Towards an Art of Irony with continual reference to Rodney Graham

Ed Atkins

2 Before beginning this essay in earnest it seems important to offer an initial explanation as to what is meant here by irony. Or at least, to examine why it might be difficult to say what irony definitely is. Or, at least, to explain why it might be impossible to say anything categorical and certainly not exhaustive about irony at all. As a result, elements of what follows may appear somewhat enigmatic. And as I will go on to intimate, irony is fundamentally reflexive: an essay about irony might also be an essay of irony. Nevertheless, recognising when and where irony is employed will be one of the overt (and covert) considerations hereafter concerning the subject and the reflexivity involved in writing about such a subject. Here, I am following in the laudable footsteps of Paul de Man, who opened his lecture of 4 April 1977, entitled The Concept of Irony, with a similarly oblique rejoinder1 . The title of that seminal lecture is taken from Kierkegaards doctoral thesis of the same name2 . Its an ironic title, notes de Man, because irony is not a concept.3 This begs the question: what is irony then, if not a concept? As de Man concedes, it seems impossible to get hold of a definition4 . He goes on to suggest that perhaps irony is tropological: a trope-like motion, a turning away, a deviation from literal and figurative meaning5 . But if this is the case, then surely its the trope of tropes6 : the ultimate, ever-turning trope. But before this we might ask, what is a trope? Certainly the linguistic remit of what might ordinarily be considered a trope does not attempt to encompass the latent existential aspect of irony.

This definitional incertitude has a fine pedigree, stretching back to ancient Greece and sustained passionately in the disputes that raged between some of the finest thinkers at
Warminski, Andrzej (ed.), Aesthetic Ideology Paul de Man, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996 pp. 163 164 2 The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates This also provides the somewhat ironic referent for the title of this thesis. 3 Warminski, op. cit., p.163 4 Ibid. p.164 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.
1

3 the end of the 18th century in Germany. This was ironys most expository era, and was characterised by fierce debate (Solger complains that Schlegel never actually explains what irony is; Hegel writes that Solger doesnt know what hes talking about; Kierkegaard protests that Hegel actually knows nothing of irony; and Climacus (a subsequent, pseudonymous disguise for Kierkegaard) completely remoulds Kierkegaards concept of irony and so on). Definitional language seems to be in trouble when irony is concerned.7 It is here that reflexion proffers a key. Although Kierkegaard is probably the most famous exemplar of the methodology, there are plenty of possible exponents of reflexivity in talking or writing about irony ironically, where definitive statements concerning irony itself may or may not be true, or at least intended as such. This mitigation of culpability lies deep and brooding at the core of irony, and in particular in its performative function. It exemplifies the constitutional reflexivity of the ironist, and the mooted (as explored later in this essay) possibility of irony actually producing subjectivity. Certitude concerning irony (or ironic certitude) is oxymoronic. So it seems important that I begin by being brave and attempting to provisionally delineate what I mean by irony here. Or, at least, what I would like irony to tropologically turn away from. Or at least, what might be the use in a critique of irony as a determination of subjectivity8 , and as the only legitimate form of communication for the artist9 . This final charge will lead us tentatively to the implicit core of this essay: the possibility of irony as art. To this end, I will refer throughout to the work of the artist Rodney Graham, who will vicariously serve as both cipher and actor in my thesis, not so much after Kierkegaards thesis and its continual reference to Socrates but more as an interpretative construction that may serve to elucidate the
Ibid. Kahn, Abrahim, Melancholy, Irony, and Kierkegaard, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, no. 17, 1985, p. 71 9 Breuer, Rolf, Irony, Literature, Schizophrenia, New Literary History, 1980, p. 114
8 7

4 ambiguities of the practice of irony. And not empirically, but as an instance neither arbitrary nor epitome. In this vein I will take on the role of interpreter rather than author rather than ironist (if the distinction between ironist and audience can be comfortably made) thus giving a rather duplicitous shape to the social aspect of irony, as constituted through its interpretation as such. Needless to say, Rodney Graham himself is a key figure in all of this. His complicity is a requisite, even if it must be stolen. I will predominantly focus on Grahams performance works, and the films, photographs and the products that accompany them. In each of these works Graham himself takes centre stage, always playing the protagonist(s); always historical stereotypes both pre-modern and Modernist but always also performing, recognisably, as a version of himself. Formally, his work is often endless: his films loop interminably; characters fall unconscious only to awaken back at the beginning of the film. Wheels spin and spirals corkscrew. This irresolute movement is echoed in the myriad themes that orbit around and within the work. Entire epochs are conjured through both nebulous clich and historical pedantry a curious combination of genre (cinema, fiction, Romance) and scientific research. I will argue that Grahams work might be understood and critiqued through the lens of irony. That Graham himself is an ironist of the type traced in this essay, and that the form of irony is inscribed indelibly within his work. I will assert that these forms repetition, irresolution, the infinite; a whirling trope and their expression, is the essence of irony, connecting the ironic with the creative, with art. Grahams presence in this essay is as subject to irony and of irony in order that we might in some way answer de Mans contention that irony is not a concept10 with the notion of irony as practice. *
10

Warminski, op. cit., p.163

5 Etymologically, irony was borne of a lie. Eironia ironys treacherous parent translates as dissimulation: the veiling of a truth beneath a lie. Used, in fact, as a direct synonym for lie by Aristophanes in his plays11 , eironia is an opaque and open lie never revealing the truth beneath its surface. Eironia was always recognisable always perceived as the deception that it was but nevertheless pronounced its opposite as true. This was the irony of Socrates, as described by Plato and Xenophon: employed historically in a genial pedagogic manner, with Socrates the teacher feigning ignorance in order to inspire a false sense of self-confidence in his pupils and subsequently subtly reveal the falsity therein. When Socrates feigned ignorance, he asserted that he knew nothing, but because his audience certainly knew this not to be true, he was also asserting that he knew more than them. Furthermore, and more complicatedly, he was also proclaiming that he knew enough to know he knew nothing. In this sense, Socrates feigned ignorance was both true and false. Though Socrates method was objectively transparent in respect to his dialogues (everyone knew he wasnt actually ignorant), the more complex truth of Socrates personality remained forever hidden, through his apparently complete espousal of and practice as ironist. This explicit irony of the Socratic dialogues eironia that seemingly frustrates the audiences desire for stated truth, in practice serves to ease dialectical difficulty by disallowing the actual intrusion of a concept that is in direct opposition to the lie, whilst allowing the interpretation thereof to support that dialectic. Although the lie is seen for what it is (albeit convolutedly), its oblique purpose as pedagogy, as benefit, as modesty and as subject position appears to outweigh the presumed importance of being told a straightforward truth; that this truth might only serve to undermine the subterranean (sub-textual) message of the irony.

