Episode 044: Susan Dieleman

Dr. Susan Dieleman is the newly appointed and inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at the University of Lethbridge. Dr. Dieleman is a renowned authority on the philosophy of Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist whose approach to understanding society through language and solidarity has been so instrumental in the work of many scholars in the humanities.

Transcript

Cameron: My guest today is Dr. Susan Dieleman, the newly appointed and inaugural Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership at the University of Lethbridge. Dr. Dieleman is a renowned authority on the philosophy of Richard Rorty, the American pragmatist whose approach to understanding society through language and solidarity has been so instrumental in the work of many scholars in the humanities.

I got to speak to her when she visited York University for the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

​Susan, welcome to the podcast.

Susan: Thanks. It's great to be here.

Cameron: I'm so pleased I can meet with you face-to-face. You're here for the 2023 Congress at York University, and there's thousands of people all over campus at a time when the campus is usually quite empty.

Susan: It's one of my favorite things about Congress is seeing everybody coming together in these groups and chatting about the stuff we love.

Cameron: So who is Congress for? Like what, what collection of academics gathers together for congress?

Susan: Um, so we're looking at scholars in the social sciences and humanities. And so I would be in the humanities. I'm meeting here with the Canadian Philosophy Association or Philosophical Association. but I usually try and sneak out and see some talks in some of the other societies as well. So I'm hoping at some point to go see some talks at the Political Science Association, if they'll have me, maybe the Sociology Association.

And then there's also general events for everybody that they can go to as well.

Cameron: The reason that we're meeting together here, as you suggested, you were coming to Toronto anyway, but your name appeared on my radar when I, heard from York University's, media department that you as a graduate of York had been appointed to a new position at the University of Lethbridge, and it sounded really intriguing.

Can you tell me about this new position?

Susan: Sure. So I haven't technically started yet. I start on July 1st, but the new position is the Jarislowsky Chair in Trust and Political Leadership. So it is one of five chairs. Four have been announced. We're still waiting to find out who the fifth person is, and I think we're all about to start these positions.

Some of us are actually meeting while we're here cause we realized we would all be in Toronto at the same time. So we'll be meeting together. But this is a position very generously endowed by Mr. Jarislowsky, with the goal of creating programming that will help to create trustworthy and ethical political leaders in the future.

Cameron: It's an interesting coincidence that it's election day in Alberta today,

Susan: Yes, I have not been paying attention. I've been too busy with talks and other things going on, but I will certainly be on my phone tonight seeing what's been going on.

Cameron: Yeah, well it's a contest for sure. Mm-hmm. And, uh, the incumbent is, uh, someone who has been accused of all kinds of things that I care not to comment on 'cause I'm not an expert in them. But it sounds like there's definitely some questions of trust and political leadership involved. So your work is cut out for you.

Susan: Exactly, and my work is certainly cut out for me catching up. I have been living in the United States for the last five years, um, so I've got a lot of reading, to do, a lot of newspapers to review. So yes, that's what the rest of the summer is primarily going to be set out for, is moving to Lethbridge and then hopefully catching up on all the news, what the major issues are, how the, what the fallout of the election is, those sorts of things.

Cameron: We're gonna be talking about an article you wrote in Pragmatism Today, that deals with the fallout to the 2016 election in the US and, I don't know if, well, of course you would've no reason to know this, but this podcast originated around those events because I, when I saw Donald Trump being elected, I began to doubt whether there was any point in being an academic researcher if truth and facts don't matter at all, and clearly they don't in politics, at least not in the way that I hoped they did. then what's the point of investing ourselves in this academic research to find deeper truths about society, to understand society better, to be able to have rational arguments with people to convince people through evidence. All that stuff seems quite obsolete in today's political climate.

Susan: I might not go so far as to say obsolete. It's maybe playing second fiddle or taking a backseat in certain contexts, I think. But I mean, as somebody who teaches philosophy and who has been responsible for a few years now for teaching general education courses in critical thinking, or as we call it, reasoning and argumentation, it's really difficult in my position to just say, "Well, truth and facts don't matter."

Part of what I do is try to teach students how important they are and what roles they play in their various sorts of decision making, including political decision making. but I think to reduce politics to truth and facts and how things really are, is a mistaken way to approach politics and sort of a dead end way to approach politics as well.

I think one of the reasons I like reading Richard Rorty, and thinking about what he said, is that he provides a way of thinking about politics that doesn't reduce it to truth and facts, which isn't to say it's not important. They play a role certainly. but that's not all there is to the political game.

