the high brow and the low brow, cultivating multiple selves, rejecting the idea of personal authenticity, and maintaining that truth and knowledge are somehow human creations and relative to human purposes/different cultures. Further, it consists in incredulity toward the idea of progress and lack of belief in reason, plus taking generally a skeptical stance, not least toward political ideologies.¹ Indeed, the arch-postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”² (“metanarratives” refers to ideological systems and suchlike).

The pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty fitted the postmodern bill by and large nicely. Thus, he thought that we could recreate our selfhood by inventing new vocabularies; there is no such thing as an authentic self in his book.³ Further, he had a deflationary theory of truth; only sentences can be true or false, sentences are parts of languages, and languages are human creations. Therefore, truth is, in a way, a human creation but constrained by reality; reality can cause our sentences to be true or untrue but not determine truth any further than that. In light of this, it does not make any sense to say that truth consists in correspondence to reality.⁴

Now, Bob Dylan might not share this deflationary view of truth, but he certainly does not think that truth is up for grabs; he says in a cycle of poems, written in the mid-1960s, “I know no answer an’ no truth.”⁵ Thus, Dylan takes a skeptical stance. Further, he mixes the highbrow with the lowbrow in a postmodernist manner. He mixes folk and rock music with modernist lyrics, for instance, in the song “Mr. Tambourine Man.”⁶ And in his lyrics, he often alludes to both highbrow and lowbrow phenomena in the same breath, for instance, Ezra Pound and the Phantom of the Opera in the song “Desolation Row.”⁷

Sonja Dierks has a point when she says that Dylan often sings as if he is not really present. He has many voices, and they are like masks; there is no authentic voice or self behind the masks.⁸ Dylan himself hinted at his playing the role of “Bob Dylan” in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1980.⁹ This adds more support to the contention that Dylan is a postmodernist who has (or pretends to have) multiple selves and lacks authenticity. No wonder that the 2007 movie about him is called I’m Not There.

Dylan is a protean person, an ever-changing creature, who has been recreating himself throughout his career: changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, being for a while a folk hero who sang like a hillbilly, then becoming a rock...