See Aristophanes, The Acharnians and three other plays of Aristophanes, trans. Frere, J. Hookham, London, Dent, 1909

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6 The convolution of Socratic irony as outlined above, was rooted in its practice in the development of a mode of address that contained (one assumes) sufficient histrionics to convey the opposite of what was stated. Yet the disparity between the lie and the truth the former realised but false; the latter abstracted but true conjured an ulterior area of interpretation that, although not yet allowing a truly subjective reading, nevertheless pluralised doubled the meaning of the statement. These meanings, in superposition, are homogenised, holding both truth and falsity in suspension. The potential effect of this upon the audience is significant: (partial) interpretative freedom. And although this possible individual subjection was by no means complete in classical Greece, it served as the beginning of a trajectory within ironys development: a trajectory towards interpretative freedom and, consequently, a certain amount of cooperation between ironist and audience, to which I will return later. This nascent, certainly contingent interpretative freedom has notable parity with a later development in the Middle Ages of a theory of allegory which presented the possibility of reading (interpreting) in ways other than the literal. Previously strict, closed readings of the Scriptures were opened up by the possibility of reading in an allegorical, anagogical or moral sense, allowing for a certain amount of flexibility and difference between individual subjects readings. Though, as Umberto Eco points out in The Open Work,
What in fact is made available is a range of rigidly pre-established and ordained interpretative solutions [that] never allow the reader to move outside the strict control of the author. [] And symbolism is objectively defined and organised into an ordered cosmos [] which each individual must understand in the only possible way, the one determined by the creative logos.12

12

Eco, Umberto, The Open Work, Harvard University Press, 1989 p.6

7 Despite the seeming invitation for a plurality of interpretations, the subject is ultimately denied this freedom by the author and/or the established stricture of the time. In the case of irony, however, the subterranean meaning is in opposition to the stated meaning. The violence of this ostensible juxtaposition is, in actual fact, a kind of superposition: a jarring negatively charged confluence of oppositions. The manifest difference being one in which the scaffold of convention, stricture and morality that supports the predetermination of meaning, is razed by none other than the ironist, denying, at will, the ontology of the time13 . * Rodney Grahams role as ironist begins in a dramatic mode. Beginning with Vexation Island (1997), continuing with How I became a Ramblin Man (1999), and preliminarily ending with City Self / Country Self (2000) (see appendix); Graham created a trilogy of films that explore, with great wit and skill, the idiom of cinema and its unique historiography of genre. Similarly and somewhat sub-textually he also explores the role of the contemporary artist as author and siphon, who, in this context, has equivalence with both the actor playing the role, and the role itself. To this end Graham performs as a buccaneer (replete with pertinent accoutrements and an Errol Flynn moustache); a gent and a country bumpkin (dressed in the received period costume of smock and britches); and a moseying cowboy (with leather-tasselled jacket, Stetson, steed and guitar). In each of these films Graham is also playing himself. These works are conceived more as Hollywood style star vehicles and less as auteur films14 with Graham assuming the role of the star. He is manifestly also the artist (though not the director in this analogy). The characters he plays are not really anything of the sort: they are archetypes; notional figures that denote their genre and
13 14

ibid. Wall text accompanying Grahams films as shown at Rodney Graham: A Little Thought, March 31 June 27 2004, Art Gallery of Ontario

8 in its conspicuous absence the reality that lies muffled and near unrecognisable in the recesses of empirical history. In this context of matte paradigms, Graham himself becomes the character as well as the actor and the artist. Inevitably, this confounds the conventional means we might have of understanding the narratives of these films. In a work by Rodney Graham, Rodney Graham the artist plays Rodney Graham the actor playing the part of the cowboy (in How I Became a Ramblin Man) who is, essentially, a Cowboy-type: a thick sediment of clothing, tools, landscapes, tics and plots that denote a genre as opposed to that invisible reality of cowboys. In this way, Graham leads us in a great circuitous and cumulative route all the way back to Rodney Graham, though not necessarily Rodney Graham himself. Like Socrates before him, Graham is detached not only from the conventions of his epoch but from all previous epochs also. In contrast to Ecos cited pseudo-openness found in latter forms of Medieval allegorical theory (and its actual legitimisation by the author or contemporary stricture as a whole), Graham disregards his own time and history in favour of an a-history: that is, a history according to genre. His is a meta-history that falsely appears to run parallel with(in) History, but is in actual fact the history of an affect: the history of cinemas historiography and its subsequent absorption into public consciousness. Graham effectively eliminates contemporaneous convention by positioning himself in that particular, ersatz past while at the same time revealing the fallacy therein. Again, there is the suggestion through rhetorical opposition, or perhaps an inversion of contemporaneity without the historicism of anachronism of the truth, unuttered. This permanently latent truth, so crucial to the recognition of irony, can be seen most explicitly within the role Graham assumes. Always already the artist and author, Graham seems to suggest that these genuine roles are as evasive as those within cinemas generic cast. The Artist, like the Cowboy, is an archetype a product of

9 genre. Rodney Grahams true self lies beneath this denotation, though is never revealed within his work. What is revealed is the knowledge that this genuine self does exist, because we are made aware, through Grahams reflexive performance, that our conceptions of him are always contingent upon the generic coherence of that conception be it cowboy, buccaneer or artist. In this way, Graham is assuming the same ironic stance as Socrates. We understand that Graham is not a cowboy he is an artist, and perhaps an actor. But we might also understand that an artist, as mtier, is no more genuine a subject position than that of a cowboy. Which leads us to the insoluble idea that Graham is not an artist; that he knows enough to defer this classification and to remain, for the purposes of the work, incoherent and suspended in his subjection. Graham is both artist and actor: both the genuine article and the matinee idol playing him. * The original meanings of classical irony as presented in the Socratic dialogues, are as follows: feigned ignorance (Socrates moral inversion); a rhetorical device consisting of saying the opposite of what is meant (though this rather primitive polarity almost certainly predates Socrates subtlety); and as a standpoint for determining subjectivity15 . It is this last meaning that speaks of the reflexive affect of irony: the intention of the ironist and their subject position. It also provides grist for a large proportion of Kierkegaards dissertation, The Concept of Irony, With Continual Reference to Socrates; and it is this meaning that will provide the delineation for the irony of concern within this essay. For Kierkegaard, the concept of irony was fundamental to his interpretation of human existence, and it reappeared under a variety of guises throughout his writing. It is a possible way of being in the world, a condition for

As outlined in Kahn, Abrahim, Melancholy, Irony, and Kierkegaard, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, no. 17, 1985, p.83