Cameron: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's funny that I put this emphasis on facts when in fact, my own research is about undermining these truth claims of people in power, like corporations and stuff like that, because I'm a, an accounting scholar. so I'm very, very interested in Rorty's work and I've used it a lot in my own approach to research.

One of the things I find about Rorty is that he seems extremely American. And I wonder if I'm maybe on thin ice by borrowing Rorty's thinking to apply to another context because just, he's very connected to the idea of America as a project, I think. and Canada is different, the UK is different. Australia, New Zealand, all these English speaking, countries where scholars could quite easily access Rorty 'cause he writes in English. I'm wondering if I'm, if I should be worried about using Rorty. Tell me about, his Americanism.

Susan: Yeah, and I think there's definitely an Americanism there. He is coming out of and working with the American philosophical tradition, borrowing a lot from people like William James and John Dewey, Walt Whitman, Emerson, right? These are people that he calls his heroes. But he has other heroes as well. So he talks about the later Heiddeger and Wittgenstein and so on as well.

So very wide read, and I would argue in part because he's so well-read, very cosmopolitan as well. And it might be his cosmopolitanism that makes him appeal to folks outside of America or outside of the United States. What's interesting is I think there's a lot of interest in Rorty right now in Europe as well. I was at a conference in Paris just this past December that was a workshop on Rorty, and there were all kinds of younger scholars, graduate students writing dissertations on Rorty. So interest in Rorty is definitely expanding outside of America. But there is a challenge, I think, in teasing out what aspects of his work can be brought over to other contexts like Canada, um, because he is really in a lot of his work addressing himself to problems that may not be unique to America, but are certainly more pronounced in America. And especially because part of his method, insofar as he has a method, is to tell stories or narratives about the history of how we got to where we are.

Cameron: Because of where he is located and the work he's doing, I think a lot of those stories will be about American history. So it might be partly our task to think about how that method or some of the insights that he gains can be translated to other contexts as well. We do the same thing with Foucault, right? Foucault is very, very French. it's French society, French problems that he's addressing. And, we as academics of every persuasion, of every discipline, are really fond of poaching Foucault for our purposes. And you have to make certain translations, not just from French to English, but But conceptually to the, the context that you're studying because it's not France. And it becomes this very pragmatic exercise.

And I think that this is leading back to Rorty. The thing that I, that we need to do if we're gonna use Rorty outside of the American context, as you've said so many people are doing, we have to be pragmatic about it and not too hung up on the purism of his approach to American life.

There are things we can learn from what he says about America that we can then try to apply critically and analytically in a Canadian context for something. That would be my rationale, my, my self justification for using Rorty.

Susan: Yeah, absolutely. Because I, I think in part some of the stories that he tells, like we often say it's important to learn from history and he tells these historical narratives, which means there's lessons we can learn no matter where we are.

Cameron: Foucault's history of the present!

Susan: Yeah. The genealogical method. Yeah.

Cameron: "How on earth did we get here?"

Susan: Yup.

Cameron: And I think that's a really powerful question to ask. And to understand that the, that where we're at is a result of contingencies. Things could have been different. It's not necessary that we are the way that we are as a society.

It could have been different. Why was it different? Because certain choices were made at certain inflection points. And those choices are affected by the wielding of power and the distribution of wealth and all those kinds of things. And that leads us to understand at a deeper level why we are the way we are.

And perhaps then think of other ways that we could be. And that's where the liberation is for me, right? That you'd say it's so hopeful.

Susan: Yes, absolutely. And I think that's really one of the features that drew me to Rorty, a little bit as an undergrad. I started really seriously reading Rorty as a master's student and then wrote my dissertation on Rorty. But that's one of my favorite phrases, actually, this idea that things could have been otherwise.

Like we chose this is how we ended up where we are

Cameron: We chose this, dammit.

Susan: In a lot of ways, we did, and the hopefulness and the freedom of realizing that we could choose something different going forward, as well, I think is what always really appeals to me about Rorty: that it's not entirely in our control, but in a lot of ways really in our control.

I want to unpack that word we, because for Rorty, one of his central, one of the key words that he's using is solidarity. So when we talk about us and we from a Rortian perspective, what does that mean and how does solidarity with others play into that?

Sure, and I think you might not realize, but it's actually a really loaded question, what the Rorty "we" actually refers to because he uses it a lot, right? He talks about we bourgeois liberals and we western intellectuals and things like that. So in part it's, I think, just a rhetorical strategy where you can really pick out who the audience is that he's appealing to.

