In Latin, ironia, and in Greek, eirōneia, stand for irony.

Transcription

1 2 Definitions of Irony In Latin, ironia, and in Greek, eirōneia, stand for irony. The word is used in everyday speech and in philosophical treatises. In language it is listed as a figure of speech, but in philosophy its meaning is harder to fathom. As a working definition, we take irony to mean a pretense, ignorance, or falseness. Irony refers to many ideas verbal irony, dramatic irony, situational irony, irony of fate, irony of satire, and Socratic irony. Verbal ironies are common in speech, such as when we say one thing but mean the opposite for example, saying it is a nice day when it is actually raining heavily. Situational irony is also well known, such as in the saying that someone killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. We mention dramatic ironies as used in Sophocles Oedipus Rex and in Shakespeare s dramas. To further underscore the significance of irony, Goethe, a German literary authority, spoke of artful irony designed to please us, good willed irony with their justness, broadness of view, gentleness in adversity and constancy in changes, and narrative irony, affirming that truth can be known only through its manifold manifestation and reflections (Goethe 1995, Vol. 3, 184, 256; Vol. 10, 9). Booth, a modern rhetorician, gives us definitions of irony that are overt (stable and local or finite) and covert (unstable and infinite) (Booth 1974, 235). Philosophers use irony as a path to the truth. Two philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ferdinand Saussure, working M. Szenberg et al., Economic Ironies Throughout History Michael Szenberg and Lall Ramrattan 2014

2 10 Economic Ironies Throughout History independently, have asserted that language holds the key to explaining the world. Language uses words, while thought uses ideas. Ideas represent objects, which can be used in relationships to form propositions which we can study for their truth or falsity (Harris 1996, 2). We use language to communicate thoughts to others. Keep in mind that language may fail us. We find gaps between the expression and the ideas expressed and between ideas and facts (5). While Saussure is willing to separate linguistic from non-linguistic social phenomena, Wittgenstein bases language on social language games (113). For Saussure, the content of a concept is not defined positively but differentially or negatively, through contrasts of signs (115). Wittgenstein conveys that a word is put to social use. In both Wittgenstein and Saussure, we may want to value the truth more than the appearance. The proposition p, or that it is raining, can be verified by looking at the evidence. For Wittgenstein, the world is a totality of facts, not of things (Wittgenstein 1922, 31 [1.1]). From facts we build propositions to answer our problems. Even if we are able to answer all our scientific questions, the problems of life have still not been touched at all (188 [6.52]) in which case we will cast away the propositions, as we throw away the ladder when we have climbed up on it (189 [6, 54]). Irony is like the propositional ladder in that search for the truth. To quote Wittgenstein, Everything we do consists in trying to find the liberating word (Ostrow 2002, 1). For propositional ladders with the correspondence theory, a liberating word must correspond with external fact. The coherence theory holds that truth should not correspond to an external thing, that propositions must not contradict each other, but should instead cohere. The practical view is when we take truth to be that a thing works, such as when we say capitalism is the fastest way to increase the wealth of a nation. We will examine ironies dealing with all those aspects of truth. We start with background materials to lay the foundation for the meanings of irony.

3 Definitions of Irony 11 Sign, Referential, and Narrative Meanings of Irony Modern media tends to represent the meanings of irony through the use of signs or by the referential or narrative method. The naming of things was perhaps the first level of meaning attached to a word, after which the concepts and reasoning emerged. Sign and the Meaning of Irony A first understanding of the linguistic meaning of irony would transform the analysis from a theory of things to a theory of signs (Derrida 1974, xvii). In his De Interpretatione, Aristotle said that the spoken sound is a sign or symbol for affections in the soul. Wittgenstein wrote that every word in language signifies something. The meanings of the simple sign (the words) must be explained to us... By means of propositions we explain ourselves (Wittgenstein 1922, 69). The proposition is a picture of reality (Wittgenstein 1968, 7). In terms of linguistic usage, an irony would be a sound pattern. It does not relate to actual sounds, but to the image of these sounds in our head. Such images get into our head through the gateway of our senses during our waking state. They fade into the concepts we hold of things, and they appear in our dream state as well. Signs, images, and ideas on which ironies are formed are not always about mind stuff, but also involve our intuition. Wittgenstein seems to be using signs in terms of mathematical or logical signs. The relation of a to b, written arb, is a sign. He speaks of the identity symbol as a sign. Irony in his system seems to be the misuse of signs in proposition and language (Russell 1922, 7). In a deconstruction situation, we use dichotomies on arguments that are themselves subject to deconstruction, a pair of contrasted terms, which places us as a mild or conservative presence in our deconstruction thinking (Wheeler 1988, 239). We can deconstruct a text with dichotomies by