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10 acquiring wholeness of personality16 . This wholeness might be seen as synonymous with the freedom outlined above, mirroring the subjection of interpretation in the ironists intent by depriving the object of its reality in order that the subject, the ironist, might feel free. This freedom, as Kierkegaard points out, is a negative freedom a freedom based upon the usurpation of the object by not meaning what one states about it. It is Socrates rhetoric of opposite meaning denying the object its reality, makes it shiver, shatter, disappear17 . The actuality that rushes into the gap left by the object is, in fact, nothing of the sort; but instead a kind of comment on a prior actuality (the object) rather than a new actuality in itself18 . The possible re-objectification that might occur in the wake of irony would be built upon the shadowy absence of the object, rather than upon the legitimate foundations of an objective reality. In this sense, the ironic subject is murderously, negatively free and in so doing, frees the audience also. For in order that irony function at all in order for it to be it must be recognised as such: if it is not, the dissimulation stands simply, starkly, as the objective meaning. Without the ironic context, Socrates is ignorant, and every object otherwise negated remains in an alternative, positive reality. Therefore, prior to any other interpretative act, the audience must interpret the irony as such. This method upon which the public success of irony is contingent places as much impetus on the participator as on the ironist. In Socrates case this is perhaps doubly true, as it is only through the writings of others that he is remembered at all. The documentation of Plato and Xenophon (who are the most famous exponents of Socratic dialogue) is, needless to say, un-ironic. Recounting irony surely (and perhaps ironically) requires the expedient use of cold, concretised objectivity. Socrates, however,
ibid p.68 Barthelme, Donald, Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel in 60 Stories, New York, Penguin, 2003, p.164 18 ibid.
17 16

11 appears to have not merely been a periodic performer of ironies: his irony was not restricted to judicious employment when discussing particular matters, but was in fact according to Kierkegaard a condition that qualified his personality19 . Rather than solely directing his ironical perspective outwards towards an external reality, Socrates reflexively directs his irony inwards also, somewhat monstrously producing, as Kierkegaard puts it, the infinite reverberating backward echo of the reply in personality20 . Through the performance of irony directed inwards (the feigned ignorance asserting both Socrates knowledge and his genuine ignorance), Socrates becomes the object of his own irony: statements he makes about himself are no longer true. In his post-Socratic account of irony, Kierkegaard distinguishes between the phenomenon (the word), and the essence (the concept or meaning), wherein truth demands a coherent identity of equitable essence and phenomenon21 . In ironys coercive grip, however, phenomenon and essence become uncoupled, dislocated from one another: the phenomenon is not the essence but the opposite of the essence22 . Socrates the phenomenon is the opposite the negative of Socrates the essence. Since it is Socrates himself in the guise of ironist, his reality disappears as if turned inside out. It is replaced by a citation a detached relation to that previous, now deposed reality rather than something new, positive. This rather dramatic turn of events represents, for Kierkegaard, the beginning of the period of reflective individuality in world history23 ; Socrates becomes through irony negatively related to the objective ethical reality, to its demands and obligations []24 . The Greek

Kierkegaard, Soren, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. and ed. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna N., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989, p.262 20 Khan, Abrahim, Melancholy, Irony, and Kierkegaard, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, no. 17, Springer, 1985, p.70 21 ibid. p.212 22 Barthelme, op. cit., p.164 23 Kahn, op. cit., p.69 24 ibid

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12 philosophy and ethos that was contemporaneous to Socrates determined that completeness of personality could only be achieved by becoming succinctly aligned with the finite order of reality25 . Socrates great subversion of this accepted anthropology was in his reflexive and absolute assumption of the role of ironist. Accordingly, in the place of finitude is a negative infinite, a stasis; in the place of reality is an abstraction:
Irony establishes nothing, for that which is to be established lies behind it. It is a divine madness which rages like a Tamerlane and leaves not one stone standing upon another in its wake.26

Irony is maintained through its reflexive motion because, by destroying every object and establishing nothing in its wake, the subject is all that is left; and in order that the subject be free constituted as such the subject must maintain an ironical perspective that is both outward and inward, destroying their own objectivity, rejecting all empirical epistemologies in an infinite negativity. Irony is [] a determination of subjectivity27 . In a contrary motion, the participator who recognises the irony in the outward movement of the ironist is also subjected under the same terms although with a potentially infinite interpretative remit. Although a Socratic, oppositional rhetoric constitutes one aspect of irony, I have already demonstrated that the opposite meaning of what is stated is not objectively true either (Socrates ignorance is both true and false). The chimerical dialectic of irony is unique because it is not directed towards any goal, but rather it is suspended infinitely, irreconcilable to itself (this, amongst other things, was the reason Hegel admonished irony quite so vehemently, declaring it the absolute evil28 ). It is left to be
ibid p.70 Kierkegaard, op.cit., p.261 27 Kahn, op. cit., p.71 28 Behler, Ernst, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1990, p.87; quoting Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit from Hegel, G.W.F, Werke in 20 Bnden, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1988, vol. 7, pp. 279 280
26 25

13 reconciled, perhaps, by the contributor. One of the dangers that Kierkegaard sees in this kind of irony of infinite absolute negativity29 , is irony no longer directs itself against this or that particular phenomenon, against a particular thing30 . In this scenario, the whole of existence has become alien to the ironic subject31 . Importantly, this is the hypothetical situation for an ironist whose reflexivity becomes her contributor; whose ironies are constituted inwardly. The ironist, who impels her audience to contribute however, to invest the irony with its necessary interpretative stasis, does not risk this alienation; but neither is she genuinely free. The alienation Kierkegaard speaks of requires the schizophrenic reflexion of the ironist 32 or, as the epoch confers, the Romantic ironist. * Although Rodney Graham might not be operating at Kierkegaards declared zenith33 of irony that place of infinite absolute negativity he does seem to point to a similarly mortal conclusion. One aspect of this is his use of the loop (to which I will return later), the other in the aforementioned convolution a seemingly infinite fracturing that he and the characters that he plays undergo. As outlined above, the true ironist (in Kierkegaards constitution) in subjecting everything to their ironical, gorgon-gaze inevitably subjects themselves, destroying their own objectivity, thereby setting themselves free, albeit with the seemingly unambiguously adverse caveat of being left with merely an infinite negativity. By asserting the possible fallacy within the category of artist, Graham undermines his own authority and denies his subjected coherence within the production of his work. If Graham is not an artist if an artist is

Kahn, op. cit., p.71 Barthelme, op.cit., pp. 164 165 31 ibid p.165 32 See Breuer, Rolf, Irony, Literature, Schizophrenia, New Literary History, vol. 12, no. 1, Psychology and Literature: Some Contemporary Directions, Autumn 1980, pp. 107 118
30 33