But also, in the sense that he's appealing to a certain audience, we western bourgeois liberals, what he's suggesting is we have no choice but to start from where we're at. That's his ethnocentric perspective. So we have to start from where we are at and if you think of we as we Western liberals, insofar as we're interested in pursuing greater justice, equality, fairness, democracy, all of those sorts of values, then we have to think about bringing additional groups, people we currently think of as them, into the we, or into us, into our moral community.And for Rorty, it very much is a liberal, democratic, sort of moral political community, not for any grand philosophical reason, but because he thinks it's just the best option that we've so far come up with. And part of what it means to be a liberal democrat is to expand the circle of "we" to include outsiders, people who are currently outsiders, so that we get more diversity, more rich, full lives as a result.

Cameron: Um, my head is going back to George W. Bush and Karl Rove. And at that time, what I think Karl Rove was doing was co-opting Rorty to draw these kind of linguistic boundaries around who counts. So he is not interested, Karl Rove is not interested in growing the moral community.

He's interested in defining a tight boundary around it and saying those others, we can't possibly communicate with. They have a different language game. You know, we have nothing in common with them. And that becomes, the kind of insularity of the American right, now that just sees itself as under threat constantly, when in fact it's the most powerful group in the world.

Right. Um, so I, I, I've, I worry that Rorty is particularly open to, not as a person, but as a way of thinking, that Rorty's approach is open to being co-opted politically.

Susan: Yeah, and I think this is where some of the tension around Rorty's use of "we," I think, comes into play or "us." Like, who counts as this "we"? Who are you talking to? Who is included in this group. And I think he really does mean, at other points, he talks about the heirs of the enlightenment. We liberal democrats in the West.

But I think really integral to Rorty's project is this goal of solidarity, right? Which really is about expanding the sense of we, which as a result changes the nature of the we. Right? So it's not that it's about assimilating others to become like us. It's about enriching our lives, by adopting or by growing and changing our own self-conceptions, he often talks about, by coming to know people we think of as them better, which is why he always encourages reading. Right? Literature is one of, was one of Rorty's great loves, and part of his reasoning there is that it's through reading, and reading literature especially, that we come to see how we're similar to people that we think of as very different from ourselves.

Cameron: And then those commonalities, those similarities become the basis of the solidarity that we can grow, the larger the moral community we can establish. Yeah, when you read The Death of Ivan Ilyich and you realize just how close to the bone his description of this person is, and the way that he's muddling through life, andit's a completely different era, a different cultural context. Everything about it is different, and yet you can see a connection between yourself as a reader and this, this other human being, uh, as, you know, as difficult as that story may be to sit through.

Susan: Mm-hmm.

Cameron: Um, 'cause it's about a guy dying.

Susan: Yeah. And he does the same with George Orwell, right? And he does the same with Lolita, Nabokov. And it's all about, as the reader, seeing yourself in a character in what you're reading, and seeing partly the kinds of cruelty that you as an individual might be capable of. So it serves as a warning: "I don't wanna be that person, so I'm not going to be cruel in that way." And then there are other books. He talks a lot about Charles Dickens, and how what we can do in reading Charles Dickens is recognize forms of suffering that we might not have recognized before and see that this other person is capable of suffering in just the same way I am, and that we have that in common.

And so I have a responsibility to alleviate that suffering if I'm able to, and that means that this person's part of your moral community.

Cameron: Mm-hmm. That leads us very nicely into your article, which I want to get into in a little more detail. The article is called "Class Politics and Cultural Politics," and it's in a special issue of Pragmatism Today, that's dealing with Rorty in the wake of the 2016 election in the United States. And there is this very interesting distinction that's being made here between the political left and the cultural left, between class politics and cultural politics.

Can you teach me a little bit about that distinction?

Susan: I can try. Um, so the distinction between class politics and cultural politics, for Rorty, I think can be mapped on to this distinction he offers between sadism and selfishness. And so for Rorty, what cultural politics is largely about is about trying to end, he calls it sadism in some places, but to end things like racism, things like sexism, the ways in which we exclude and are cruel to other people.

Cameron: Yes. It's the cruelty.

Susan: Cultural politics is largely going to be about trying to end those practices. One of the things again that drew me to work on Rorty is my interest in feminist philosophy.

And so he engages a decent amount with feminist thinkers, and I think from them probably learns about the methods for ending cruelty to women, right? So when he talks about cultural politics, he's talking about ending that kind of cruelty primarily by changing the way we talk about people and as a result how we understand them and understand ourselves as well.

And so cultural politics is that project, and he uses it to cover a lot of ground, but it's that project of changing the way we talk; as a result, changing the way we think about others and about ourselves and about our moral community. So it really is focused on what people might be more familiar with, known as identity politics.

So that's what cultural politics is primarily about. Class politics, I think is your traditional understanding of trying to reduce the inequality between economic classes. So reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. He's looking primarily at the United States context, but also globally as well.

