Irony and the Discourse of Modernity

Ernst Behler

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295801537
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäische Literaturkritik

Behler discusses the current state of thought on modernity and postmodernity, detailing the intellectual problems to be faced and examining the positions of such central figures in the debate as Lyotard, Habermas, Rorty, and Derrida. He finds that beyond the “limits of communication, ” further discussion must be carried out through irony. The historical rise of the concept of modernity is examined through discussions of the querelle des anciens et des modernes as a break with classical tradition, and on the theoretical writings of de Stael, the English romantics, and the great German romantics Schlegel, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The growth of the concept of irony from a formal rhetorical term to a mode of indirectness that comes to characterize thought and discourse generally is then examined from Plato and Socrates to Nietzsche, who avoided the term “irony” but used it in his cetnral concept of the mask.

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Modernism and Postmodernism in Contemporary Thought

Among the dominant themes in today’s critical and philosophical debate, the question of what constitutes the particular status of our modernity seems to gain in scope and interest almost every day. The literature on the designation of various modernities, the roots of our own modernity, epochal breaks, or change of paradigms in our mode of knowledge is constantly growing. All this reflects, of course, our own historical position at the end of the twentieth century. The quest, however, for what is modern and the search for the specific features of modernism are as old as the modern age itself as it originated with Bacon and Descartes. A self-reflective consciousness of time combined with a need for self-assurance accompany the modern age through all its phases, and this quite naturally. For being modern means essentially a departure from exemplary models of the past, a decentering of habitual ways of viewing the world, and the necessity for producing normative standards out of oneself. This is combined with an opening to the future which has the necessary result that the moment of a new beginning constituting modernity will incessantly produce itself again and again.

These considerations have come forth since the late seventeenth century in a certain type of semiphilosophical, semi-literary writing that thematizes the topic of modernity and simultaneously exhibits its problematic nature. For writing about modernity, especially one’s own, is an act that inevitably engenders history and relegates modernity to the past. No direct way of writing can escape from this paradox. As the most extreme expression of time, modernity is like an endless fuse cord that keeps consuming itself. Regarding this inherent paradox, Nietzsche wrote, “Being is only an uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself.”¹ With only a seemingly different twist of thought, Foucault declared it to be the task of philosophy to explain today and that which we are today. Yet he also recommended doing this without declaring today as the moment of the greatest damnation or the daybreak of the dawning sun and added, “No, it is a day like every other day or rather a day never precisely like the others.”²

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It is from these considerations that the notion of the postmodern, of postmodernity, has originated—a notion that because of its enhanced paradoxical structure has become a real annoyance to some of my colleagues in the humanities. The prefix post seems to suggest—as in postcapitalist, poststructuralist, postfeminist, or postnuclear—a new period, another epoch after a former one, a relief, so to speak, from the past, and, because of a lack of a new designation, contents itself with canceling out the previous system without completely deleting it. Yet in the case of postmodern, this does not work, because modern is already the most advanced period designation and cannot be outdone. Postmodernity therefore reveals itself as an ironic notion communicating indirectly, by way of circumlocution, configuration, and bafflement, the necessity and impossibility of discussing the status of modernity in a straightforward and meaningful manner. Postmodernity, in its twisted posture, seems to be the awareness of this paradox, and consequently of the status of modernity, in a somersaulting fashion.

This seems to be at least the most general connotation of the term in many of today’s writings. From here, postmodernity appears to be that attitude in which the problems, questions, and issues of modernity accumulate in an unheard-of way, which explains the constant references to forerunners, to anticipations of postmodernism in previous centuries, to writers such as Nietzsche or Diderot. Postmodernism is neither an overcoming of modernity nor a new epoch, but a critical continuation of modernism which is itself both critique and criticism. Criticism now turns against itself, and postmodernism thereby becomes a radicalized, intensified version of modernism, as would seem to be implied through a certain nuance in the prefix post. A comparison of postmodernism to the notion of avant-garde seems to confirm this impression, because avant-garde clearly gives us the idea of outdoing, of advancing, of a future-oriented innovation, whereas the retrospective attitude of postmodernism seems to relate to the past, if only through self-criticism and self-doubt.