4 12 Economic Ironies Throughout History showing how they undermine or implicitly deny the text. Wittgenstein takes out the dichotomy by noting what is said and when it is said (244). A sign is the basic concept of meaning in linguistic philosophy. Popular usage of a sign dates to Saussure (1986, 67), who defined it as a kind of ratio, a relation of sound pattern and concept. In the case of Socratic irony, for instance, the word irony would act as a sound pattern for the concept of selfdeprecation. This would be written as (self-deprecation/ Irony). One reading of such a sign sees that the term irony is a signal for the concept of self-deprecation. The brackets stand for a circle around the ratio. The arrows indicate that the concept and its signal are united or inseparable. One distinguishes three things: the Signifier (irony), the Signified (self-deprecation), and the Sign (Barthes 2009, 83). An interior relationship unites irony with self-deprecation. An analogy can be made with musical theory, where the language of Middle C unites the concept of pitch and vibration on the one hand with the acoustic image of sound on the other (Waterman 1956, 307). The definition of a sign is abstract. It is not as simple as relating a name to an object (Saussure 2009, 66). Traditional representation theory associates a word to its meaning, as does a dictionary. Saussure wanted to free the sign from such positive doctrines. He gives the analogy of a street which was demolished and rebuilt and is still referred to as the same street. What matters is the street s connections to other streets, and not the materials that built it (107). Signs appear to us in many ways. The rival terms for a sign are signal, index, icon, symbol, allegory, or trope, all of which bring out its relational aspect. It is well documented in philosophical texts that deep distinctions between, say, signs and symbols are not easy (Hospers 1967, 4 5). From the sign point of view, a trope is another sign that is created in a special way. It is formed by taking the signifier from one sign and the signified from another. For the linguist Paul de Man, irony is the trope of tropes (Antal 2005, 234). Such a relation may or may

5 Definitions of Irony 13 not imply a representation, an analogy, and immediacy, or an existential relation, which may be interpreted differently by philosophers such as Hegel and Peirce and by psychologists such as Jung and James (Barthes 1964, 35 37). Meaning and Value of Signs In general, meaning relates a sign with other signs that follow or precede it, and value relates a sign to a reservoir of other signs it may be drawn from (Barthes 2009, 180). The sign (selfdeprecation/irony) will give the meaning of irony as of a moment in time, which is a static or paradigmatic concept of a sign. In the dynamic or syntagmatic view of signs, the distance between two signs posits a gap. An easy way of understanding a gap is to think of reading the same book twice (Derrida 1974, xii). This gap forms a source of differences in values, like a chess piece taking its value by the position it occupies on the chess board (Saussure 2009, 88). A sign therefore becomes very important through its surroundings (118). This is because the values between the signs in a chain may change. According to Roland Barthes, a linguist who has socialized the concept of a sign, a sign is like a coin. The value of the coin is the amount of goods and services it can command in the market. The coin maintains its value in relation to other coins as well (Barthes 1964, 14). A sign is a token for a concept or meaning (Saussure 2009, 114). An idea is fixed in a sound (111). It is like a sheet of paper where thought is on one side and sound on the other (ibid.). As we shall see, psychoanalysts such as Lacan have used highly mathematical models to get from one side to the other. A material sign is not necessary to invoke an idea because a language can contrast something with nothing (86). In general, the meaning of a word depends on the conventional use of the word in society and not on the sound pattern. Saussure s separation of value from meaning allows a scientific

