Abstract
In these days of earnest despair, self-description seems to come too easily, while irony is in short supply. Irony, according to the OED, is ‘the expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect […] the use of approbatory language to imply condemnation or contempt’. Its association with condemnation and contempt makes it all the less surprising that earnest attempts to know one’s true self flourish while irony seems to have died a thousand deaths. Irony’s most recent death occurred around the turn of the present century. In 1999, for instance, the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy, then a recent graduate of Harvard University, went in search of ‘common things’ in response to ‘an ironic time’. For Purdy, ‘irony has become our marker of worldliness and maturity. The ironic individual practices a style of speech and behavior that avoids all appearance of naiveté—of naïve devotion, belief, or hope’ (1999: xi). Purdy saw the possibility of community in a move away from irony, from detached knowingness. Sounding a bit like a ghost from the mid-nineteenth century haunting Y2K modernity, Purdy offered sincerity as a corrective to irony. If in 1999 there was too much irony, just two years later, in the wake of 9/11, we were being told that irony was dead, and that its death was a source of fleeting joy in the midst of catastrophe. As Roger Rosenblatt (2001), writing in Time Magazine, put it, ‘One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony’. If we follow Purdy, Rosenblatt and company, to have social relations, intimacy and real political and ethical hope we must do away with the tyranny of irony. Then, presumably, in the world absent irony we will find our true selves, honest ways of being in common and authentic solidarity.
Yet, as we reach, sometimes too haltingly, sometimes too forcefully, for new political subjectivities to navigate the ongoing crises of the twenty-first century, we would do well to think about the politics of irony, or the irony of the political subject. In this context, it is jarringly refreshing to return to Denise Riley’s The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony, published in 2000 on the precipice of the end of the Age of Irony. For Riley, irony is not about a detached distance from the world but rather an intimate attachment to it. ‘Irony’, Riley writes, ‘is not an effect of any leisurely distance, but of the strongest and most serious engagement with hurt’ (2000: 162). If irony can be associated with ‘some charming personality quirk’ and ‘supposed world-weary superiority’, that nonetheless does not exhaust it. Indeed, it obscures ‘a political necessity of irony’ (Riley, 2000: 161). As Riley puts it, ‘I cannot, obviously, declare that I am an ironist. There can be a politics of irony; it must lack a programme and a manifesto. By definition without predetermined content, irony can only be a practice without calculation, or else an inclination’ (2000: 162). One cannot claim to be an ironist because that would be wrapped up in the problem of identity that Riley analyses – the problem whereby identities lead to ‘massification’ and become rigidly inflexible. Indeed, at its simplest, The Words of Selves asks its reader to think about how to imagine a political subject not grounded in the consolidation of an identity. Riley takes: tacit issue with the conviction that it’s politically imperative to hang on to an asserted category, since any time spent reading in archives or through old newspapers (or simply living long enough) demonstrates that the collisions and shattering of identities have been as decisive for progress as their consolidations—while the latter have so frequently been disastrous that one could make a counterclaim for the historical necessity of the strongest identity to the most reactionary cause (2000: 10).
It is irony that works with and against this tendency of categories of identity. If identity categories and, more overtly, political movements presume calculation, predetermined content and a programme, irony emerges out of the excesses and failures of those same categories. ‘Irony, once achieved, will always sidle away from anyone’s ownership. A public irony must flourish, for the sake of the political and ethical vigour of language; lurking inside a self-categorisation, ideally it can inspect the limits of any expansionist identification, can check hyperbole, can puncture any overblown claims from within to arrive at a sounder measure of them’ (Riley, 2000: 162). Which is to say that identities – the categories on which we rely in order to become subjects – are first and foremost in language, and that they tend towards an expansiveness that both overdetermines the subject and is politically dangerous. One need only think of the oppressive force of identity categories that mark racism, sexism, nationalism or transphobia, among others. In contrast, irony cannot be owned – it is public – which is part of what gives it political and ethical life.
