What do such men as Jeff and Jack mean when they speak of irony?

It is possible that they mean irony in the sense of Derrida’s former colleague Paul de Man. And in his glossing of the concept of irony, De Man pledges an allegiance to Schlegel and to Kierkegaard; Kierkegaard swears fealty to Socrates. So, if we want to be generous, we might note Derrida’s frequent use of the term para-site, and wonder whether Derrida views himself as being someone akin to Socrates, the gadfly of Athens.

Did Derrida view himself as needing, and primarily needing, to demonstrate the fallibility of those who make hasty claims to knowledge? If one looks at his career, Derrida often wrote/presented detailed commentaries, at the request of others, on authority figures, only to disprove their authority, e.g. Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche, etc. Is it that Derrida is himself not attempting to put forward a system, a coherent mode of thought, but is merely saying that “all I know is that I [like you] know nothing”? Is the point that he wants to present as if he knew, only for his writing to disprove itself, so that readers will–by this irony–come to know that they know nothing?

Does having a contradictory and paradoxical text like Archive Fever serve its function through irony, as something that can be read in completely opposed terms, as something that testifies to knowledge’s saving room for non-knowledge? Or is Derrida saying to Bennington something akin to: “I don’t know how this is going to turn out, but let me try using different metaphors and phrases than we are used to; let me try not to think the presence of the present and see how far I can get; if I fail, then it will serve as an ironic lesson, as you can then know with greater surety the futility of other ways of thought”?

Such irony has, for good reason, been problematized in recent theory and criticism.

In a short story that seems to parallel De Man’s expository essay on “The Concept of Irony,” Donald Barthelme’s “Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel” presents a man who discusses frequent and vivid sexual fantasies of women, as well as participation in protests. He demonstrates before others that he wishes for change, but his demonstrations do not lead to successful changes in society’s habits or structures. In the life of Barthelme’s protagonist, presentation just becomes a useless form of staging, does not permit one to escape from one’s habits–importantly, these thoughts are expressed over the course of what seems to be a therapeutic interview.

Midway through the story, Barthelme seems to interject in his own voice, providing a sudden theoretical/meta-literary interpretation of irony according to Kierkegaard and Schlegel, and expresses the fear that Kierkegaard’s irony may be more truthful than Schlegel’s. (He wants to, without succeeding, believe that “Kierkegaard is unfair to Schlegel.”) While Schlegel viewed irony as a liberating aesthetic force, the human being’s capacity to become any person in any story, Kierkegaard advocated for principles of anxiety, dread and despair, believed that the function of irony was to inhabit the dreadful result of one’s sins before they occurred.

In the aesthetic/literary realm, such as in De Man’s or Schlegel’s, irony is the awareness of a common trope, is the event where your neighbor in the audience nudges you with his elbow, winks, and whispers: “I know how this is going to end.” There can even be a buffo, an Italian clown, who acts out this nudge-nudge-wink-wink knowledge on the stage for us. In this domain, irony is playful: mocking but not damning.

Then Kierkegaard uses this “I know how this is going to end” for completely different purposes. In Kierkegaard’s religious/moral reading, irony enlists perspective-taking as part of allowing one to change one’s habit. Kierkegaard’s various pseudonyms and multiple narrators often help to show what not to do. The most famous example is in Either/Or, where Kierkegaard presents what is supposedly a seducer’s diary as a way of showing how empty and unfulfilling the seducer’s life is, even if it looks exciting and adventurous from the outside. In Freudian terms, irony acts like a reality principle to counteract one’s wish fulfillment, makes self-criticism or self-awareness possible.

To clarify, in re-citing Kierkegaard I do not want to say that we should all be monogamists: what is at issue with the seducer is not his promiscuity but the fact that he can never be honest about his polyamory. It is the constant lying and dissimulation that is the problem, and not the number of his attachments or (sexual) interactions. Throughout Kierkegaard’s oeuvre one finds a near-constant fear that avoids recognition: of being recognized, of recognizing oneself, of recognizing what will happen; it is precisely this fear with which irony is supposed to make one come to terms.