6 14 Economic Ironies Throughout History investigation of the latter. A sign s value is revealed by its use in relation to other signs in the language. The meaning of a word may be investigated by the method of contrast and similarity in usage, an analysis based on facts, elevating meaning to a scientific level (Waterman 1956, 308). Referential and Ironic Meanings Some poets and philosophers give a referential meaning of irony. For poet Ezra Pound, a Chinese ideogram for red can be derived by combining the abbreviated pictures of objects such as roses, cherries, iron rust, and flamingoes (Pound 1934, 22). Pound looked at how poets use groups of words and observed that they appear to be dancing in relation to an object; he called this phanopoeia, a new type of irony. Referential meaning for reality varies among philosophers. Bertrand Russell s set theory proposes that when we look at a group of things such as apples, we notice the idea of unity or oneness. Cartesians look at objects inside and outside of themselves, and declare, I am. In a world in turmoil where we do not hope to find the real, philosophers look for a man-made reality. Kierkegaard said, The phrase know yourself means: separate yourself from the other (Kierkegaard 1989, 177). This separation is necessary when one is entangled with social activities and customs and cannot reflect. An ironic stance is therefore necessary for this separation to occur. Narrative and Ironic Meaning Novels exemplify narrative irony well. George Eliot used irony in narrative discourses that lead one to self-scrutiny in Middlemarch and to complacency in The Mill on the Floss (Rignall 2000, 173). We learn that when Jane Austen penned the first line of Pride and Prejudice, that a single rich man must be in need of a wife, she really intended the opposite (Burdan 2001, 197).

7 Definitions of Irony 15 For Charles Dickens, the title Great Expectations itself is ironic (Boghian 2010, 55). Following modern research, we can distinguish between a sign and a frame structure of irony. Narrative signs are metonymic (Barthes 2009, 216). A discourse that is in the postmodernist s tradition subscribes to a narrative meaning of irony. The sign of the narrative can take the personal (I) and the apersonal (He) forms (239). In composing a paragraph, for instance, one may start with a simple subject-verb-object structure. The following sentences may use a pronoun to represent the subject and maintain unity with the first sentence. In that way, we find that the subject ironically dies out in the paragraph. The cognitive scientists hold that the words we use are defined by frames of thought. Frames are a brain phenomenon. For example, the frame under which we do commerce is the market framework, where we play the role of buyers and sellers who exchange money for goods and services (Lakoff 2008, 22). Our brains are framed by us or by others. When we think about things we structure our brains directly. When we think with symbols and metaphors and ironies, we structure our brains indirectly. When we say prices rise, two parts of our brains are activated: one that thinks of vertical movements, the other that thinks of quantity. When the two sources are activated, thoughts are spread outward through a connected neural network. When the two streams of thoughts meet, they form a circuit: Neurons that fire together, wire together (83). We see the world and perform our actions according to how our brain is framed by that circuit. This is called the execution or X-schema (27). Let s see where irony fits into this cognitive approach. Lakoff and Johnson purport that we think and act fundamentally in terms of metaphor. They define metaphor somewhat differently from the dictionary. Essentially a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 5). This seems similar to what Douglas Hofstader s tried to do in Gödel, Escher, Bach when he attempted to infer the I from atoms, as we go from = 4

