TSAI

POSTMODERN IMMANENCE

One way to understand postmodernity is to see it as a radical rejection or redefinition of irony. If irony demands some idea or point of view above language, contexts or received voices, postmodernity acknowledges that all we have are competing contexts and that any implied ‘other’ position would itself be a context. Postmodernity would be a society of simulation and immanence with no privileged point from which competing voices could be judged. One would have to accept one’s own position as one among others, and as thoroughly unoriginal. One could be ironic, not by breaking with contexts but in recognising any voice as an effect of context, and then allowing contexts to generate as much conflict, collision and contradiction as possible, thereby precluding any fixity or meta-position.

Alternatively, one could see postmodernity as the impossibility of overcoming irony. Any attempt to reduce the world to discourses, contexts, language-games or relative points of view would itself generate a point of view of recognition: the point of view of the postmodernist who continually affirms the end of meta-narratives, the point of view that is other than the beliefs of feminism, Marxism, nationalism or any other belief in identity.

Neither position is possible, and yet both seem inevitable. Postmodern irony in its radical form works with this contradiction. Insofar as one speaks one must adopt or generate a point of view, one must say something. Even speaking ironically, or being other than what is said, requires one to express a position. And the point of view above such a position, the disembodied, impersonal, implied and absent ironic narrator has—from Socrates to the present—created its own style, context, manner and morality. Far from speaking from ‘nowhere’ postmodern literature has problematised the impersonal point of view, the point of view that would be other than life. It has done so by presenting the dual force of all saying.

Traditional irony is intuited or suspected because one assumes a principle of non-contradiction. If the text is contradictory, absurd, clichéd or self-refuting, then we must assume that what is said is not meant. However, one cannot remain in a position of pure not-saying; for the not-saying is itself an act of speech. Postmodern texts have shown all the ways in which not-saying or ironic detachment generates a specific said. Saying is always saying that. The voice from nowhere has a style, position, commitment and force. One must be aware of the force and violence of a closed and unquestioning context; at the same time, one must also be aware that in speaking one nevertheless says something. But just as there can be no position of ironic not-saying, for the position above speech generates its own ‘said’, so there can never be a position of pure saying. All speech is haunted by irony. Not only can we question whether what is said is really meant; any act of speech can be repeated and quoted in another context, generating unintended forces. Further, and more importantly, insofar as speaking creates some event of decision, force and difference, or makes a claim about what is other than itself, it must refer to what is not itself. One can only make a statement about the world, or really say something, if one recognises the force of contradiction. To assert that something is the case is only a forceful speech act in a context where one could or would assert that it is not the case. As the contemporary Yale school critic J.Hillis Miller has observed, if something is universally and unquestionably true then it does not need to be said. Saying something unquestionably true can never be a speech act of one’s own: universality can have no copyright (Miller 2001, 70). To recite a multiplication table is not to say anything at all; one only speaks, or speaks with force, if what one says can be contradicted, if what is asserted can also not be asserted.

On the one hand, to speak is to adopt a position and style, to say that something is. On the other hand, such a saying or position could only make sense, or be a position, if it is articulated against what it is not. Is one really speaking or saying anything if what is said is what must be true? An utterance has force or speaks only to the extent to which it is what is not already assumed. If one wants to speak and be heard, to be taken as saying something, then one must commit to this rather than that. One must rely upon the principle of non-contradiction, a commitment that in saying this one negates or rejects its contrary. At the same time, this very commitment also demands and requires contradiction, for to be saying something, to be asserting this with any force, is also to acknowledge the force and validity of what one is not saying. Addressing an other or communicating is not the circulation of the already known. An assertion has force or makes a difference only if it makes a claim about what lies beyond the speech act.

To make sense or interpret what someone says not only requires some meaning behind the signifiers or words used. There cannot just be the circulation of signs, with no logic, order, hierarchy or conflict. To speak is to be recognised as saying something, rather than emitting noise. In listening or interpreting one must direct oneself to what the speech act in itself is not. We interpret a speech act as sincere or ironic depending on whether we take what it says to be true or to be contradictory: contradicting either what the speaker has said or usually says, or contradicting what we take to be true. Irony relies on the force of contradiction; we assume irony if what is said cannot be meant or is not the case. But irony also inhabits contradiction: we cannot say ‘a’ and ‘not-a’, or we cannot say what we all assume or know to be false, so the speech act must be ironic. However, some of the most complex forms of irony intensify contradiction; they do not clearly contradict the true or the logical in order to present themselves as in opposition to what is said; they do not allow for a truth or sense behind the speech act. The speech act produces a conflict of sense, expressing both sides of an assertion with equal force.