Kierkegaard himself struggled with honesty, and sometimes his own dissimulations represent an attempt to avoid recognition. It might be possible to see a similar fear at work in Derrida’s claim that: “even my admission [that this work on Nietzsche is cryptic and parodying] can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth.” His claim is that it would be a lie to say that one tells the truth, because one never knows oneself nor the truth; the presumption of knowledge is taken to be the greater dishonesty, the greater dissimulation. But does the impossibility of perfect success excuse the lack of an attempt? Or is Derrida avoiding, fearful, shameful, a certain recognition, a certain capacity to be direct? As already noted, nowhere in his essay on women is he able to acknowledge “the woman’s figure.”

We find a similar fear of recognition in Barthelme’s short story. Like the aesthete that fails to change despite his frequent readings and stage performances, the analysand who speaks about his fantasies is unable to eradicate them, nor does his appearance in public protests allow him to change his own bourgeois allegiances. There is a remarkable parallel to Barthelme’s own position as a bourgeois storyteller in the New Yorker, a storyteller who wonders whether his words will lead to meaningful change. So, on one level, Barthelme is following Kierkegaard’s example of irony by being honest, by putting the author’s own voice within the character’s; on the other, as a writer for The New Yorker, he is staying with Schlegel’s penchant for stories and performances.

David Foster Wallace, a likely reader of Barthelme, wrote similarly ironic tales in his “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” and suggested that what people need is a move away from post-modern irony, towards what some have termed a post-post-modern “new sincerity.” Although, Wallace understands irony slightly differently. To him, irony is understood to be the ability to criticize oneself, to thereby distance oneself from one’s actions, without having to change them. Irony is therefore, for him, tied to addiction as a limiting rather than liberating force. Wallace may have even succumbed to these spiritual or pharmacological or cultural addictions. In D.T. Max’s literary biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story [Desire is always present/absent!], Max indicates that neither Wallace’s irony nor his sincerity sufficed to separate him from the “hideous men” featured in his “brief interviews,” nor could he separate himself from the “great male narcissists,” but he was instead emotionally abusive and objectifying in his relations with women.

But, let’s not forget the purpose of our inquiry on irony, which is to determine what Derrida intends to do in Archive Fever.

If Derrida prescribes both forgetfulness and memory in Archive Fever, and if this is an ironic move, then it is possible to view Derrida’s irony as an ambigram: a boustrophedonic device that can be read both ways. Ethan Kleinberg provides an example of this ambigram in his Haunting History; although, he uses Derrida’s term of a “double gesture.” Kleinberg repeats Derrida’s claim that “we must proceed using a double gesture, according to a unity that is both systematic and in and of itself divided, a double writing, that is, a writing that is in and of itself multiple, what [Derrida] call[s] in ‘La double séance,’ a double science.” Like the séance, an uncanny duplicity haunts Kleinberg’s book; we find repeated claims that there are doubles and doppelgängers: mirror reflections of ourselves that carry what we most wish to hide.

The duplicity is inherent to Kleinberg’s version of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, insofar as “the deconstructive strategy is to approach a text (historical or otherwise) as a site of contestation and struggle, where one tendency in that text asserts itself as the source of order and thus establishes a hierarchy of meaning. The hierarchy is constructed in an oppositional binary that is presented as neutral and thus conceals the organizing principle (good and evil is a simple one)[. ]The deconstruction exposes the binary construct and arbitrary nature of the hierarchy by revealing an exchange of properties between the two tendencies.” There is a simultaneous continuity and divergence, so that the terms are split while retaining “an exchange of properties.” As Kleinberg notes, “absence is at work in presence, and presence is at work in absence,” such that it is possible, by acknowledging the simultaneity of presence/absence for “the binary [to be] exposed and the hierarchy unsettled by the exchange of properties.”