29

Kahn, op. cit., p.69

14 as unreliable and specious a subject as the cowboy or the pirate then how does his work come about? It is not a question of whether Rodney Graham is or is not; but who he is. That we know that he is means that there is an answer to that question, but one that, necessarily, we cannot know at least not with any sense of objectivity. Graham understands that the criteria under which an artist might be deemed as such are constituted under the terrific duress of history hence his imagined pre-modern ancestry which serves to cast not only his own time, but all times, into question. Indeed, according to Kierkegaard, this exemplary and alienated ironist the Romantic ironist is embodied in the figure of the poet and of the artist. By denying the empirical status of everything through a tropology of art, the ironist detaches herself from all empirical reality epistemologically floating free from her time (and all times previous), and subjugating the world accordingly. As mentioned before, what distinguishes this from any other form of deposition is that-which-has-been-deposed is not replaced with anything else. In an objects stead there is an insoluble ambiguity, a subjective perspective that is neither true nor false, but a distance from the prior object, an absence. The poet, operating from this alienated position,
opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect, and thereby softens and mitigates that deep pain which would darken and obscure all things34

The darkening of all things is, for Kierkegaard, the ultimate scenario for the ironic subject the poet who, rather than reconciling themselves with the actual world proceeds to a subjective victory over it; a world more perfect than any reality; a world replaced by a tropic movement away. For Kierkegaard, whose philosophy was rooted in reconciliation with the world through religion, this distance was a failure, a hollow victory whose apparent benefits were outweighed by the terrible animosity created as a

34

Barthelme, op. cit., p.165

15 result of such all-encompassing existential irony. This is now a fundamentally political encounter and the dispute as to whether politics begins with agreement and recognition, or difference and incommensurability35 is key here. Irony (in the fragile conception we have laboured to arrive at) surely concerns the latter. Kierkegaard seems to assume, rightly or wrongly, that the ironic poets irreconcilable distance is prescriptive in aspect 36 that the ironic perspective tells us how to live which, crucially, seems to disregard the role of the audience, of the participator that Socrates necessarily required. As suggested before, the participatory reception of irony is, for all intents and purposes, what constitutes the irony. Unless recognised as such, the irony does not exist, thus unravelling that which Kierkegaard fears. Certainly, this is the biggest danger facing the ironist in this account, leaving their perspective trapped interminably in that infinite absolute negativity37 .
The point about irony and its corresponding reflex movement in personality is [] that it leaves the person taking irony as a standpoint confronted with nothingness. The objectless confrontation is implied by the very fact that irony has within it an apriority for self-destruction, and by the very nature of the personal freedom it occasions. According to the former, it does not allow anything to endure, nor posits anything for that matter. [] The impact of its infinitely delicate play with nothingness on the personality is that the latter is faced with having either always to posit something or simply to despair.38

The potential danger that Kierkegaard feared is reiterated here, where both accounts end with the ironic subjects complete and utter alienation. The apriority of irony lies, accordingly, in that infinite absolute negativity an infinite entropic process that is temporarily halted only by the positing of another irony, the creation of another,

35 36

Colebrook, Claire, Irony, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, p.44 Barthelme, op. cit. 37 Kahn, op. cit., p.71 38 Khan, op. cit., pp.71 72

16 subjective perspective. The figure of Kierkegaards ultimate ironic subject, the poet, demonstrates that in her act of irony, of poetry, the poet disposes of historical actuality successfully, serially, and irrevocably. Irony considered as a trope as a movement, a turning away is an unending trope, a dervish spinning away forever. If irony ends, despairs, there is no concretised, immutable history to return to only the tropic motion itself, reflexing, Janus-headed, to face itself. Within his most recent work, Graham has pursued this reflexivity most unequivocally, calling upon previous archetypes within art itself, rather than those brought forth from the annals of cinema. Over the past few years or so, Graham has developed a character through photos, films and paintings; that studied art in America in the 1950s, and who latterly finds fame in a practice that is generically abstract expressionist. In order to arrive at this style, however, Graham underwent a kind of auto didacticism, teaching himself (or his character) the techniques and histories that a student and artist of the time would have learnt 39 . Firstly Graham studied European modernist painting of the first half of the 20th century, producing oddly non-proprietary paintings that strongly recall Picassos work, but without explicit replication. They are odd approximations that might be construed as plebeian derivatives if it werent for the fictional context Graham establishes around them. They become a body of work that leads the artist inexorably (as we might bizarrely divine with reference to actual history) to produce abstract expressionist paintings. As distinct from his previous performances as explicit archetypes that conceal the more problematic category of artist, here Graham openly addresses the ways in which the history of art and particularly its recent history is received as linear and generic. The ironic trope appears most explicitly, however, when one pursues the timeline of this artist-role to its more recent incarnation: Rodney Graham himself. Perhaps, after
Steiner, Shepherd, In the Studio with The Gifted Amateur, Modern Painters, March 2007, pp. 64 69
39

17 abstract expressionism via pop and conceptualism (see appendix: Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong) this character would arrive just in time to emerge as the actual Rodney Graham in Vancouver in the late seventies. This convoluted form of reflexion brings us back to the parabasis40 of irony. Thus unshackled, Graham drifts away from the immutability of history into a narcissistic reverie of complete subjection. This apparent narcissism, however and following on from Kierkegaards warning is undermined by a lack of objectivity. Graham himself is no longer extant as such, but is instead a trope: a movement without the substantive resolution of objective reality. By citing himself within an affected history of his own devising, Graham, like Socrates before him, steps further away from coherent comprehension and deeper into an ironised form of that coherence. * For Kierkegaard, irony at its zenith, as a moment of becoming, is essentially melancholic41 . By pursuing irony to its alienating apex, the ironist is irreconcilably caught in the looped noose of infinity: unending and unresolved. This account is notably similar to Freuds psychoanalytic conception of melancholia 42 . The destructive movement of irony (with an ultimate apriority for self-destruction43 ) depriving objects of their reality is akin to the melancholy transferral of the object from the external (the empirical) to the internal44 (the subjective, ironic position). In psychoanalytic terms, the melancholics identification with the object is denied, and the possibility of acknowledging and mourning its loss debarred. This loss (and the original attachment) is

de Man describes parabasis as the interruption of a discourse by a shift in the rhetorical register [] the constant interruption of the narrative illusion by intrusion (Warminski, op. cit., p.178) As exemplified by the Greek chorus. 41 Khan, op. cit., p.69 42 ibid 43 ibid p.72 44 Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power, California, Stanford University Press, 1997, p.134