8 16 Economic Ironies Throughout History to Gödel s impossibility theorem. In those schemas, it will be ironic if we try to go from appearance to reality. New research on quantum physics is demonstrating that consciousness is not local. One can send a message without a signal through consciousness. In other words, consciousness is replacing matter as the basis of our being. Irony can be transmitted simply by thoughts. This was deduced from the doubleslit experiments on light particles. It seems that electrons can choose which slit to go through. Within the quantum relations between the potential brain and potential conscious, one can communicate ironic narratives without using signals. To bring out meaning, narratives integrate fundamental phonemes into words, words into sentences, sentences into discourses, discourses into rhetoric, and rhetoric into belleslettres. The narrative is distributed over events and has meaningful common structures. From the sign point of view, meaning is defined by the word and by its link to neighboring signs. From the frame point of view, meaning involves many words and a system of frames, metaphors, and ironies. Meaning occurs in narrative when two parts of a frame undergo a neural binding. For example, take the meaning of relief in the business and economic world. There is a rescue narrative which aims to help the victim, an affliction narrative for the afflicted party, and a binding that rescues one from affliction (Lakoff 2008, ). Now to understand tax relief, we have to frame taxes economically as a deadweight loss to society or morally as taking money that belongs to the taxpayer. We have therefore used several narratives that bring out a hierarchy of meaning. The various definitions raise the question as to the pragmatic uses of the term irony. Booth iterated several steps in order to make his stable irony practical. The reader must reject the literal or surface meaning, fiddle with alternative interpretations, come up with the author s view, and choose a new meaning or cluster of meanings (10 12). A student textbook recommends that we ask not what the speaker says but what he means.

9 Definitions of Irony 17 Then we determine that the speaker is opposing the thesis or proposition of the situation, and finally we try to decipher the speaker s intended meaning (Winner et al. 1988, 54). Some Generalizations on Meaning, Values, Reference, and Narrative Ironies According to Schlegel, one of the best writers on the subject, irony helps us uncover an unknown side of humans that is not unveiled through rational behavior (Schlegel 1971, 268). Schlegel states: Irony is the form of a paradox. Paradox is simultaneously good and great (149). Schlegel thinks that morality would be vulgar without a sense of paradox (248). This paradox might be taken as a contrast between reality and appearance (Muecke 1970, 31). A philosopher might say he is seeking the truth, which for him would be reality. His method may be to doubt everything that appears to him as the truth. This doubting does not apply only to word and meaning, but to man and the universe as well. Mostly, we only see the appearance of a thing, not the reality that is in the background. With Derrida and Barthes, we witnessed a shift from language inheriting a textual meaning, to speech where it is intertextual (Allen 2003, 82). Intertextual analysis is highly complex, because the meaning of a word in a text is not limited within the text but extends outward to customs, codes, discourses, and other texts (ibid.). Here, text is something woven or spun, made up of quotations, references, and echoes, and is different from a book, which is something tangible that can be put on the shelf (83). Texts are woven into functional, actionable, and narrative ironies. Spoken words have ironic functional aspects. In religious works, the word occupies a position of first principle. It is transformed into great sayings that drive individuals to take action. The history of mankind documents narratives of ironies in each epoch. Functions, actions, and narratives are renewed in

10 18 Economic Ironies Throughout History each person s life, regardless of epoch, country, and culture, and no one theory has a monopoly on the ironies that prevail. Modern theories about irony seek testable hypotheses to be confronted with data. Gibbs has surveyed some of the modern studies of irony from a cognitive point of view (Gibbs and Colston 2007, 3). The theories focused on verbal forms, context comprehension, social functions, developing understanding, and situational forms of ironies. Theories are needed because the literal meaning of an utterance is original, while its opposite meaning is used in verbal or situational ironies. The theories seek to limit the scope of irony to thought and language and to broaden the base of verbal ironies. For instance, one can use an utterance to express his or her true feelings, or just mention it as a reference. This expansion creates a gap between what is echoed and what is expected. If someone says to a basketball player, Nice shot! that could be an echo of what the fans predicted, or what is generally expected of a good player. This new contribution makes the testing of irony comprehension possible. The gap between the actual and the expected determines our lives. Irony resides in these gaps for instance, between what is said and the situation described (Giora 2011, 20 21). This allows one to take a scientific approach to irony. For instance, Rachel Giora tested eight hypotheses on three views: direct access view, where strong contextual support is activated immediately; exclusively pragmatic model, where literal interpretation is activated first; and a graded salience hypothesis, where meaning coded and held foremost in our mind cannot be blocked. The test involved a text given to participants who were cued for ironic and non-ironic interpretations. The experiments found that ironic interpretation was not supported in the direct access view. The main finding is that salience-based interpretations of utterances were immediate and held for a long duration (29). Modern reflection on the treatment of ironies over time, place, and culture reveals a tropological view on the one hand, and paradoxical and surreal views on the other. Tropes in the early forms of ironies are founded on a clear-cut distinction of