And then Freud returns too! Kleinberg couples this glossing of deconstruction with Freud’s analysis of the uncanny, which he defines as “the double, the unheimlich, the ghost that terrifies us because in it we see our ‘darker purpose’ and the limits of the project of history: the aporia of the chaotic, heterogeneous and polysemic past.” What Kleinberg means with that key word “polysemic” ultimately refers back to what we have seen in Levinas’s concept(s) of equivocation/profanation; he gives “a concrete example of deconstruction”  through his “concurrent book project on Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic lectures in Paris,” in which “what is at issue are conflicting registers of the immanent and transcendent or secular and religious.” So the term polysemic refers to the capacity for language to mean multiple things, to equivocate; and, as was the case in Levinas’s work, Kleinberg views equivocation as serving a redemptive function.

We ultimately find an example of the double gesture, the ambigram, when Kleinberg repeats Hayden White’s criticism of postmodernism, which asks: “When the world is denied all substance and perception is blind, who is to say who are the chosen and who are the damned? On what grounds can we assert that the insane, the criminal, and the barbarian are wrong?” On the level where the questions are rhetorical, White is stating that a constant deferral of meaning prevents the capacity for making moral assessments. On the level where the questions are sincere, where White is sincerely asking “on what grounds” one can make a moral assessment, White seems to suggest that self-questioning is a necessary part of the process whereby we come to see that “the insane, the criminal, and the barbarian are wrong.” In Derrida’s terms, we might recall the similar question: “For after all who would claim to be just by economizing on anxiety?” Kleinberg constructs two Whites, or two Derridas: one that is against the deconstructive move as overly relativistic, and another that supports it as being progressive. He then collates the uncanny pair within the same statement, as a way of demonstrating their inseparability.

The ambigram, Kleinberg explains, is ironic: “What is ironic, given White’s assessment of Derrida in 1976 [the statement listed above], is that in defense of his position he states that ‘the significance of the cultural turn in history and the social sciences inheres in its suggestion that in “culture” we can apprehend a niche within social reality from which any given society can be deconstructed and shown to be less an inevitability than only one possibility among a host of others. I support such a deconstructive enterprise.'”

The claim that White’s statement is ironic must be noted, as it calls to mind the fact that White had his own, substantial definition of Irony. As he put it, “Irony is negational” because “[t]hrough Irony, finally, entities can be characterized by way of negating on the figurative level what is positively affirmed on the literal level.” We can find “emblems of this trope” in “the figures of the manifestly absurd expression (catachresis), such as ‘blind mouths,’ and of explicit paradox (oxymoron), such as ‘cold passion.'”

As we have already seen, Ankersmit himself views paradox as part of the process of language overcoming language, and his concept of paradox is perhaps heavily indebted to White. Ankersmit gives us the example of “Tocqueville’s paradox of the post-revolutionary governments compared to those of the ancient regime: ‘The governments it set up were less stable than any of those it overthrew; yet, paradoxically, they were infinitely more powerful.'” Ankersmit explains that “on the level of the language used by Tocqueville, this surely is a paradox: How could a government be both less stable and more powerful than those preceding it?” In a construction that matches White’s Ironic statement, De Tocqueville engages in the process whereby “entities can be characterized by way of negating on the figurative level what is positively affirmed on the literal level.” The entity of governance is affirmed by De Tocqueville in his paradox, because, “if we cast a look at historical reality itself, we shall see, much to our amazement, that the statement is true: These post-revolutionary governments were both less stable and more powerful.”

In other words, the traditionally linked terms of stability and power are questioned, and one begins to see that power might come at the cost of stability, and vice versa. The capacity to act may very well come at the cost of persistence. So the paradox therefore is instructive, informs us that our current language, our models of reality, are flawed: “In paradox language is used to convey the message that it [language] cannot be trusted anymore and that we must now move beyond it, to the world itself.” As part of the entry into the world, Ankersmit views paradox as the development of knowledge or experience, and “this is what paradox also shares with what sensitivists such as Van Deijssel” intended, because “[t]hey were also looking for a language to undo all language.”

On this level, one uses language according to common rules as a way of demonstrating the faultiness of those common rules. In this respect, it is worthwhile to note that Ankersmit introduces De Tocqueville’s example of linguistic paradox with the claim that “An instructive example is sometimes [emphasis mine] more illuminating than a cumbersome argument.” The “cumbersome argument” represents the common language, the flawed “model of reality,” which the paradox or example eradicates, such that exposure to “historical reality,” “to “the world itself” allows one to “move beyond” common assumptions.