For Riley, irony emerges precisely in the reiteration of categories themselves; irony is not something that one can claim but is rather an affect/effect of language. Verbal irony—another affect of language—offers me its spontaneous running commentary on my situation as it observes and remarks, unabashed, on the great categories of being as they stiffen or sag. Illuminating the historicity as well as the arbitrariness of the categorical words that consolidate me, it affords me a way of analysing and accepting the inventively productive displacements I suffer with a measure of relief, and with good grace (Riley, 2000: 3).
This running commentary occurs alongside and in reaction to the other side of identity – if the repetition of these categories produces irony, it is also the mechanism of interpellation. Whether interpellation is ‘bad’ (aggressive interrogation, accusation) or ‘good’ (love), it is a repetitious project of calling subjects into being. As Riley notes of Althusser’s concept, ‘interpellation and subjection both happen in one and the same blow’ (Riley, 2000: 78). If there is, as Riley puts it, ‘nowhere beyond interpellation for us’, there is nonetheless that running ironic commentary, potentially undoing the presumptions of interpellation (without ever fully escaping it).
Just as interpellation has its own strange temporality (that of the ‘always already’), so too does irony. If, as Kierkegaard writes, ‘irony […] has no past’, it does have historicity (Riley, 2000: 183). Indeed, it is by being alert to the history of categories that irony does its critical work. As Riley puts it, ‘irony is politically advantageous: that irony is alert to history, that to be able to deploy a category ironically frees you to recognise its historical formation and consequently its potential to alter and disintegrate’ (2000: 166). This tension between irony’s presentism and its historicity suggests that it is the linguistic mode of a history of the present. As Paul de Man put it, ‘irony and history seem to be curiously linked to one another’ (1996: 184).
Given its awareness of history and its relation to repetition/reiteration, irony, as Riley conceives it, allows historians to rethink the subject of history, to rethink the deployments of identity and to reorient the relationship between historical writing and political solidarity in the present. This is apparent in the social history that came to animate much historical writing in England, France, and the United States beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the primary projects of this social history was an effort at the recovery of experiences – especially those of marginalised groups and individuals, obscured in no small part by the hegemonic workings of ‘mainstream history’. On the one hand, social history was the history of collective cultures and social formations, in the parlance of the day, the ‘others’ of white, male, heteronormative liberal history. On the other hand, the emphasis on agency and resistance implicitly presumed autonomy and will as essential characteristics, thereby leaving the liberal subject as something like an absent presence. 1 These experiences coalesced into the production of historical identities. Just a few years after The Words of Selves appeared, the historian Walter Johnson critiqued the notion of agency in the history of slavery, and in particular the notion that historians were ‘giving the slaves back their agency’, a trope common in social history since the 1970s. Johnson cautioned that scholars need to be aware of the changing political conditions informing social history. ‘I can imagine a time in the 1960s or perhaps the 1970s or even the 1980s’, Johnson writes, ‘when these gestures were important ways for white scholars to use a declaration of their alignment with Black slaves in order to signal their alignment with the ongoing struggle for Black Freedom’ (Johnson, 2003: 120). But, by the early twenty-first century, things had changed, which made the gesture of solidarity something quite different. ‘The politics of solidarity they ostensibly represent seem to me to be correspondingly diminished […] even as they assume a posture of present engagement in the political struggles of the past they do so on a closed circuit by which historians and their audience together share in the knowledge that they have transcended the past’ (Johnson, 2003: 120). In other words, if these histories rest on the presumption of an identity that always existed but that now needs to be recovered, they are also the product of contemporary historical formations of identity – the solidarity of white scholars with Black Freedom struggles is not the same now as it was in the 1970s. They gesture, as Johnson argues, at a political solidarity that forges some relation between past and present, but this solidarity no longer has the force that it had in the 1960s and 1970s. We might, with Riley, think of this as the irony of agency – its reiteration exposed its overdetermined expansiveness, its hyperbole, to the point that its massification worked against its earlier efficacy. Johnson, without quite saying so, picked up on this irony, which in a sense sets a task for the writing of history: how to deploy a subject, how to mobilise identity, in ways that are alert to and wary of the inevitable overdetermination, repression and oppression, as well as the mutability of which irony is the marker.
