“Redescription often humiliates”

Making my way through Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (1989), I found myself startled by this passage:

[T]he best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. Consider what happens when a child’s precious possessions — the little things around which he weaves fantasies that make him a little different from all other children — are redescribed as “trash,” and thrown away. Or consider what happens when these possessions are made to look ridiculous alongside the possessions of another, richer, child. Something like that presumably happens to a primitive culture when it is conquered by a more advanced one. The same sort of thing sometimes happens to nonintellectuals in the presence of intellectuals. All these are milder forms of what happened [in Nineteen Eighty-Four ] to Winston Smith when he was arrested: They broke his paperweight and punched Julia in the belly, thus initiating the process of making him describe himself in O’Brien’s terms rather than his own. The redescribing ironist, by threatening one’s final vocabulary, and thus one’s ability to make sense of oneself in one’s own terms rather than hers, suggests that one’s self and one’s world are futile, obsolete, powerless. Redescription often humiliates.

A little context:

Rorty defines the ironist as someone who fulfills these conditions:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

“Final vocabulary” is Rorty’s term for a set of words that justify one’s actions, belief, and life. The ironist understands that her final vocabulary is contingent, subject to revision, that it has no claim to some ultimate truth about what is “out there.” Rorty says that ironism results from an “awareness of the power of redescription,” an awareness that one’s sense of things could very well be different. But, he adds, “most people do not want to be redescribed.”

The fleeting glimpse of humiliation and loss in childhood in the passage above appears eighty-nine pages into the book, with nothing remotely like it before or (at least thus far) after. I wonder if it might have been drawn from Rorty’s life. Here’s Rorty talking about his childhood.

Related reading
A handful of OCA Richard Rorty posts (Pinboard)