It should be noted that the linguistic paradox is a kind of feigned sincerity, pretends to accept the common deployment of language, only for the sake of later disproving it. Feigned sincerity is irony, because, as White says, Irony deploys “the manifestly absurd Metaphor designed to inspire Ironic second thoughts about the nature of the thing characterized or the inadequacy of the characterization itself.”

But it should be noted that Irony is not simply the substitution of a certain set of terms for another set. It is much more temporally complex than that, precisely insofar as it contains multiple readings, because it inspires “second thoughts about the nature of the thing characterized or the inadequacy of the characterization itself.” In this way, Irony may be viewed as serving a synthetic function, because it contains opposites; and, as a synthetic function, it may be “suggested that Irony is essentially dialectical, inasmuch as [Irony] represents a self-conscious use of Metaphor in the interests of verbal self-negation.” Irony therefore has a sequential character, requires some prior knowledge or experience which the reader or auditor brings into the language of the text, because it is “presupposed that the reader or auditor already knows, or is capable of re-cognizing [hyphen and emphasis mine], the absurdity of the characterization of the thing designated in the Metaphor, Metonymy, or Synecdoche used to give form to [the text].”

In some ways, White seems very much in favor of Irony; he even claims in the preface that “this book is itself cast in an Ironic mode.” Although, he feels frustrated that the use of Irony seems always bound to “[t]he rhetorical figure of aporia (literally ‘doubt’), in which the author signals in advance a real or feigned disbelief in the truth of his own statements,” such that Ironic story-tellers are always “cast in a self-consciously skeptical tone or are ‘relativizing’ in their intention.” White feels frustrated by “the skepticism and pessimism of so much of contemporary historical thinking” which “have their origins in an Ironic frame of mind.” White explains that his Irony “is a conscious one, and it therefore represents a turning of the Ironic consciousness against Irony itself.” White’s even-more-conscious use of Irony allows one to realize that “this [skeptical/pessimistic] frame of mind in turn is merely one of a number of possible postures that one may assume,” and thereby provides “some of the grounds for a rejection of Irony itself.” So White therefore privileges the potential of irony to instill consciousness (which we have already seen in Derrida’s prescription of anxiety), while also distrusting pessimism (which we have also seen in Derrida’s prescription of anxiety).

As White explains, Irony is tied to pessimism because it “points to the potential foolishness of all linguistic characterizations of reality as much to the absurdity of the beliefs it parodies.” If pessimism is indeed tied to parody, and Derrida’s writing is clearly linked to a sort of parody, then it remains to be seen how one could retain the ironic statement without a parodic/pessimistic loss of consciousness. Parodic Irony “is, in short, a model of the linguistic protocol in which skepticism in thought and relativism in ethics are conventionally expressed,” and this skepticism is not inherently incorrect in its “apprehension of the essential folly or absurdity of the human condition,” but reaches dangerous extremes when it can “engender belief in the ‘madness’ of civilization itself” or “disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of social reality in either science or art. [emphasis mine]”

Though White clearly intended these ideas for the practice and writing of history, I relate to these ideas most as a practicing social work counselor/clinician. I therefore think of White’s examples of Irony through the following experience. I was recently in a seminar on therapeutic practice, where we discussed the importance of noting the behaviors of a speaker (in traditional Freudian terms, an analysand), such as the shaking of a leg or the failure to maintain eye contact. Many beginning counselors/clinicians (especially those who have experienced gendered/racial/economic oppression) pointed to the fact that these behaviors can derive from a series of different neurological/cultural/environmental causes, and expressed fear that assuming the relevance of such behaviors leads to one’s misunderstanding the speaker. One can respond to such qualms by stating that data points do not necessitate a pattern, but that patterns require data points.

