The cultivation of irony

In my last post I was basically saying, underneath it all, that one of the most important things literary criticism can do is serve as the chief locus for the cultivation of irony (by which I mean, very broadly speaking, the general experience of things as having more than one meaning, or saying something different than what they say--which can mean, even more generally, possessing a little distance from the sincerity and literalness of what one says when one says it). But this presupposes something else: that the cultivation of irony itself is one of the foremost ethical demands in our society. And I pretty much firmly believe this: one of the big things we have seen in the last thirty or so years, after the rise of a certain theoretical criticism that privileged irony (and was the expression of a more ironic attitude in America as a whole, after the 60's), is that irony is actually something that is very hard to sustain.
Year after year, we keep hearing that the end of irony has come, and this announces not so much that irony is dead, but that our ability to sustain it and its constant demand to achieve a little healthy distance from a situation is something we've grown very tired of and would rather just put away. The last few years indeed have seen a huge preference for wholesome, dangerously serious discourses that people can just consume and be done with: Republican patriot rhetoric of the Bush years and (to a lesser extent, especially when it is seen as the rising up of a minority which brings irony back into it) the Obama rhetoric. What happens then is not so much that we get a set of people with staunch beliefs that won't talk to each other (fundamentalism) but that when these people do indeed talk to each other they lose the ability to also actually express what these beliefs entail: in short, they paradoxically lose their ability to demand something of the other person--especially without being backhanded or resentful (slavish, in Nietzsche's sense) in doing so. (This talking together, I should note, also happens much more often than those who too quickly make belief into fundamentalism would like to think--Stanley Fish being one of them, however much he seems to champion "belief").
So sustaining irony, keeping one's commitment to it, making it something that is cultivated (and indeed this is a most Nietzschian task--cultivating that which precisely and as such resists cultivation) and able to reassert itself steadily--this is what we in reality need more of, precisely after the 80's and such (also because it is so present not just in elite circles, but, more generally wherever there is this belief that I'm talking about). For what I'm saying is that what we see in our being tired of irony is really a growing ability to take irony as serious--which is counterproductive and in fact dangerous because it exploits irony while attacking it (Republicans have increasingly become masters of this--but also theorists, as we'll see). In other words, this doesn't take irony seriously as irony, but transforms irony into seriousness. It folds back what was a difference into precisely the discourse that it has achieved its distance from (unlike the folding back of close reading that I talked about).
In criticism, this manifests itself in the horrible move that is precisely that folding back of the speaker into the position from which he speaks, so as to show how he is complicit in what he speaks about (its a trademark of serious discourse that it takes things--here, even the mechanism of turning irony into seriousness--too literally). This is generally a very de Manian and deconstructionist-Marxist move, but it can happen everywhere (so Fish will fold back a speaker into his disciplinary position, which will always contradict whatever the speaker says). You know what I'm talking about. So in a class the other day we were discussing Derrida and political activism, and someone said that Derrida's discourse, which questions the possibility of activism rather than engages in it pure and simple was a nice thing, but could only happen because Derrida himself was a comfy professor, without any need to get in the streets and fight. What makes Derrida radical as concerns activism can therefore only be accomplished by being someone who doesn't need to know a thing about activism. You see what's going on--besides the remark being false (as the professor pointed out). The sort of ironic position of Derrida (who I'm just using as an example), which is to take up activism by questioning its possibility in the first place, is folded precisely back into a secure and stable notion of what activism is, and, as a result, what happens is that one takes Derrida's ironic position as a serious position. What is the result of this move? You expose the person as a hypocrite! Ooh, interesting--but pointless, because what you see is that they are still hypocrites only on your terms, which are precisely terms that have no sense of irony.
I hope it's clear that I'm not talking so much about Derrida here, but that something that needs to be understood in terms of irony is understood in terms of seriousness--which of course will expose the irony as contradictory, complicit, and hypocritical, because it precisely resists the notion (and practices) of serious discourse. Frankly, a better example is Frederic Jameson, who always, always takes an ironic discourse in terms of how serious it is. The noble thing about Jameson--and the thing that really makes his mode of meta-critique something to keep, rather than, like so many other instances of this same move, something that should be totally, remorselessly, given up--is that he does not do this in order to expose or show anyone to be a hypocrite. That has to be kept in mind--one really can't understand Jameson without knowing this (and I think many of these serious people--Spivak is one of them, cf. her remarks on Jameson on her Critique of Postcolonial Reason--read him this way and find in him confirmation of what they do). It is indeed what makes his discourse deserve the name of a dialectic. But the thing is that the move he makes to bring this about is something that essentially, as it is constituted, does not need to be deployed with these aims: this is evident in precisely the sorts of misreadings it often produces--which work in the context of the books he is writing, but which as readings totally misrepresent whoever they are talking about. So he reads what Deleuze and Guattari say about anti-hermeneutics as precisely something hermeneutical. This would be fine perhaps if it acknowledged the irony of what D&G say, but the mode of the folding back, of the establishment of complicity, does not allow Jameson to do this. So we get what D&G say as something without the possibility of irony, as something that is totally serious, which will in fact ensure the success of the move of folding back that Jameson effectuates:

