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eveal the degree to which our human connections with others beyond
our borders are exposed.
Consubstantiation posited by Burke is thus a rhetorical procedure
prior to establishing what Rorty calls a “contingent community,” a
community of individuals united by “metaphor” and “self-creation”
connected imaginatively through language and representation. Like
Nietzsche, Rorty is also skeptical toward absolute claims to truth and a
priori moral obligations from on high, the notion that we as sovereign
individuals are beholden to our countries and communities first than to
ourselves. In fact, what Rorty locates and praises in Nietzsche (among
other, modernist literary figures) is his role as an “ironist,” his lyrical
skepticism, rather than his legacy as a metaphysician. Whereas the
metaphysician advances through logical argumentation and scientific
inference, the ironist proceeds through “redescription,” believing that the
“unit of persuasion to be a vocabulary rather than a proposition” (Rorty
78). Successful rhetors do not persuade by advancing stronger arguments
but by providing their listeners and readers with larger conceptual
vocabularies and filling their imaginative repertoires so that difference is
multiplied rather than synthesized, expected rather than opposed.
How might this be useful in achieving a cosmopolitan ethic? Again,
as Rorty explains: “Ironists specialize in redescribing ranges of objects or
events in partially neologistic jargon, in hopes of inciting people to adopt
and extend that logic” (78). Imagine, if you will, popular comedians like
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and their “mock” news reports that not
only satirizes politics and issues of the day but redescribes these issues and
events ironically. Such redescription and rhetorical performances extends
a degree of critical meta-awareness to their audience through a shared
skepticism toward the essentialist and reductionist analyses of current
events offered by mainstream news organizations. Skepticism toward the
news media, rhetoricized through irony and satire, is just one example of
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how a contingent “self-created” community of globally situated strangers
can form spontaneously and imaginatively, consubstantiated through
counter-identifications against official gatekeeping institutions. The
Rortyian ironist, and the identifications she provokes in her audience, also
aligns with Burke’s definition of “humble” or “true irony” as one of the
“four master tropes” that motivate discourse. According to Burke, “True
irony, humble irony, is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with
the enemy, as one needs him, one is indebted to him, is not merely outside
him as an observer, but contains within, being consubstantial with him”
(514). In a sophistic sense, the advantages of a global network media
is both the disease and the cure for a cosmopolitan worldview, since,
as it tends to initially create divisions in the world, it also allows us to
counter-identify with these divisions through irony and satire, permitting
listeners or viewers to come together as an impromptu critical discourse
community of insiders who “get” the joke, while those outside—power
and authority—remain clueless.
Some have criticized Rorty’s notion that the only basis for truth and
forming a contingent community is through “free and open encounters”
between citizens unyoked by tradition, custom, and essentialist definitions
(68). Skeptics might point to 9/11 and its aftermath as proof of all that can
go wrong by promoting such “free and open encounters.” But as Appiah
notes, it is not necessarily a clash over values where conflict necessarily
arises but the interpretation, by different communities, of those self-same
values. Conflict arises, according to Appiah, when different groups of
people essentially agree upon the same values but interpret or appraise
these values differently. Appiah notes how when disagreements over the
issue of abortion occur, both sides do not appreciably disagree about
either the sanctity of life or the right women have over their own bodies
as much as they would like to think they do, but instead disagree on
where life begins and whose body is more important—in other words,
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