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18 thus preserved in the depths of the psyche45 . For the ironic subject, the ironic gesture annihilates the object completely even going so far as to revoke any prior objectivity retroactively. Everything is cast into ambiguous shade, including (as Socrates and, above, Rodney Graham seem to demonstrate) the ironist themselves. This nothingness is commensurate with the ironists internality, her psyche. The melancholic object is internalised therein, suspended in the viscous irresolution of the infinite. We have already established that the depths of reflexion that the committed ironist undertakes lead them to deny their own objectivity in order to be free of all epistemologies. This, however, is not a form of purposeful revolt: once objectivity has been razed it is not in order to establish a new, superior kind in its stead; but to solely maintain a negative freedom. The only way this can be achieved is through the destructive act. The infinite aspect, however, debars the resolution retroactively as well as in the future, meaning that the original attachment the objective reality now annihilated goes unrecognised, resulting in Kierkegaards image of the ironist confronted with nothingness46 . There are, of course, crucial differences between this constitution of irony and Freuds melancholia; the most interesting of which is surely that of choice: where the melancholics pathology is unintentional, the ironist is such deliberately. Putting this difference in choice aside for a moment however, (not to mention the possibility of subconscious desire) we might understand the positions of the melancholic and the ironist as twinned in effect. This, surely, begs the question of whether the melancholic, similarly to the ironist, is negatively free. Though the melancholic is constituted through the loss of an object that is unacknowledged, it is this root-anonymity that pluralises the loss, decentring it and, consequently, preventing the possibility of its avowal. The effect might be understood as a tropic movement, with the melancholia infecting everything in advance, through its lack of resolution.
Brockbank, Sally-Ginger, Creative Loss: Art Practice and its Melancholy Paradox, MA dissertation, Goldsmiths College, 2008, p.11 46 Khan, op. cit., p.72
45

19 Following Kierkegaards ironic route, we might ask whether this means that melancholia becomes asymptotic: curving irresolutely everywhere, effectively insinuating everything including the melancholic as the lost object, without ever acknowledging that always already irretrievable object. In this sense, mourning (as distinct from melancholia in Freuds comparison) is analogous to the resolution of a dialectic the lost object is recognised as having been previously loved or attached, and can be avowed, through whatever cultural practices of acknowledging grief are pertinent, ultimately purging the loss. This resolution seems concomitant with a return to objectivity: it is a movement from the internal to the external, from the subjective and the ironic to the empirical. It serves, as Kierkegaard advises, as a reconciliatory device between the subject and reality a palliative for the initial violence of the loss. Melancholia on the other hand serves to preserve the loss as a constitutive aspect of the subject in much the same way that irony does destroying the object through its absolute repression. If we consider melancholia as a form of critique commensurate with irony however, we expose profound differences between the two. This is particularly apparent if we rethink Rodney Grahams practice as originating in melancholia rather than irony. The most notable divergence comes in the aforementioned idea of intent: if Rodney Grahams work issued from a melancholic subject position rather than an ironic one, deliberate obfuscation transforms into necessary or inadvertent obfuscation. And when it comes to the notion of irony as constitutive of subjectivity, melancholia can no longer act as its double. Those characteristics that compose the Freudian melancholic are detrimental to the freedom of the subject because they are categorical in a way that irony is not. Melancholia according to Freud is just that: according to Freud, and not the subject. Irony, on the other hand, is ironic of itself and of the subject through its chimerical indeterminacy and unanimous ambiguity. This means that Grahams choice to affect

20 a distance from the object to lose it altogether is not a modus within an objective reality, but a trope that is of itself alone: that spinning nothingness that seems so playful (as mooted by both Kierkegaard and ironys biggest advocate, Friedrich Schlegel more on whom later), so unreservedly subjective. Grahams choice to be ironic, to be an ironist, is a contingency of the subject a condition of subjectivity that, unlike melancholia, cannot be usurped by the objective reality of a particular epistemology. The importance of the origin of irony in the will of the subject cannot be underestimated; it is what lends that particularly political flavour to the notion of the contingent freedom it bestows as opposed to the possible freedom of Freuds melancholic, who is likewise negatively free (toying with nothingness) but through no will or design of their own. The inadvertence of melancholia then consigns it, within this hypothesis, to the role of effect, wherein we return to Kierkegaards sub-textual criticism that irony at its apex produces melancholia as a necessary by-product of its destructive, reflexive remit. * Just as important as the origin of irony is its end, in the reception and interpretation of irony, where its true complexities are unravelled. If irony is founded upon opposition, how can it be received, let alone identified? The writing of this essay in particular the interpretation of Rodney Grahams work as ironic is, potentially, founded upon the destruction of that very irony. Through my external reception of irony as such in Grahams practice for instance a paradoxical resolution of irresolution is reached, albeit one that in itself appears to be infinite. Irony, it seems, can only really be constituted through this ruinous paradox. Perhaps it is apposite that irony should resolve in such an unresolved manner; but still the question remains, how is irony recognised? Or, perhaps more pertinently, how is irony constructed interpretatively? Irony as an unresolved dialectic involves

21
the making of a statement that is open to ambivalent interpretations, that is, interpretations of different weights and meanings. The construction of a meaning that is to be taken as the intended one is left to the audience.47

The infinite aspect of irony is tempered and personified in the audience and their possible interpretations, rather than in those incessant reverberations within the ironist. In this way, ironys end is found outside of the ironic subject, in the partially definitive response of the audience. This satiation might guard against the innate melancholia within irony, as witnessed in Kierkegaards alienated ironist who might then become reconciled with the world, not through religion, but through an imperative, life saving sociability. The effects of this paradox, however this troping of a trope reverberate backwards, dislodging previously hard-won delineations of irony. Primarily, the resolution of irony appears to completely undermine its asymptotic nature: ambiguity eternal is the scaffold upon which much of our irony here is balanced. The freedom won in the irony of a melancholic attachment (which includes disavowal) and the delicate, contingent play with nothingness is surely lost without the ironic annihilation of objective reality, inclusive of the ironist. If objectivity subsists in the interpretation of the recipient of the irony, then there remains a state of at least partial captivity (within the multifarious confines of a received ideology) for both audience and ironist. This appears to create something of an impasse. For irony at its zenith48 to exist that is, in the integration of both linguistic and existential ironies in the service of a negative freedom irony must remain an asymptote. But, for the ironic subject to be recognised as such, the irony must be interpreted externally thereby destroying the negative reflexion that engenders such radical freedom. I would like to suggest that the solution might lie in a

Brown, Richard Harvey, Dialectical Irony. Literary Form and Sociological Theory, Poetics Today, vol. IV, no. 3, 1983, p.550 48 Khan, op. cit., p.69