Yet with equal reason, we can see postmodernism as that situation in which all the ideals of modernity have come to their exhaustion, that phase which claims to have experienced the end of metaphysics, the end of philosophy, and the end of man. We should be careful, however, not to construe these events as the beginning of a new period, as unavoidable as it may seem for us to think in such categories. For if postmodernism opened an entirely new phase of intellectual history, of antimodernism or the accomplished transgression of modernism, it would continue the innovative trend of modernity, something which seems to be precluded by the paradoxical configuration of its name. One good way of expressing this feature would be to say that the postmodernist mind is just as skeptical about the historical designation of epochs as it is about structural unification in terms of system.

From this latter perspective, postmodernism is the rejection of any totalized conception of truth in the sense of global philosophies of history, all-embracing systems of meaning, or uniform foundations of knowledge. What motivates the postmodern mentality instead can be described as a radical pluralism of thought and opinion, without the presumption, however, that such a state of plurality and openness will ever be fully realized. What is certain in the given situation is heterogeneity in discourse and fallibility in theory formation. Historically speaking, postmodernism is an alignment with Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the refusal of Hegelianism, of Hegel’s equation of truth with totality, as well as of his entire teleology. Another way of describing postmodernism would be through semiotics, by saying that in our society the relationship between signifier and signified is no longer intact, in that signs do not refer to something signified, a pregiven entity, but always to other signs. We thus never reach the true meaning of things, but only other signs, interpretations of other signs, interpretations of interpretations, and we move along in an endless chain of signification.

We could try to say that postmodernism protects the position of the other side, that of the nonsystem, of the woman, the suppressed minority, although we would soon discover that any accusatory criticism combined with rectifying tendencies in the style of ideology critique or even in the old tradition of liberalism would run counter to the antisystematic and atotalitarian drive in postmodernist thinking. Such a critique would eventually be seen as a sign of the reemerging system and of superimposed value structures. It would similarly be questionable to claim that the tradition of modern thought from Kierkegaard to Sartre, existentialism in other words, already articulated the groundlessness and finitude which became decisive in postmodernism. This would be a false canon because groundlessness and infinitude are experienced in existentialism as a deficiency, whereas in postmodernism this experience is one of “joyful wisdom,” of “gaya scienzia.” Postmodernism affirms the “anything goes that works” device in a cheerful mood of self-deprecation and parody. Writing is the main activity of postmodernism. But to write on postmodernism in the form of a handbook or an encyclopedic article would be self-deception.

It would of course be fatuous to restrict the postmodernist mood to theory and philosophy without recognizing similar trends in other areas of life. Architecture is, if not the origin of this movement, then one of its most conspicuous expressions. Fredric Jameson has shown that contemporary architectural trends in the arrangement of our cities or individual buildings counteract fundamental concerns of the modern and rationalist mentality. In their tendency toward the mere surface, the epidermis, the skin, and by eliminating any “depth dimension” (for instance, in Los Angeles), these architectural trends offset traditional models of building characteristic of the modern phase, such as the dialectical model of essence and appearance, the psychoanalytical model of latent and manifest, the existentialist model of authenticity and nonauthenticity, the Marxist model of alienation and reconciliation, and the semiotic model of signifier and signified.³

In the more general sphere of aesthetic life and aesthetic production, these trends find their correspondence in an extension of art to mass society and mass culture. In a now famous image, Adorno once illustrated the modern notion of an elitist autonomy of art with Odysseus’s voyage through the realm of the Sirens.⁴ Tied to the mast of his boat, he could listen to the seductive singing of the nymphs without succumbing to their attempt to lure him into death, while his deafened sailors oared him through the dangerous zone. This is at least one aspect of this image. In the postmodern relationship to art, the separation of classes is supposedly overcome. The price for this accomplishment, however, is a leveling of art to the standards of a mass culture, an absorption of art by the vulgarity of life. Art is no longer the realm of otherness, no longer able to hold a mirror, to point a finger. One especially striking example of this development is the museum and the hedonistic use of the museum in postmodernist practice. Originally an institution, a temple for the preservation and exhibition of art objects that otherwise would not have survived, the museum has become a postmodernist architectural building surrounded by shops and restaurants where objects of exhibition are evaluated according to economic standards. Computerized data inform about the showability of the museum’s possessions and regulate their acquisition and sale.⁵ Conversely, and again in accordance with the anything-goes device, purpose-oriented activities based entirely on profit, such as advertising, assume the lofty l’art pour l’art attitude of complete purposelessness. This populist image of postmodernism is interwoven with complex theoretical and philosophical issues. They have come forth in a body of texts marked by an intensified critique of reason and rationality, a bewildering questioning of those values and norms which have governed the course of modern history.