11 Definitions of Irony 19 what irony was and was not. Now we are beginning to see that irony has a pluralistic form, where speech interacts with context and situations. A new core paradoxical view is now being developed. Paul Simpson has recently drawn on pragmatics of linguistic philosophy to synthesize production and reception of ironies for social and cultural phenomena (Simpson 2011, 33). His survey of irony in that regard brings out a conceptual paradox. He considers binaries about assertion and meaning and between encyclopedic knowledge and situational context as sub-definitions. He came up with five categories of eclectic ironies: oppositional, as when asserting the opposite of what the speaker intends; echoic, such as when Mark Antony says six times in Julius Caesar that Brutus is an honorable man, echoing or repeating an utterance or stated belief; conferred, as when we interpret non-ironic texts with deviations; dramatic, as in Shakespeare on drama; and ironic belief, where fictions are treated as if they are real. One can approach the surrealistic view of irony in five ways: a process to derive the meaning, context dependence (which is the amount of contextual information necessary to recognize the ironic character), cancelling (which is the prospect for cancelling the ironic character), interpretation, and humor (Kapogianni 2011, 51). Eleni Kapogianni exemplified this method through the use of dialog. If to the question: Are you going to school tomorrow? the answer is No, I am riding my unicorn to Alaska! then the reply is surrealistic and ironic. This new view of irony does not contain a negation as in standard ironies and does not require much context. As we move from the consideration of simple to complex ironies, we will distinguish between their temporal and differentiated uses. We will explore the influence of ironies in different time periods, naming the main protagonists and their methodology for the period. By the time we reach the modern period, we will have achieved a good appreciation for the complexity of the subject and its application to our period, as exemplified in the modern media.

12 20 Economic Ironies Throughout History Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacques Lacan on Irony Psychoanalysts have made a significant contribution to our understanding of irony and the real. For Sigmund Freud, an understanding of irony does not require us to consult the subconscious (Freud 1966, 767). Essentially, Freud adopted a definition of irony that expresses the opposite of what one has in mind. In dream-work, a composite image easily represents a pair of opposite images and changes a dream-thought into its opposite, creating difficulties for the interpretation of dreams. Freud calls his system the (psi) y-system, which starts with a perception system, the P-system, and ends with a mobility system, the Cs system ( ). In the I or Ego psychical system, bodily needs are related to motor activities. In that view, only things in the ego can become conscious and therefore display irony. In another psychical system, the it or id organizes instincts that populate the unconscious. Forces in the ego are born from the unconscious as well. The ego looks around the outer world for favorable things to satisfy unconscious instincts. It then adapts to and modifies the outer world through the reality principle, which replaces the pleasure principle. Conflict arises when the ego represses instinctive desires for satisfaction from the id (Freud 1947, 14 18; 20 23). Freud demonstrates this reality process in a linear circuit: Starting with an observation in external reality through perception (P), a memory (trace) occurs (M), which gets to the unconscious (Ucs). The unconscious then goes through the pre-conscious (Pcs) to get to the conscious (Cs) (491). Next, Freud states the problem with reality: The unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indicators of our sensory organs (Freud 1966, 541). The bottom line of the discussion is that Reality will always remain unknowable (Freud , Vol. XIII, 196).