47

22 separating of the two freedoms engendered by irony, between the ironist and her interpretative audience. The audiences interpretation need not interrupt, with finitude, the infinite reflexion of the ironist; the intent and the interpretation and their unique subject positions might be kept apart by the manifestation of irony; by a blockage that is itself permeated with the irresolution of the ironist on the one hand, and the individual interpretation on the other; both kept separate by an autonomous irony. This may be what Walter Benjamin calls the ironisation of form in his essay, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism. Relating an account of Schlegels notion of an irony of irony49 , Benjamin describes this form of irony as presenting an objective moment in the work50 which comes from the spirit of art, not from the will of the artist51 . He suggests that,
[] an ironic artist might seem to destroy the very coherence of his work, but that is only an illusion; on a higher level, Benjamin believes, this incoherent, shattered, fragmentary work draws its indestructible subsistence from the sphere of objective irony: The ironisation of the form of presentation is, as it were, the storm that raises the curtain on the transcendental order of art, disclosing this order and in it the immediate existence of the work as a mystery. The work is not [] essentially a revelation and a mystery of creative genius; it is a mystery of order, the revelation of its absolute dependence on the idea of art, its eternal, indestructible sublation in that idea.52

What Benjamin seems to suggest is that the acknowledgement of such a system, and its subsequent appropriation by Schlegel as the system of romantic poetry, does not
Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, et al., ed. and trans. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1997, p.125 50 As cited Benjamin, Andrew and Hanssen, Beatrice (eds.), Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, New York and London, Continuum, 2002, p.48 51 Bullock, Marcus, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings vol. 1, Harvard University Press, 2004, p.164 52 Chaouli, Michel, The Laboratory of Poetry, Baltimore and London, The John Hopkins University Press, 2002
49

23 actually explain it. The system, the order, is affirmed, over and over but as a mystery. The order is ironised and though in essence objective is nevertheless unrevealed in nature. Needless to say, there is a paradox at the heart of this interpretation that must be addressed if the linguistic tropology of irony is to be reconciled with the existential cessation. According to de Man who refers back to the 18th century philosopher Fichte when describing the influences upon the genesis of Romantic irony language is the origin of the self in this context. Rather than his oft-cited role as being within the lineage of the phenomenology of the self, the self, in Fichte, is a logical category, [] the self as a property of language, [] as originally posited by language.53 The self, therefore, is the origin of a logic before it is experiential or phenomenological that is named as such through language. From this point on, from when language constructs the self, it can also, and it has to, posit the opposite54 . In constituting the self, language describes its negation at the same time not antithetically, but simultaneously and through logic. Fichtes highly methodical dialectic goes on to argue that it is only in the interaction between these two opposing selves that they can start delimiting one another, and at that point its possible to begin making decisions concerning the self. These decisions he classifies as synthetic (comparable), analytic (distinctive) and thetic55 , wherein the former two concern the selfs judging of external objects, and the latter (which is of most interest to de Man in the service of irony) is concerned with reflexive judgments. This thetic judgment is evinced in de Mans (via Fichtes) example, in the statement man is free:
If man is free is considered a synthetic judgment that is, man belongs to the class of free beings then this supposes that there must be men that are not free, which is impossible. And if it is considered an analytic judgement that is, man is in opposition to all species that shares that shares the property of freedom with
53 54

Warminski, op. cit., p.172 ibid. p.173 55 ibid. p.174

24
man, and there is none. Man is free is not simply synthetic or analytic; in the thetic judgment man is free, freedom is structured as an asymptote (as is, Fichte adds, aesthetic judgment). Man should come infinitely close to an unreachable freedom.56

De Man, likewise, suggests a paradoxical objective derived from Fichte: the origin of self in language and the concurrent birth of its negative is also the origin of the act of likening, or distinguishing things from one another. According to de Man, the origin of judgement comes from metaphor, from tropes, rather than from reason. This tropology is precisely what is generally assumed to interrupt reason, preventing its transparency57 . Here, the illusion of a philosophical system is an aesthetic illusion. What disrupts this illusion, aesthetic semblance, the ideology of the aesthetic, and the transparency of reason, is irony as permanent parabasis.58 Irony made manifest is the indefinite impediment of aesthetics and philosophy. According to Benjamins notion of the role of the artwork as formal irony, the effect for both ironist and interpreter is the same: art becomes the universal buffer, either side of which lies the two parties distinct but, crucially, mutually conceiving of the irony in-between that permanently disrupts their objectivity. Here, by reintroducing Rodney Graham, my role as interpreter is necessarily highlighted, as audience member and as contingency for the formation of a partial irony towards that ultimate irony of Kierkegaards poet. My perception of Grahams irony is as a trope that disrupts the reasonable comprehension of him and his work most notably as a suspension of the objective determination of subjectivity. This irony interrupts the illusion of an empirical system that might include, for the sake of argument, the aesthetics of pirates and cowboys; and, for that matter, artists. Through an ironic reading, Graham is made incoherent against the backdrop of normative
56 57

ibid. p.175 ibid. p.179 58 ibid.

25 coherence; he becomes the alienated ironist through the trope, through the movement of irony away from reason, towards a self-annihilating freedom though never actually arriving at that nothingness. Benjamins irony of form, understood as the basic enigma of art in the face of reason, is the subjected form of irony in this scenario the filter through which Grahams subjectivity is maintained as almost free. The aspect that undermines that freedom is the paradox I bring, as constituent audience member, to the resolved interpretation of Graham as ironist. This necessary resolution is both the contingency of Grahams freedom, and its ultimate denial. Conversely (or perhaps in asymptotic parallel) I am also partially freed by Grahams irony as I engender it but also always already denied that conclusion by my decision to interpret him and his work as ironic. But it is in the work itself a communication that is ironical in form that our relational positions are made tenable; and in order to progress this thesis, it is important to try to understand how irony interacts with, and perhaps defines art. To this end, we will turn again to the writers of Romantic irony. * At the end of the 18th century, in Jena, Germany, Fichte had taken a chair in philosophy and was at the peak of his popularity. Around him a coterie of avid followers was gathered most notably the Schlegel brothers. Friedrich Schlegel (with whom we are concerned in this essay59 ) was studying classical philosophy and culture, and was particularly concerned with the relationship between ancient and modern art and literature. This was not merely a theoretical concern, however, but a practical one also. Schlegel believed that his contemporary world was in the process of change from a previous order an order that seemed to assert a complete allegiance of subject and society: its making and content reflect no essential division between what is and what

Although certainly one of the foremost proponents of German Romanticism, August Willhelm Schlegel Friedrichs brother wrote little explicitly concerning irony.