In other words, failure to note such events, failure to retain them in memory and to keep actively sorting through their possible meanings, would be a disservice to the speaker, for whom one is supposed to provide as much active listening as possible. Insight in the therapeutic relationship is therefore generated through an aporetic consciousness that can hold multiple possibilities simultaneously, but not by an anxious consciousness whose fear prevents it from noticing or remembering specific behaviors. The problem is therefore as follows: the overhasty assumption that one can ascribe meaning to a behavior is as problematic as the overhasty assumption that one can reject a behavior as meaningful.

What remains to be seen is whether through the accumulation of ironic experiences one can expand the number of possibilities that one holds simultaneously, can retain in memory a greater number of behaviors. Or, it may be possible that one simply is conditioned to make varying use of one’s consciousness according to one’s context, according to the patterns in the community where one works.

Indeed, increasing the density of thought, or making consciousness more expansive, is precisely what we have been engaged with for this whole foray into “the speed of observation,” particularly when we ask what it means to “read well.” Is it that one’s consciousness is always expanding through the process of reading, such that I can now offer a series of interpretations on a short passage, when earlier I could understand it only in one way? In other words, we are dealing with the question of how it becomes possible for prior experiences to come to bear on present acts of reading.

The deployment of irony, the ambigram, or Kleinberg’s “double gesture” may relate to this process of condensation. The “double gesture” makes it so that the language we use is more plastic, can serve a greater array of functions. The ambigram is therefore both rationalist/modernist/structuralist in its assumption of progress through more utile expressions/understandings/models, and is also anti-rationalist/postmodernist/poststructuralist in its skepticism of accuracy/certainty/finality. We can find an example of this simultaneity in Butler’s “Subjects of Desire,” which investigates how many twentieth-century critics of Enlightenment still hold allegiances to Hegel, who is often seen to be the example par excellence of belief in the progress of history. In particular, Butler devotes substantial space to Hegel’s ambigram: “Substance is subject.”

We find similar ambigrams in essays by Judith Butler, essays which defend the humanities as well as a certain critical/deconstructive disposition that tends to favor uncertainty over certainty. In “Precarious Life,” Butler discusses the scenario of being questioned over the continued relevance of the humanities, having received this question from an unknown source. She responds: “Have the humanities undermined themselves, with all their relativism and questioning and ‘critique,’ or have the humanities been undermined by all those who oppose all that relativism and questioning and ‘critique’?” It is worth noting how this question, as a question, does not place ultimate blame, but can be read much like White’s question “On what grounds can we assert that the insane, the criminal, and the barbarian are wrong?”

The function of the humanities, as Butler explains, is to try to figure out the person to whom one is responding, and the “I” in which one speaks. Being asked to defend the humanities made Butler “wonder whether [she] was not in the middle of the humanities quandary itself, the one in which no one knows who is speaking and in what voice, and with what intent [emphasis mine].” Again, the criticism of a scientific rationalism that can do away with scholastic reading involves the critique of intentionality. In other words, she flips the script: is is that the work of unearthing who constitutes the “I” interferes with giving a direct answer, or is it that the failure to understand who constitutes the “I” creates inutile questions? The answer is probably dual, hence Butler’s use of the unresolved question as a rhetorical device. There is an extent to which failure to understand the reasoning for one’s beliefs is a moral failure, and Butler is accusing her unknown addresser of this failure.

Butler engages with the dilemma of needing to respond, and needing first to understand who one is in order to respond meaningfully, throughout her oeuvre, but especially in Giving and Account of Oneself. As Butler explains, the moral dilemma calls to her, such that “in fearful response, I offer myself as an ‘I’ and try to reconstruct my deeds, showing that the deed attributed to me was or was not, in fact, among them. I am either owning up to myself as the cause of such an action, qualifying my causative contribution, or defending myself against the attribution, perhaps locating the cause elsewhere. These are the parameters within which my account of myself takes place.”

Butler retains the traditional anti-rationalism/intentionality critique that “[t]here is that in me and of me for which I can give no account”; however, she also asks whether “this mean[s] that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do?” Again the questions leave possible answers both for and against continued investigation, when Butler continues: “If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to another ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability?”