This inhabitation of contradiction or sense of irony can mark texts that are not presented as ironic. Andrea Dworkin, the radical American feminist, has been a tireless critic of pornography, with a great deal of the force of her position relying upon what she takes to be the obvious violence of the pornographic text. Her Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) quotes a great deal of pornography, and presents this pornographic material as an act of representational violence against women. To read Dworkin literally and sincerely requires a clear distinction between the author and the material she quotes; it also requires a clear distinction between the use of pornographic material—those who read and view the violent material—and the mention of pornography—those feminists, like Dworkin, who can repeat the material in order to show, but not commit, its violence.

Now, on the one hand, Dworkin wants to not say or not mean what she is quoting; she positions herself and her readers as other than the discourse that is being repeated, judged and objectified. On the other hand, however, Dworkin’s text nevertheless does say what she insists ought not to be said. Her text can only work critically, like any argument, by giving voice to its other. But when arguments concern the very force of speech and representation, it is the very mention of the object, such as the quotation of pornography, that gives further life and force to the object it aims to destroy. If irony is saying one thing and meaning another, we can see an irony in Dworkin’s text: she says that she is other than, opposed to, innocent of, the violence of pornography, but in her critique and objectification of the discourse of pornography she cannot avoid speaking through, or mentioning, its voice.

This unintended contradiction—that one can only be other than pornographic by repeating the discourse of pornography—is manifestly exploited in much postmodern ironic literature. Whereas Dworkin’s text presents itself as simply other than the violent voices it would innocently mention, a great deal of post-colonial and feminist literature has acknowledged the essential complicity of voice. To speak from a position outside Western reason, to present oneself as other than the objectifying, elevated and moral voice of conscience is, once again, to place oneself in a position of elevation. The tactic for dealing with this is to say and not-say, to be ironic.

It may be the case that there is no already given, innocent and pure voice outside reason. It may be the case that in order to think what is other than Western phallogocenrism we have to rely on the very concepts of essence and identity that have marked Western thought. Feminists have referred to this strategy as ‘strategic essentialism’. To appeal to ‘woman’ as reason’s ‘Other’ reinforces the traditional dichotomies of male/female, active/passive, rational/irrational, universal and contingent and so on. The strategy lies in repeating or saying this discourse in order to demonstrate its force. One cannot be other than the voice of reason, for to set oneself up as the truer voice would be to employ all the strategies of reason. But one can repeat the discourse of reason in order to show its force, what it does, and the figures through which it is sustained. When Angela Carter writes The Bloody Chamber (1979) or when Luce Irigaray writes Speculum of the Other Woman ([1974] 1985) they both articulate a female voice, a voice of imagery, fluidity, sensuality, emotive complexity and empathy, that is other than the universal, disembodied, rational and elevated judgement of reason. They take up the traditional images of the feminine in order both to affirm the value of those images—the joy of embodiment, sensuality, ambiguity and fluidity—and to demystify those images. The fecund, multiple, corporeal and poetic feminine is a repetition of reason’s myth of the feminine. In expressing this female voice as other than masculine, they acknowledge that ‘the feminine’ is already masculine, produced through the negation of reason, as a critique of reason. The voice they articulate is both affirmed and denied. It is affirmed as female in order to counter the myth of the feminine upon which male reason has already formed itself. Only by imagining itself as other than the body, contradiction, the passions and chaos does male reason erect itself as universal. But the female voice is also ironised and negated; the feminine articulated by Carter and Irigaray is articulated as mythic. The feminine is presented as reason’s other. Carter and Irigaray both write from a point of view of female autonomy, as other than the violence and judgement of reason, and recognise that the articulation of this female voice maintains the dichotomy between reason and its other.

This tactic of saying and not-saying characterises a broad variety of post-structuralist positions. On the one hand, we continue to speak the discourse of rights, humanism, universal reason and truth; on the other hand, we also recognise the violent and local figures through which these discourses are sustained. Post-structuralist ethics is aware of complicity: to attack the Western tradition of domination, rationalism, judgement and law is only possible through the invocation of a higher law or judgement. Derrida’s response to this has been to affirm both the ethical possibility of law, or its elevation above any received tradition, and the impossibility of the law, for one always speaks from within a tradition. On the one hand, one wants to say that Western reason has been used to domesticate, subordinate and tyrannise its others, but such a judgement also employs the very sense of reason and properly universal justice it would deny. We can only continue to speak through the voice of the law with a full sense of its complicity, impossibility and contradictory force.

Against a postmodern irony, such as Rorty’s that would simply allow us to speak and not really mean what we say and that would happily allow us to say and not-say at one and the same time, both Deleuze and Derrida, in quite different ways, take the necessity recognised by the tradition of irony to new possibilities. For Derrida, all speech is potentially ironic, both because a concept has a sense we neither author nor control and because there are nonsensical forces at work in the articulation of concepts. From this point of view, reading literature today would maintain both the force and the problem of irony. We would need to acknowledge the problem of sense or meaning beyond manifest intent, as in classical irony, but we would also need to read for the inhuman, machinic or errant forces that preclude such a sense from governing the text.