59

26 should be60 . Widespread understanding in Schlegels time considered that through modern art there is an enacting of the opposite of this, reflecting the active and constitutive agency of artists who seek to create something original out of inherited forms, implicating distance between the ideal and actual and between individual and social existence.61 In this sense, modern art is reflective paradoxical in its search for objective coherence through subjective interpretation of a previous eras ideology. This previous eras integrative mystique lies in its sacralisation of nature, which subsequently via the enlightenment became somewhat profane, creating a schism between subject and nature. Classical ideology did not suffer this profanation, and thus maintained unity according to German speculation of the time62 . Schlegels critique of the art and literature of his time was that it must seek out a contemporary reconciliation with the sacred in order to approach some sort of reunification between subject and community. This inevitably required a return and a reassessment of the classical order a creative and interpretative appropriation that, at the time, was indicative of the methods of modern art. In accordance (with amendment 63 ) with Fichtes notion of the self as originally constituted linguistically (rather than experientially or phenomenological), Schlegel believed that the ultimate ground of subjectivity [was] forever unavailable to thought64 . This is simply because the process through which thought thinks itself engenders a chain of potentially infinite reflections, and that poetry as the subjective interceder in the transparency of reason via linguistic tropes could only approach the absolute; poetry, art as distinct from thought through that which Benjamin subsequently called the irony of form:

Rush, Fred, Irony and Romantic Subjectivity in Kompridis, Nikolas (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism, London and New York, Routledge, 2006, p.180 61 ibid. 62 ibid. 63 Schlegel agreed with his colleague Novalis re-reading of Fichte that the ultimate ground of subjectivity is nevertheless unavailable to human thought; poetry, on the other hand, can at least serve to elucidate this inherent elusiveness (Rush, op. cit.) 64 ibid.

60

27
Poetry does this in virtue of its elliptical manner, indeterminate content and metaphoric structure suggesting more than it could possibly be interpreted as saying. Structured in this way, art indicates ones reflective inability to grasp final content in the very act of trying to do so, paralleling ones situation as a discursively bound being in relationship with a fundamental, unbounded nature that can never be known as such.65

Accordingly, the structure of modern art is such that the artists position towards the ultimate ground of subjectivity depends upon the balancing of distance from the work in terms of the artists inability to realise the ultimate content of the work; and the affirmation of its expression due to its structural approach (both methodological and in terms of a journey) towards the absolute. This interminable voyage towards the absolute accounts for our original delineation of irony as a reflexivity that loops ad infinitum: that which Schlegel terms the oscillation66 (a tropic turn) between selfcreation (through the approach towards a Fichtean ground of subjectivity that is simultaneously positive and negative) and self-annihilation (through the knowledge that the work is essentially perspectival, and that there exists an infinite number of possible meanings and interpretations of the work). Romantic poetry, and by extension romantic philosophy, is infinite because the [tropological] oscillation is constant: there is no resolution of the tension in favour of either element.67 Here we can emphatically return to Rodney Graham and, in particular, one of his most favoured formal devices: the loop. As already suggested, this particular device has equivalence with a Freudian (as well as a classical) conception of melancholia. In this sense it may also be the symbol of a Sisyphean plight, the infinite repetition of existence. But it is also a means of tracing the fundaments of Schlegelian irony as a critique of a device beloved, not just of Graham, but also of numerous artist
65 66

ibid. ibid. p.181 67 ibid.

28 filmmakers of recent history. In his film Vexation Island (1997), Graham as a Technicolor pirate lies comatose beneath a coconut palm on the beach of some Caribbean desert island. Evidently, he has been knocked out in the wrecking of his ship, bits of which surround him; and a rather nasty looking gash runs across his forehead. Perched on a barrel at his head is a piratical parrot, squawking for him to wake up. Eventually he comes to, standing up groggily to survey his surroundings. He notices that the tree above him is laden with its fruit. Surely thirsty, he proceeds to shake the trunk of the tree vigorously, loosening a coconut that duly falls on his head, knocking him out. After a moment, the film loops. The second time around, we doubt Grahams injury: the wound on his forehead now seems to have been sustained by the falling coconut rather than during the assumed and never-shown past wherein his ship must have capsized and wrecked. This, of course, is impossible, seeing as the coconut has yet to fall in this screening of the film. It did fall in the past not in the diagetic past of the film but in the actual past of the looped screening. This formal contrivance has bled into the narrative of Vexation Island, creating a terrible confluence of past, present and future for our battered buccaneer an infinite that is torturously marked by the insistent, rupturing trauma of the coconut falling on Grahams head. This violence demarcates the repetition itself, but also breaches and interrupts it, performs as parabasis dragging Grahams always already wounded body (unconscious at the start and the end of the film) back to the beginning. The Sisyphean connotations are perhaps most strikingly evident and so, via Camus68 , is the allusion to melancholia and its possible end in suicide. As for Sisyphus, Grahams repetitious zenith comes in a similarly spherical form, and at that pinnacle where Sisyphus boulder tumbles inexorably back to the bottom to be rolled, dung-beetle-like, back up the incline; Grahams coconut works free of its fragile mooring, and cracks onto the pirates head. But the convolutions of the loop are more complex than this.
68

See Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, OBrien (trans.), Penguin, 2005

29 According to our previously ascertained ironic interpretation of Grahams work, Grahams pirate is also Graham himself analogised as both a piratical and an artistic archetype. In this sense, the metaphorical content of Vexation Island concerns both the specific critique of generic cinema and our comprehension of its conventions and a critique of the reflexively generic notion of the postmodern artist appropriating these areas and their devices. Another interpretative strand, however, might redress these concerns under the ironising duress of a loop. If Graham is both the pirate and the artist, then the repetition of these roles is a reiteration of their predominance. The pirate archetype is, perhaps, mourned through this work by acknowledging its pre-eminence as Pirate with a capital P. Likewise, the Artist is also reiterated reified, perhaps through repetition and re-inscription. The wound on Grahams head never heals, acting as a stigmatic reminder of Grahams thraldom to objectivity. In order to suppose a narrative outside of the film itself, we must understand that it is Graham himself that nebulous, ironical subject who suffers in the splices that delineate the loop, acting as artist acting as pirate (there is surely something illicit in Grahams choice of a pirate the looting of an essentialist history being implicit here). In order to state this position, Graham must be situated outside of the work free, in theory, to both pronounce this bondage and escape its clutches, though neither completely. As already noted Graham traces through the use of himself as only one amongst a legion of archetypes the outline of his true self, that remains untenable (and insuperable) due to its alienation (through a subjection that eliminates our objective and interpretive perspective), and its counter-movement towards acceptance. Here is Schlegels oscillation in full effect: Graham creates and annihilates himself incessantly, alluding to an ultimate self through ironys trope of subjection. Everyone and everything within Grahams oeuvre is (whether metaphorically, connotatively or