Yet it remains doubtful whether postmodernism has one particular style of expression or one particular area where the postmodern attitude can be seen in its true identity. Nonidentity, oscillating otherness, seems to be the postmodern mode of expression, and the realm of existence for the postmodern mode is precisely there where it presently is not. For philosophers, the postmodern style appears to be more strictly given in literature and critical theory than in philosophy, for literary critics more in architecture, for specialists in architecture perhaps in advertising, and so on. Prototypes of postmodernism are hard to locate and always outdone by something else. Poststructuralism is outdone by deconstruction and deconstruction by what is called the new historicism. For writers in the postmodern style, the evasiveness of their subject matter goes hand in hand with a certain superficiality or even dilettantism in their expertise, a certain “poor philology,” a transgression of limits. Postmodern lectures are taped, postmodern texts are photocopied, and postmodern writings are put onto the word processor.

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Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge of 1979 is the theoretical text most directly concerned with these issues.⁶ As is obvious from its title, the writing is not meant to be an event in itself or an original moment in the evolution of postmodernism, but poses as a comment on a pregiven situation, as a report to the Council of Universities of the government of Quebec on a research project devoted to the “condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies.” The text is a summary of what has happened in the past decade under the headings of poststructuralism, deconstruction, and critique of metaphysics. Yet Lyotard also coins the terms and concepts which have guided or challenged the discussion of these events ever since. The most prominent among them is the term postmodern itself, occurring right at the beginning: “Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age” (PC, 3). By using, however, the paradoxical notion of postmodern with the casual connotation of postindustrial, and by introducing in the context of a report the contemporary crisis of knowledge as a “crisis of narratives,” the text is a full-blown postmodern phenomenon itself, with all the ironic postures and configurations required for this style.

Lyotard’s characterization of postmodernism has various aspects, the most direct of which is perhaps the idea of a transformation of knowledge, even a “mercantilization of knowledge” (PC, 26). The issue is that of a fundamental change in the conception of knowledge that has essentially affected its nature. The criterion of knowledge in the postmodern phase is translatability into computer language, into quantities of information (PC, 23), whereby the old ideal of knowledge as a formation of the mind and the personality dies out and is replaced by a conception of knowledge in terms of suppliers and users, of commodity producers and consumers (PC, 24). Knowledge becomes a major stake in the worldwide competition for power (PC, 26). Another way of describing this state of knowledge would be to say that postmodernism is the departure from any totalizing attempt of reasoning, from any ultimate foundation of truth.

The most famous formulation of this diagnosis is Lyotard’s remark that in postmodernism one no longer believes in “metanarratives.” Metanarratives are those comprehensive as well as foundational discourses in which all details of knowledge and human activity find ultimate sense and meaning. Examples of such metadiscourses or metanarratives are the grand antique, medieval, or rational philosophies, Platonism, for instance, or the great religions of humanity, the utopias of a final unity, reconciliation, and harmony. Lyotard distinguishes between metanarratives of a mythological and of a rational nature and even attributes different periods in the history of humanity to them. In the premodern world, one justified one’s culture through narrations of a mythological or religious character and founded all institutions, social and political practices, laws, ethics, and manners of thinking on a belief in these metanarratives. The modern period began when these founding narratives were no longer mythical or religious, but became rational and philosophical, and secured a meaningful procedure not through a god or a heroic lawgiver, but through the authority of reason. Although rational in their manner of argumentation, they were still narratives because they gave meaning through a projected odyssey with a redemptive type of foundation such as the acquisition of freedom, progressive emancipation, the all-round human personality, or accomplished socialism and welfare. All human realities f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Modernism and Postmodernism in Contemporary Thought
• 2. The Rise of Literary Modernism in the Romantic Age
• 3. Irony in the Ancient and the Modern World
• 4. Irony and Self-Referentiality
• Index of Names