 And so in that paper, what I try to do is figure out what the relationship is for Rorty between cultural politics and class politics, if there is one, because what he says in Achieving Our Country, is he really seems to attack cultural politics and say," Hey, the left has spent too much time focusing on cultural politics or identity politics and not enough time looking at class politics."

And I think a lot of people took that to be just a straight out, full-on attack on identity politics. And I thought, well, that doesn't seem right. He's engaged with feminist work, and he has argued in favor of trying to include excluded groups into the moral community.

So in the paper I'm like, okay, there must be a relationship between them, and what is that relationship?

Cameron: This notion of pulling people together through solidarity, I think is quite paradoxical because when I think of the political landscape in Canada and probably in the United States as well, I see quite disparate groups on the right able to band together for the very pragmatic goal of achieving power, while the left is arguing over nuance.

And maybe that's unfair, but if you could draw a cartoon of the political landscape, I think that's how I would draw it. Why is it that the, that the right is able to draw these groups together in a kind of an us-against-them fight.

Susan: In the pejorative sense.

Cameron: Yes. Yeah. "Them" is bad, not just Other. They're bad. Whereas, you know, the left is, you know, if you look at the Toronto election that's coming up for mayor, we have basically one leading candidate on the right. And we have a dozen on the left all wanna be mayor, and I hope it works out okay for my own politicalsanity. My worry is that the vote would get so divided.

Why are we on the left - and I say "we" - so incapable of putting our differences aside and getting the job done.

Susan: I don't know specifically how I might answer for myself, but I think Rorty offers a compelling story, because that's what he does, of how we arrived at a really fractured left. I think a lot of his project in Achieving Our Country is looking at how did we end up with such a fractured left?

Because of this focus on ending sadism.

I think, yeah, that's definitely connected, right? And it's also I think connected to the move, or bringing identity politics into the academy. So there ends up being this strong move towards trying to theorize oppression and theorize how entangled oppression might be in the United States context.

Perhaps we can make the same, or ask the same questions and make the same claims about the Canadian context. But you end up almost getting, I think in the paper I refer to it as. a theoretical arms race about who can come up with the true theory that explains why any particular country, the United States in particular for Rorty, is rotten to the core, or is fundamentally racist or fundamentally sexist, or all of the above, for example.

Cameron: These sound like essentialist theories.

Susan: Yeah.

Cameron: And it's so contrary to Rorty's approach. His approach is pragmatism. A theory is a good theory if it's useful. And it'll be useful in some pursuits and not as useful in others. It could become not so useful over time, as things change.

And it's just, use what's at hand that works. So this search for the perfect theory of, of, you know, why there's so much misogyny in, in our culture these days, may be misplaced. Is that what you're arguing or is that what he's arguing?

Susan: I think it's certainly what Rorty is arguing and I certainly find it compelling. And so the sort of worry is, this is what happens when you turn these pursuits for social justice Into academic disciplines. Which isn't to say I think that there shouldn't be these academic disciplines, but insofar as they are prioritizing getting the right theory or developing the right meta narrative to explain how sort of rotten to the core, or how fundamentally, inherently flawed, a particular institution is, then social justice, social progress won't actually occur, because all you're doing is theorizing. And you're not actually on the ground doing the work of pursuing social justice.

Cameron: So is your article then an attempt to create solidarity between those two different approaches: the fight to end sadism, the fight to end selfishness.

Susan: I think so. I don't know if I would say solidarity, but certainly a coalition. Or certainly an alliance of some sort, because, and I guess I'm thinking solidarity isn't necessarily the right word if you're thinking of it technically in the Rortian sense. But if you think of it in the broader sense of trying to find common cause, then I think yes, solidarity, coalitions, alliances are gonna be the sort of things that are required to deal simultaneously with cultural politics and class politics.

Cameron: It's just, it's such an interesting article.

Susan: And how did you end up landing with Rorty? I always think it's an interesting story, how people find their way to anything, but Rorty especially.

Cameron: Yeah, well my background is quite eclectic. I did a degree in computer science and then went to seminary for four years, and then worked in information systems for about 20 years. Decided to go back to school to find out what else I could do, 'cause I was kind of bored of doing computer programming and that sort of stuff.

So I went back to school to do my MBA and the moment I walked onto campus, I knew I was home. It just felt so good to be on campus and, uh, you know, pushed through to do my PhD after my MBA. Got introduced to Foucault and Rorty and a whole bunch of other different scholars in my PhD program.

Susan: And what was the program in?

Cameron: It I was doctorate in accounting.