13 Definitions of Irony 21 Carl Jung, another major psychoanalyst working on analytic or complex psychology, has unfolded a major irony that can be stated as such: we think we are the master of our house, but at any time an archetype can erupt from our unconscious and disturb what we are doing consciously. The unconscious perception therefore does what our consciousness ordinarily does when we look at the house and ask ourselves Who lived there? (Jung 1957, Vol. 1, 96). We are tempted to say that our consciousness is playing a random game against the unconscious. Jung stated that whenever the unconscious fails to co-operate, man is instantly at a loss, even in the most ordinary activities (Jung 1978, 120). A non-cooperation is possible since an archetype can be evil or good. Our psychical world and its realities are discussed as archetype. The unconscious for Jung is discussed as complexes, which includes instincts, mythological and religious materials. When we have emotions, a complex of associations take place, which Jung calls a feeling-toned complex of ideas (Jung 1961, Vol. 4, 26). For Jung, irony can also be seen as a turning away from a monistic view of psychoanalytic problems toward a view that is dualistic, being based on the principle of opposites, and possibly pluralistic, since it recognizes a multiplicity of relatively autonomous psychic complexes (329). Alternatively, it is a turning away from the emphasis of pathological aspects and turning toward religious experiences. Basically, Jung sees in all that happens the play of opposites, from which he derived the idea of psychic energy. The human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. In life, instincts come into collusion with the spirit, and both are unknowns. One should stay positive to empiricism, biology, and religion as well. It is not the children of the flesh, but the children of God who know freedom ( ). In an irony with Jung, we look at one of his diagnoses. In the diagnosis of facts, Jung used an association test (a list of 100 stimulus words) to find out if a boy was stealing. Although the boy consciously wanted to hide his theft complex, Jung was

14 22 Economic Ironies Throughout History able to make him confess (Vol. 4, ). The explanation is that the psychic complexes are disaggregated. Asking questions such as Who is doing this? and Who is speaking? help to synthesize the unconscious personality (52 53). Another major psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan ( ), spoke of irony in the Freudian unconscious. He wrote that the death instinct involves a basic irony, since its meaning has to be sought in the conjunction of two contrary terms: the instinct... being the law that governs in... a cycle of behavior... and death (Lacan 1977, 101). He also speaks of irony in relation to the real and the unconscious. For what the unconscious does is show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real (Lacan 1981, 22). The gap he speaks of is a hole, a discontinuity in the unconscious that represents unfulfilled biological needs that were not met for us. This is something lacking in us and therefore an object of desire for us. Lacan concludes that The lack of the lack makes the real (ix). The real therefore is an object of desire. For Lacan, we approach a situation of irony because the unconscious finds itself, strictly speaking, on the opposite side to love (25). The way that an object of desire becomes an object of perception involves two more registers beside the real: the symbolic register and the imaginary register. To summarize, the imaginary is the first stage when the child does not distinguish between the conscious and the unconscious. It builds up to a mirror stage when the child distinguishes between the I and the image in the mirror. In the mirror state, the child is the signifier (S) and the image is the signified (s), written Ss (Lacan 1977, 149). Symbolic is used in a linguistic sense as word, language, and writing. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured as a language (Lacan 1981, 20). The real is a residual concept that accounts for what the imaginary and the symbolic cannot disclose. It is an unknown, as in algebra where we solve equations for the unknown value of x (Lacan 1977, x). With the three registers, Lacan translated Freud s linear process into a topological schema (Schema R and I). One topological

15 Definitions of Irony 23 object, the project plane, a disc, represents the unconscious of the subject. When we forget something like a proper name, a symbolic object, say object a becomes absent on the disk, and a hole is created. This absence turns a Moebius strip into a Klein bottle in the real register. The Klein bottle is taken to represent absences, emptiness, or irritation. Lacan speaks of a convergence of the delusional ego and the divine other in this process (212). This turning may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the Thou art that (7). Following Lacan, Jacques Alain-Miller speaks of the irony clinic. This clinic deals with the schizophrenic s irony, an irony of a person who does not involve any discourse with society. The symbolic is the real for such a person, who takes the word to be the thing. In linguists terminology, words communicate to words and not to things, and therefore cannot realize the world. There is no other, and our clinic will be ironic, that is to say, based on the inexistence of the Other as a defense against the real. Yet another type of irony is fathomed in the Lacanian inquiry. It has to do with an impasse. For Freud, analysis comes to a close with the castration complex. This is considered an ironic paradox because one closes an analysis with a problem, a complex. Lacan, who has observed this ironic paradox, tried to create a pass for the impasse.