The repetitive discomfort of language that bears irony is potentially apparent in the archive. ‘But what goes to determine whether irritation or boredom will be born of reiteration’, Riley asks, ‘rather than the saving grace of irony’s attentiveness to those categories which only unhelpfully apostrophise us? … Often this dawns during the archival work of feeling your way within the thickets of some strange discursive formation, where a growing sense of the peculiar intensity of its repetitions alerts you to the likelihood that something really is askew’ (2000: 155–156). This may dawn on the historian confronted with the strangeness of archival repetition, but it may also appear in what we might think of as the archive of irony itself – which is to say those moments when irony is invoked precisely in relation to the failure of identity categories. To mobilise this archive is to bring the historicity of irony and the categories it undoes to bear on the present itself. With this in mind I would like to turn, in the remainder of the article, to several iterations of irony in an effort both to think the subject of historical writing and to articulate, if only briefly, the relationship between irony and a history of the present.
In 1852, not quite two years after the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed, Frederick Douglass delivered what has become the most famous of his many orations: ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’. Delivered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York at the invitation of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass insisted on delivering the speech on 5 July, a common practice in the black communities of upstate New York. As historian David W. Blight puts it, ‘what Douglass crafted and delivered on July 5 was nothing less than the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism’ (2018: 230). Irony occupied a central place in the oration.
Douglass opened in a self-deprecating manner, a rhetorical gesture that, Blight notes, was common. ‘He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation’, Douglass said, ‘has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day’ ([1852] 1982: 359). Invited to deliver the keynote to this celebration of national independence, as one of the great orators of his day and a light of the abolitionist movement, Douglass’s self-description, the identity he brings forth, is of being not quite up to the interpellative demands of his audience. Moreover, Douglass articulates an almost ontological gap in his identity at that moment, as he remarks that ‘the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight’ ([1852] 1982: 360). This distance, between his life as an enslaved man and his place on the platform delivering an abolitionist keynote, between slavery and freedom, between black and white, is reiterated throughout the speech to his predominantly white audience. He repeatedly refers to his audience as ‘citizens’ as he notes the heroic moments of their national history. This is not a gesture of affinity and belonging, but one of the alienation that comes with the reification of categories. For instance, referring to a resolution of the Continental Congress from 1776, Douglass said ‘Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny’ ([1852] 1982: 363). This laudatory account of their nation, coupled with the persistent, reiterative distancing – each time Douglass speaks of the US he is sure to note that it is not his nation, but that of his audience, even as he speaks at a celebration of that same nation – marks much of the first section of the speech. In other words, he is in, but not of, the United States.
About midway through the speech, Douglass shifts to an overt critique not only of the nation’s problems but of his audience’s interpellation of him. ‘This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?’ (Douglass, [1852] 1982: 368) (emphasis in original). The distance that had marked the earlier part of the speech, the gap between Douglass and his audience, is bodied forth here as sacrilegious irony, a mockery of Douglass. Here we might think of the capaciousness of Riley’s sense of self-description; for all the expected categories of identity – woman, queer, black, immigrant – there are also those others such as poet and occupation, all of them overlapping and interrupting one another. Here, the event at which Douglass is speaking takes him and the audience, collectively, as members of an antislavery community, and Douglass is not so much dismissing that as he is marking its assumptions, that this political identity does not close the gap between the identity of black and white in America, or any other self-descriptions circulating there. The expectation of bridging that gap, a gap forcefully articulated through Douglass’s reiteration of it, is, ultimately, impossible, a sacrilegious irony. For Douglass, the initial irony is that of his audience inviting him to speak of a nation premised on his violent exclusion from its bonds of affinity.
