There are in fact only two kinds of people to whom unworldliness comes naturally: holy fools, or the arrogant and priviliged. The former do not respect the kingdom of this world and the latter are so carefully protected from its realities that they do not need to understand it in order to sruvive… The poor, the vulnerable and oppressed need to understand the mechanisms of power. Their lives depend upon that undrstanding. They are never unworldly.
– Patricia Duncker
The ethos of postmodernism, the ironism advocated by Richard Rorty, represents the most contemporary form of such unworldliness. I stumbled across the quote above in this book and it made me think back to the one occasion where I’ve lost my temper at a conference. It was an art conference where a philosophy PhD student was explaining his Rortean take on politics, which seemed stunningly oblivious to the contortions that were gripping the world in September 2010.
Apparently radicalism in contemporary circumstances involves creative acts of ‘redescription’, offering different terms in which the world can be construed so that we might ‘fuzz up’ the fault lines of contemporary politics and render the ‘final vocabularies’ of less ironic people problematic. It really pissed me off and I was far more intellectually aggressive than I’ve ever been in any other academic environment. I didn’t really understand why I got so annoyed and later, at lunch, I got chatting to him and tried to suggest that it was just an intellectual disagreement that got a bit overexcited.
Well the above passage helped me understand for the first time why this guy’s conceit pissed me off as much as it did. So I thought I’d share, if for no other reason than the pleasure of articulating it and realising retrospectively that I wasn’t just being an asshole.
Mark Carrigan 