From the present perspective... Deleuze and Guattari's proposal for an antiinterpretive method (which they call schizo-analysis) can equally well be grasped as a new hermeneutic in its own right. It is striking and noteworthy that most of the antiinterpretive positions enumerated... have felt the need to project new "methods" of this kind.
-The Political Unconscious, 23, note 7

This may be right, but you see that what is lost is any force that the quotes around "method" can have: the putting in abeyance of this term, which precisely seeks to account for the ironic status that any hermeneutic would indeed have in D&G, is a totally empty gesture. This is because it already takes their standpoint as complicit in an interpretive enterprise--in short, as serious. It's done simply to be accurate (consistent to a model that is already interpreted as a serious model, as something that needs consistency). The gesture that irony uses perhaps most--the putting in quotes--is turned itself into something serious. This you will find all throughout recent theoretical discourse, and it contributes, I think, to the real shabbiness and real nonpertinence that theory in particular is suffering from. (A look at this in particular would have really proved my point, since it is this sort of gesture of folding back and complicity condensed: its like seriousness-from-concentrate.) A whole generation of theorists puts things in quotes seriously--and that this is so announces such a gigantic failure of theory in particular to live up to what its possibilities were that it should concern itself henceforth with the sole task of annihilating (by the invention of new pedagogical tools) this little move that establishes complicity everywhere it appears and reestablishing the force behind the quotation marks. But this entails our discipline generally recognizing that these possibilities, however, were not the sole province of theory, but are ones that reach across the whole of literary criticism, and have their foundation in the possibility of cultivating irony.
(I should mention a merit of irony: that it isn't self-consciousness. This is what makes it, actually, very compatible with belief. But at the same time it opens up belief to self-consciousness. It is as if irony is a sort of middle-ground between the reflexiveness of self-consciousness on the one hand and shame on the other. But it's significant that current theorists of trauma and shame--Sedgwick, Leys, others--don't move towards irony: it seems that they want to in fact kill off irony and self-consciousness in the same gesture, which is establishing a very serious discourse which can account for ironic self-distance in terms of unreasoned violence and affect. This might be interesting, but it conveniently forgets that irony also implies an affective state of perplexity, frustration, and embarrassment that is not unlike shame. It might be more important for them--for both genuinely ethical and facetiously moralistic reasons--to keep the focus on serious violence.)
(I should also note that my mention of Marxism specifically above is a bit bitter, no doubt. But this is because Marxism is perhaps the most gravely serious and moralistic of discourses in the academy. Nevertheless, what is interesting is that it also contains the most condensed form of the move of folding-back a speaker into the position he speaks from. This is precisely why Jameson does it: he is a Marxist. And what this means then is that Marxism has the most to gain from cultivating its irony. Please don't take my remarks above as a blatant call to throw away Marxism, then: in fact, this is what many in the academy are doing. Rather, we need to cultivate a distance to Marxism as Marxists: what I would call for here then is a resurgence of the role of Marxism in the academy, but precisely one that learns how to make this move that it makes into the ironic principle of its operation and not its mere tool for resentment. An ironic Marxism: that would be the most profitable element in the work to cultivate irony, and it should be a part of our future.)