Rejecting the demand that he provide a reasoned argument against slavery, Douglass gives more force to irony. ‘At a time like this scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke’ (Douglass, [1852] 1982: 370). Douglass’s politics here, which follow from his almost monotonous insistence on the distance between himself and his audience, are not the liberal politics of reason and deliberation, but of irony and sarcasm.
Having celebrated the emancipatory promise and vision of the ‘fathers’ of the United States, while insistently marking his alienation from the nation, Douglass could only imagine this irony as a response. ‘There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody’, Douglass exclaimed, ‘than are the people of these United States at this very hour’ ([1852] 1982: 371). He then proceeded to catalogue some of the horrors of the nation: the internal slave trade, the hypocrisy of Christianity and the Constitution. It might seem, despite his turn to scorching irony, that Douglass had returned to reasonable argument. That, I think, would be wrong. Rather, we might think of Douglass as an Echo-like figure. In the third stanza of her ‘Affections of the Ear’, Riley’s lyric retelling of Narcissus and Echo, she writes: For now I have got it. So exiled, I fell for Narcissus. I had not voice to plead so I’d pursue. He called ‘I’d die before I’d give myself to you!’ I shrilled ‘I’d give myself to you!’ ran nearer. If he’d cried ‘I’d die before I’d fuck you’, at least I could have echoed back that ‘Fuck you’ (2000: 107).
Does Douglass not sound a bit like this Echo? It would be wrong to suggest that Douglass had a real animosity towards his audience – he was a central figure in the abolitionist movement, he lived in Rochester and had close, intimate bonds with many people in the audience. But, of course, Echo does not hate Narcissus either. The white abolitionist movement was a practical and necessary destination for Douglass and so many other fugitives from slavery. If that movement was committed, in a complicated sense, to antislavery politics, it would not quite give itself over to Douglass’s position – the racial economy of freedom and slavery would continue to mark the movement and the identities within it. Douglass’s repetitions, his scorching irony, then, were akin to Echo’s ‘fuck you’.
The lyric poetry of Echo and Narcissus, Riley notes, might suggest that Echo is ‘condemned to hapless repetition of the cadences and sound associations in others’ utterances’ (2000: 111). This may not seem to have much to do with the political concerns of Douglass. As Riley writes: [H]ow can I defend my flippant doggerel and its tongue-in-cheek exegesis here as having anything much to do with the serious question of how political subjects are consolidated? Only thus: Calling out, calling myself, and being called are all intimately related incarnations of the flesh of words. This materiality of language is packed through and through with its own historicity (2000: 111).
Is not the materiality of language of Douglass’s oration packed with historicity, marked by the repetition of the unbridgeable distance between Douglass and his audience? Douglass’s Echo-like political position is made apparent precisely in his turn to irony, which is a turn against the norms of conventional politics.
It is, in fact, what makes strange all the repeated conventions of both national celebration and antislavery critique. The irony of Echo ‘is hearing something said all too much, and that makes it uneasy. Unease, rather than boredom, grips it, as if irony must have some opinion of its own, to be alert to something which sounds to it in a wrong register’ (Riley, 2000: 157). Moreover, as Riley continues, ‘irony’s studied incomprehension is what permits it to stop its ears to the content of what’s being reiterated […] Now irony has made itself ripe to become the linguistic psychoanalyst of iteration’ (2000: 157). Douglass knows exactly what he is doing, but in that moment of irony there is a studied incomprehension, a disbelief that anyone, let alone his allies, his comrades, could actually ask him to reiterate reasoned arguments against slavery. It is his scorching irony that marks the strangeness of his reiteration of both the national myths of the fathers and the horrors and abuses of slavery. This, however, does not serve, in the end, as a pure rejection of his audience; rather, it is the source of a future solidarity. For, as Douglass ends the speech: ‘I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope’ ([1852] 1982: 387) (emphasis in original). That hope comes from irony’s disruption, for, as Douglass intones, ‘No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference’ ([1852] 1982: 387).