Susan: How do you end up reading Rorty and Foucault and Bourdieu in an accounting PhD?

Cameron: Because accounting is about representing the world.

Susan: Okay.

Cameron: Right. It's a language, right? So I began to take a very linguistic approach using, uh, Saussure, and Rorty, and Baudrillard, and just beginning to understand the way that we construct meaning.

And to me, that's become kind ofthe key part of my own humanity, my... it's my understanding of my humanity, is that, what do human beings do? They try to find meaning in things.

Susan: Right.

Cameron: And uh, you know, so that becomes pretty difficult when things become meaningless, such as when someone gets elected on the basis of a bunch of lies.

Susan: Alternative facts and all that good stuff.

Cameron: And this, this way of turning all of the, critical analysis of what's going on, on its ear, right, the fake news. Like the words "fake news" had to do with Breitbart and all those far right, factories of misinformation. And when it was being pointed out that they were fake, then the phrase, fake news just gets adopted and applied to, mainstream media.

Susan: Yeah.

Cameron: Which for all its faults was not quite so blatantly trying to manufacture facts out of thin air.

Susan: Right. Yeah.

Cameron: Oh.

Susan: Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting, the number of people you discover who have read Rorty: "Oh, okay, that's awesome." And were assigned to read Rorty, as well, especially. Yeah, I remember being surprised. So I also have a master's degree in public administration. And I took a research methods course and the first person we read was Foucault.

And this was after my PhD. And it was just, "What happened? Am I in the right place in the right program?" But so it makes sense, yeah, in that context that you would, yeah, read some of that stuff.

Cameron: Yeah, there's a very wide spectrum of approaches to accounting research, and as you imagine, the dominant one, the predominant one, is an economic approach. And that leaves a lot of the world for people like me to explore.

Susan: Absolutely.

Cameron: That they're not paying attention to.

Susan: And do you get to teach any of this stuff?

Cameron: Oh, it's an inside job. Susan. I'm corrupting my students lecture by lecture.

Susan: Ah, that's good. Socrates would be proud.

Cameron: Yeah. Yeah. I, teach, students about critical theory and critical understandings of the world, and power. And it's all connected to the use of accounting as a tool for telling stories, drawing the narrative around a corporation.

Susan: Hmm.

Cameron: And trying to be able to see how that is being done and understand it.

Susan: Yesterday, the Law and Social Philosophy Organization met. We just have a one-dayworkshop, but one of the papers was on the disability tax credit, and it was about weaving a narrative. Like, it was primarily about the injustice of it and the unfairness of it, but there was a lot of the sort of narratival work going on, I think, in the background of it, for sure.

Cameron: / Hmm. How does the work that you're doing end up affecting the world? Because you're talking about academic disciplines here. It sounds like you're having a conversation with other academics, much as you and I are engaged in a conversation right now. Like, how does this approach, this understanding of the world, leave this room?

What happens next, after your research?

Susan: Sure. Well, I think primarily it's going to happen through education, right? And Rorty emphasizes this as well, is that in order to pursue and hopefully achieve the sorts of goals we have, greater solidarity, greater justice, et cetera, what you need to do is make sure that the students that you have are doing the reading, doing the work required to achieve those things. So reading the literature, thinking carefully about politics, learning the theories, but maybe learning the history as well that creates those theories, that we maybe depend on or rely on or at least learn about. So I think teaching is gonna be a significant part of it, and I think that's a very Rortian approach to take, as well.

I think things like podcasts. I'm hoping to do more writing in public fora in my new position as well, once I get the chance to do that. But also, I think, getting out into the community in very real ways, as well, whether it's directly as an academic or in other sorts of roles where you can still bring pragmatist perspectives to whatever it is that you might be doing, even if it's not at all related to academia or your research.

Cameron: So blurring the boundary between the academy and the rest of the world would be a good starting place.

Susan: Yeah, absolutely.

Cameron: Cool. Well, I wish you all the best with your new position in Lethbridge. It sounds like, some exciting stuff is happening there and I want to keep in touch with you and pay attention to what's going on there.

It's certainly, as I say, with the Alberta election going on right now, it's,it's a, an appropriate time for you to be going there.

Susan: Absolutely. I'm very much looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to starting at Lethbridge and getting back to Canada and delving right into it.

Cameron: Yeah. Well, welcome back to Canada.

Susan: Oh, thank you.

Cameron: Thanks, Susan.

Susan: Thanks.

Links

Susan Dieleman’s website

Article: Class politics and cultural politics, publshed in Pramatism Today in 2019.

Credits

Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Photos: Susan Dieleman
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Descript, Audacity
Recorded: May 29, 2023
Location: Toronto