30 allegorically) Graham; but it is also never actually Graham himself this self remains unattainable to both Graham and us, the audience. This is the case for him because in order to attain such freedom he must annihilate himself, and for us because we can never objectively conclude whom Graham is or interpret work because he has already subjugated us. The looping form of Grahams films is a perfect example of Benjamins ironisation of form connecting meaningfully with an existential irony. Vexation Island (along with How I became a Ramblin Man and City Self / Country Self) shows the model of irony as close as possible to its zenith, with Grahams ironic mode constituting itself within a subjugated world rather than an objective one while at the same time annihilating itself for the sake of that freedom. This is a necessary contingency if Graham is to destroy the object the pirate and the artist placing, in its stead; an irresolvable negativity (what the pirate, the artist, is not) and an implicit though unpronounced positivity, a possibility. So the oscillation begins again, and again and so on. The loop is the shape of irony not repetition, but the traversing of a smooth, fused circle where the act of self-creation leads, through that inexorable paradox, towards self-annihilation which is the condition of freedom and selfcreation, and on and on * We have arrived timorously gripping Schlegels hand at a possible solution to ironys impasse, in poetry, in art. The artist-ironist creates their work tropologically turning away from reason towards (but never arriving at) the fundamental, unbounded nature that can never be known as such69 . Art demonstrates this journey-without-end through its implicit use of irony as the tropology of subject the paradoxical, reflexive core of the subject in relation to nature and community. Fundamentally reconciling linguistic and existential irony within the Fichtean subject, irony as art (as
69

Kompridis, op. cit., p.180

31 consummately demonstrated by Rodney Graham) maps the infinitely vast route towards the absolute, towards ironys zenith that unreachable freedom70 that Schlegel notes; and the melancholic, infinite absolute negativity71 that Kierkegaard warns of without ever actually getting there. Instead, it continues oscillating back towards the self-creation of de Mans tropic subject, and so on, forever. The previous problem of both recognising irony and prevailing upon its essential ambiguity proves to be potentially the wrong difficulty. If the artist-ironist can only ever see the potential for self-annihilating objectivity, rather than experience it (Benjamins irony of ironies, the irony of form appears to save the artist with a fata morgana of objective irony that, needless to say, is not objective at all), then the artist need never fully comprehend let alone react to the effect of an interpretation of their ironic existence or work. Likewise, the audience member-cum-participator can never see beyond the arts autonomous, objective irony, to the artist herself meaning that their perspective is essentially subjective, though still rooted in a tropic statement. Both form singular loops of reflexive indecision, but both also recognise the possibility of another perspective, without which there would be no irony to be (mis)understood. In this way, for the audience at least, art is a means through which one can imaginatively enter into a point of view in a substantial way, yet one that stops short of actually living in terms of that point of view. An artwork presents the richness of the world from the perspective of the artist and its indeterminacy solicits intersubjective understanding and communal participation through critical interpretation.72 And though this summation seems to make some substantial assumptions regarding the intent of the artist, in Schlegels writing the notion of criticism was necessarily
70 71

Fichte cited in Warminski, op. cit., 175 See footnote 27 72 Kompridis, op. cit., p.183

32 poetic also, meaning that it is no more conclusive or determinate than poetry itself. In this way, the participatory, intersubjective and interpretative understanding that is arrived at through the irony of the artwork, is an irony of form that comprehends a system made up, paradoxically, of a mystery; an unveiling that serves only to reveal a deeper opacity. This oxymoronic comprehension of mystery (that is, the recognition of art, as mooted by Benjamin) might be understood as synonymic with the interpretation of a work or a person as ironic. This is a brave interpretation on the part of the audience member, for it at once claims both a partial responsibility for the work or person, and the acknowledgement of the artist-ironists perspectival subjugation of the work and themselves tantamount to an understanding of their subjectivity. This is because in many ways, understanding a statement, a work or a person as ironic is to discard predetermined, coherent models archetypical, objective and epochal constitutions of subjects and allow that subject to remain hidden, unresolved. This irresolute resolution (to dispense, finally, with the paradoxical prefix) provides an alternative to the innate resolution that Kierkegaard (and Hegel) describes for the true ironist. It also provides, through its wilful parallelism with melancholia (as deliberately suspended loss; as deliberate destruction of the object), an alternative to the return to objectivity offered my mournings coherence; the moral stricture and resolution of Hegelian dialectics; the reconciliation with the world through religion; and, vitally, suicides ultimate finality. Irony is essentially sociable and predominantly, it seems, because of its silent arrival it must be reciprocally willed, recognised, into existence: its entire form is reliant upon the buoyant mutual exclusivity of the ironist and the interpreter. For art, then, irony can be the trope upon which its conceptual mystery and therefore its essential autonomy and objective irony hinges. It is also the means by which art turns away from empiricism towards a subjective responsibility. The ironist who reiterates the process of their own annihilation, by breaking into a

33 million essentially identical exemplary archetypes, so that they might build themselves up again through that histrionic and rhetoric of opposites; and the audience member who dares to interpret a work and the artist as ironic.

34 Appendix

35 Bibliography

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37 Gardiner, Patrick, Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2002 Gay, Peter (ed.), The Freud Reader, London, Vintage, 1995 Halberstam, Judith, Notes on Failure, Lecture given on January 26 2006 at The University of Texas, Austin Hannay, Alastair and Marino, Gordon D. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998 Herzinger, Kim, Not-Knowing The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, Berkeley, Counterpoint, 1997 Howland, Jacob, Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Philosophy and Faith, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Hutcheon, Linda, Ironys Edge, Theory and Politics of Irony, London, Routledge, 1994 Kahn, Abrahim, Melancholy, Irony, and Kierkegaard, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Springer, no. 17, 1985, pp. 67 85 Kierkegaard, Soren, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. and ed. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna N., Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989 Kierkegaard, Soren, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hannay, Alastair, London, Penguin Books, 2008 Kompridis, Nikolas (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism, London and New York, Routledge, 2006 Kuenzli, Rudolf E., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, Massachusetts, MIT, 1990 Lippitt, John, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaards Thought, London, Macmillan Press, 2000

38 McCaffery, Larry, Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelmes Fictions, Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. XIIV, no. 1, January 1979, pp. 69 79 Meyler, Bernadette, Bakhtins Irony, Pacific Coast Philology, vol. XXXII, no. 1, 1997, pp. 105 120 Riley, Denise, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2000 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, et al., ed. and trans. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1997 Steiner, Shepherd, In the Studio with the Gifted Amateur, Modern Painters, Louise Blouin Media, March 2007, pp. 64 69 Stringfellow Jr., Frank, The Meaning of Irony: A Psychoanalytic Investigation, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994 Teskey, Gordon, Irony, Allegory, and Metaphysical Decay, PMLA, vol. XIX, no. 3, May 1994, pp. 397 408 Warminski, Andrzej (ed.), Aesthetic Ideology Paul de Man, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1996