Douglass is, of course, not alone in this deployment of irony as a political project. A little more than a century later, this time in France in the 1970s, Luce Irigaray would deploy irony in a manner both quite different from but also continuous with Douglass’s own effort. In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray devotes one section to ‘The Eternal Irony of the Community’. This irony, as Irigaray puts it, is that ‘self-certainty—in masculinity, in community, in government—owes the truth of its word and of the oath that bonds men together to that substance common to all, repressed, unconscious and dumb, washed in the waters of oblivion’ (1985: 225). The substance is blood, of which ‘woman is the guardian’. For Irigaray, the possibility of masculinity, community and government – the metonymic slippage here is, I think, important – rests on the preservation of a substance in common (blood), which is protected by woman, who is then repressed. On the one hand, this is a relatively common articulation of patriarchy – the state is the preserve of men while women are excluded from it. One can see cognates in the liberal conception of public and private. But where a liberal conception presumes the possibility of an ever-unfolding inclusion of those formerly excluded, Irigaray is making a more all-encompassing claim: the possibility of the world, as such, rests on a constitutive irony – insofar as there is a community, a state, masculinity grounded in being-in-common, that commonality is the repressed feminine. And this irony has some political potential. ‘At times the forces of the world below’, Irigaray writes, ‘become hostile because they have been denied the right to live in daylight. These forces rise up and threaten [to] lay waste to the community’ (1985: 225). There is a caustic humour that comes with such a move into daylight. ‘What is more, she would pervert the property/propriety of the State by making fun of the adult male who no longer thinks of anything but the universal, subjecting him to derision and to the scorn of a callow adolescence’ (Irigaray, 1985: 226). The universal claims of the male citizen find their force in repetition, in the claim that political subjectivity is realised in citizenship, but precisely in that repetitive gesture the founding irony comes to the fore in the form of derision. As Irigaray continues, the only way to deal with this is to treat the foreclosed Woman as a corruption of the universal aims of the citizen. ‘The community can protect itself from such demands only by repressing them as elements of corruption that threaten to destroy the State. In fact these seeds of revolt, in principle, are quite powerless, are already reduced to nothing by being separated from the universal goal pursued by the citizens’ (Irigaray, 1985: 226) (emphasis in original). But in appearing quite powerless, this may well be like Echo, whose ‘passivity possesses its own strong agency [… as] initiator of the ironic’ (Riley, 2000: 157).
Irigaray, not unlike Douglass, suggests that the community, the State, masculinity are constituted only in the absurd repetitions of the language of the citizen and the universal – repetitions born in the foreclosure of the materiality of blood and Woman. Here we find what Riley calls the ‘materiality’ or ‘fleshiness’ of language. ‘The linguistic materiality lies […] in the reiteration, the echoes, the reflexivity, the cadences, the automatic self-parodies and the self-monumentalising which, constituting both being called and calling oneself, constitute the formation of categories of persons’ (Riley, 2000: 111). This materiality is undone when it is re-presented through irony. Writing of Echo and this fleshiness, Riley notes that ‘what she presents back is no longer the original utterance. The word, now as thing, is wrenched into a novel sense or a nonsense, made strange by the brute fact of its re-presentation alone or because its context has been lopped off’ (2000: 157). Is this not the absurdity of Irigaray’s scene – that we may think of Woman making claims on citizenship and universality not necessarily, or only, as a moment of inclusive tolerance, the unfolding of an improved world, but as a laying waste to the community by stripping terms like citizenship and universality of their context which is, of course, the foreclosure of Woman (and, as in the case of Douglass, enslaved persons and black diasporic subjects)? Irony carries a political efficacy too often overlooked.