Something similar occurs in Joan Wallach Scott’s essay “Evidence of Experience,” where “experience” seems to be coeval with the “grounds [upon which] we assert that the insane, the criminal, and the barbarian are wrong” mentioned by White. Again, Scott is cautious that our acceptance of these grounds is too hasty “given [experience’]s usage to essentialize identity and reify the subject.” Though it is tempting to “abandon it altogether,” “[e]xperience is not a word we can do without.”

However, Scott does not seem to accept that there is an inevitable ground of consciousness, a limit to which consciousness is able to question; she does not outright say that an endlessly expansive consciousness is not possible. The issue is not taken to be with human consciousness but with “everyday language” through which the term “experience” is “so imbricated in our narratives that it seems futile to argue for [the term’]s expulsion.” When she notes experience’s use in “claiming knowledge that is ‘unassailable,'” one cannot tell whether she believes that there is something that must ultimately be regarded as “unassailable,” or if she only gave up on the attack because, “[g]iven the ubiquity of the term, it seems more useful[ ]to work with [the term], to analyze [the term’]s operations and to redefine [the term’]s meaning.”

The problem according to Scott is therefore that language always mediates how consciousness meets something like an object, a reality, a world, such that redefining meanings may make it possible to change consciousness. It still therefore seems possible for consciousness to be more expansive, at least if our language is denser, more direct; and this density may become possible through the deployment of ironic statements, ambigrams, and questions.

But, even if expanding consciousness is possible, recent theorists seem ambivalent on the issue of whether such an expansion would be truly just, whether it really would improve the conditions of humanity. Importantly, Derrida left it as a question whether “the antonym of ‘forgetting’ is not ‘remembering,’ but justice?” In “The Psychic Life of Power,” which in many ways continues her investigations from “Subjects of Desire,” Butler describes how interpellation, or the French “assujettissement,” the subject-formation, involves a prescription of responsibility and anxiety. At the same time, Butler describes how foreclosure creates consciousness at the cost of unconscious desire, such that “the foreclosure of homosexuality appears to be foundational to a certain heterosexual version of the subject,” and this inability to love “forms [the heterosexual subject’s] constitutive melancholia, an emphatic and irreversible loss.”

We might see a similar ambivalence at work in the arc by which Foucault’s early work in Discipline and Punish and in The History of Sexuality note the pervasive use of “confession” as a means of panoptic control, a way of getting people to police their own thoughts and desires. Foucault’s anti-confessional ethos can be found in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, where Foucault praises Anti-Oedipus for standing against a repressive “fascism”: a fascism which is, “not only the historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini,” but is “the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” We find a similar claim in Barthes’s inaugural lecture at the College de France, where Foucault himself taught. In that lecture, Barthes famously claims that “language–the performance of a language system–is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.”

Foucault’s later work in the last volumes of The History of Sexuality engages in a more positive way with the potential of discipline, of having discipuli: students. He even engages with the Confessions of Augustine, in a way that suggests a desire for self-awareness. At first, in the first volume of the history of sexuality, confession is understood to be coeval with the denial of absent-minded pleasure: “Whether in the form of a subtle confession in confidence or an authoritarian interrogation, sex–be it refined or rustic–had to be put into words.” Later, in the analysis of the teacher/student relationship, absent-minded pleasure seems overrated; it becomes necessary to, Stoically, forego immediate desire to reach an even greater pleasure, a way of enduring boredom/loss/pain as a means of achieving some meaningful goal. Perhaps the key issue is Foucault’s critique of neoliberal economic theory and its expansion into nearly every aspect of life: the homo economicus. The issue is that neoliberal society has permitted, even promoted, entertainment and pleasure at the cost of a meaningful life.

In other words, our inquiry into irony first detailed the trends by which contemporary theory has expressed distrust of science, of any model of reality. Irony therefore detailed the specialty of the humanities with respect to other disciplines, and helped to explain the grudge which the humanities bears to science. But the inquiry into ironic self-conscious, particularly as it applies to Foucault’s oeuvre, shows an ambivalence among contemporary theorists towards discipline as well as their discipline. Because postmodernism distrusts dialectics, it therefore distrusts theory itself. Why is it that one must know, and why is it that knowledge must come from prolonged study rather than direct, instantaneous experience?

To be continued…