TSAI

LINDA HUTCHEON AND THE POLITICS OF POSTMODERN IRONY

The political nature of this problem of irony has been explored by the Candian theorist of postmodernism Linda Hutcheon. When the West decides to be ironic about itself it cannot avoid some relation to its others; it cannot avoid repeating the very colonialism it adopts only ironically. Hutcheon details one striking example of a Canadian museum exhibit that, instead of presenting its archives from other (dominated) cultures from the point of view of knowledge and authority, decided to adopt an ironic viewpoint (Hutcheon 1994, 178). For example, one image of a white woman educating the indigenous population in the art of hygiene was presented and labelled as such, with the viewer supposedly being able to recognise the patronising tone both of the image and its description. The colonialist images of the past were presented as colonialist and as images: as speaking and looking in a certain style of paternalism, authority, objectification and imperialist grandeur. The curators were aware of the very politics of speaking about others. If one cannot present other cultures themselves, and if one cannot be placed in a position of authoritative truth in relation to other contexts, then one should play up and emphasise that any exhibition of other cultures is just that: an exhibition. The image of the other is always decided, collected and determined from a governing and colonially complicit point of view. However, this decision to present the colonising gaze ironically, by repeating all its demeaning and objectifying images, failed to achieve its aim; many of the indigenous viewers of the exhibition saw the images as one more presentation of the white Western view of its others.

Hutcheon’s analysis of the incident details the ways in which the irony of the exhibition was misread. Not only did many viewers not notice the quotation marks around descriptions of exhibits, the indigenous viewers themselves felt that even a marked irony repeated the occlusion of their stories, culture, voices and specificity. Hutcheon’s reflections are interesting and salutary precisely because she acknowledges the problem and risk of irony but can come to no conclusion:

it is far too easy to forget the dangers in the face of the valorization of irony’s subversive potential by much feminist, gay and lesbian, post-colonial and poststructuralist theory and practice…the particular intersection—in the communicative space set up by meaning and affect—that makes irony happen is a highly unstable one, sometimes even a dangerous one. Whether it will become too dangerous, too risky is for the future to decide. Will there ever be another—safe—‘age of irony’? Did one ever really exist?

(Hutcheon 1994, 204)

Unlike Rorty, Hutcheon recognises that such gestures of irony, far from avoiding the old myths of the West as the privileged viewpoint of reason, once again allow the West to speak in the absence of others. Even if the irony had been better managed, rendered more explicit or made less ambivalent, would irony, Hutcheon asks, have been an appropriate gesture? Not only are there some issues that might deserve more respect than others, such as the genocidal crimes of colonialism, there are also risks inherent in such post-colonial acts of irony and self-distancing.

For Hutcheon, irony is not and should not just be a disbelief or distance from what one says (as it is for Rorty). Irony has a political and ethical force. One speaks the language of colonialism and reason ironically in order to display its violence, force and delimited viewpoint. However, this critical repetition does not only risk being unnoticed or misunderstood. It still allows the voice of colonialism to speak, even in quotation marks. Hutcheon herself can reach no conclusion on this issue. On the one hand she maintains the value of irony in creating a distance from Western discourses and narratives of reason. It is precisely because, from a position of postmodern postcolonialism, one cannot find or desire a better position of truth and authority, that one adopts irony to present any authority or history as one fiction among others. On the other hand, not only can such gestures of distancing and irony fail to be read, they also allow the West to keep speaking itself, even if one is speaking with a full sense of the violence and limits of one’s context.