Permit me one last example – one that seems to provide, against Riley’s warning, a manifesto for irony. In her now classic ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Donna Haraway explicitly calls for a politics of irony. Indeed, the essay opens with ‘An Ironic Dream of a Common Language for Women in the Integrated Circuit’, which among other things is certainly an impersonal echo of Douglass and Irigaray. For Haraway, this ironic dream entails contradiction: ‘Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist feminism’ ([1985] 1989: 174).
The iterations of a politics of irony are, moreover, not linear but recursive – this is not just an excavation of irony from its interment in the dead space of the archive, but rather an insistently present commentary on the contemporary. It is nearly impossible not to feel, in these articulations of irony, that these texts from Douglass, Irigaray and Haraway are contemporary to us. Moreover, they work on one another. The eternal irony of community, as Irigaray elaborates it, opens up ironies that Douglass had not quite considered. For instance, when speaking of his audience’s nation, he repeatedly deploys the trope of the nation as woman. But, given Irigaray’s articulation of the ironies of that community, how might we think about Douglass speaking of the nation from which he is alienated as a woman? What might we make of the subject of history in these instances of irony? And then, as Douglass describes his audience’s nation as an inheritance from their ‘fathers’, what might we do with the ironic politics of the cyborg, for whom ‘fathers, after all, are inessential?’ (Haraway, [1985] 1989: 176). How do the ironic politics of the cyborg inherit the vexed relation to kinship that marked the social death of the enslaved? What we see here is an affect of language, a mechanism of politics, for which there is no clear foundation, or rather, a fantasmatic foundation the desire for which marks almost all political projects. Moreover, this is an irony inherent in language, and thus, as Riley emphasises, it cannot be owned; it is the province of the public as it is the property not of an identity or an individual, but of language itself. As Paul de Man put it, commenting on Schlegel, ‘irony is everywhere, at all points the narrative can be interrupted’ (1996: 179).
This should not be a cause for mourning but rather an impetus towards political solidarity. As Riley puts it, ‘irony’s hopefulness begins, not in innovation, but in the unmitigated monotony of reiteration’ (2000: 5). Irony, as we have seen, especially if we are alert to irony the way irony is alert to the strangeness of reiteration, makes for political openings in what otherwise is the deadening imperative of the compulsion to repeat. There is something to be said here for the political possibilities of irony and the political potentialities of the death drive. 2
It turns out, despite the pronouncements of its impending death after 9/11, irony has not died. In fact, it has multiplied exponentially. As Damon R. Young notes, irony is now so culturally pervasive in digital culture that any ‘authentic’ meaning is impossible, and as such if one cannot exclude irony, neither can more earnest affects like sincerity be excluded. ‘In an overdetermined media context of pervasive irony’, Young (2019) writes, ‘some combination of technology and form works to displace both conscious and unconscious intention, such that the author is no longer any kind of authority on the question of his own sincerity’. If this is the case, then, Riley’s discourse on irony is more necessary than ever, finding its hope and optimism, its politics and ethics, in the monotony of repetition, which, despite appearances, introduces difference in each iteration. As the political, ethical and ecological stakes of the contemporary moment seem more despotic, oppressive and despairing than ever, new political formations are emerging, becoming visible, not only in small acts but in mass collective mobilisations. Before they tend towards inevitable massification, perhaps we should not run from irony, but find our potential, unseen and unmapped futures in it. I will end here with Riley’s words: For irony’s outcome can’t be guaranteed. Coming down neither on the side of language viewed as frothily superficial nor on the side of a ‘realism’ which is supposedly wider, grander, and earthier than language, irony is constitutionally incapable of settling, since it must adhere to its principled hesitancy and to its openness to revision. Irony as self-scrutiny is above all conscious of its own provisionality; this is what it stages, and especially in the conspicuous provisionality of the categories of social being. Self-reflecting identities will happily know themselves to be tentative, as irony eyes them finely from different angles and holds them up to the light between its fingertips (2000: 165).