Irony Is Not Enough

Irony Is Not Enough: The Limits of the Pragmatist Accommodation of Aesthetics to
Human Life
Author(s): Jacques Poulain
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 165-180
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773146
Accessed: 17-04-2017 15:57 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773146?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Poetics
Today
This content downloaded from 193.54.174.3 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 15:57:46 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Irony Is Not Enough:
The Limits of the Pragmatist Accommodation
of Aesthetics to Human Life
Jacques Poulain
Philosophy, Paris and College International de Philosophie
Abstract The pragmatist aesthetics advanced in Richard Rorty's Contingency,

Irony and Solidarity endorses a pragmatist accommodation of aesthetics to
human life. Because we all seem to submit ourselves to the law of consen-
sus which governs experimentalism in the world at large, as in ourselves an
others, we tend to perceive ourselves, both theoretically and in practice,
god-like. Consequently, we expect to be able to transform ourselves into th
selves that our communicative and social partners imagine us to be and to
exist in harmony with the world and everyone in it. Rorty states that by d
divinizing ourselves we can cure ourselves of our arrogance and of our crue
conduct toward others, thereby reconciling ourselves with ourselves as wit
our social partners. In this paper I wish to point out the ambiguous nature
pragmatist aesthetics: ironic de-divination cures us of arrogance, but it also
reinforces the process by which we repress not only our use of judgment, b
even that figurative identification which, since the beginning of humanity, ha
served to link us to the world and to others. The transfiguration of our pra
matist uncertainty by the ironic consciousness of our own finitude helps u
to forget this uncertainty, and the aesthetic accommodation of our self-ima
to what we are doing to ourselves thereby acquires its specific and deadly
anesthetic power.
1. The Ironical Accommodation of the Self

to the Experimental Form of Life
At present, the pragmatist way of life would seem to be the only means
of realizing the modernist project of subjecting nature, external an
Poetics Today 14:1 (Spring 1993). Copyright ? 1993 by The Porter Institute f
Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/93/$2.50.
166 Poetics Today 14:1
internal alike, to reason. Modernity sought to produce a Copernican

revolution not only in science and technology, but also, even primarily,
in our public and private lives. It sought to actualize human reason in
all its forms: cognitive, practical, and aesthetic. We have discovered in
the course of this century that we are language-conditioned and that
the actualization of our reason is conditioned by our ability to trans-
form ourselves into language, that is, by our ability to submit ourselves
to the law of consensus. It is this law which seems to govern experi-
mentalism in the world at large, as in ourselves, and thus to regulate
the only form of life we can imagine.
If science and technology emerge from total and unrestricted ex-
perimentation involving the mathesis universalis, our public and private
lives are fields for unrestricted experimentalism involving the sapientia
universalis. As C. S. Peirce has taught us, it is through experimentation
that the scientist asks the visible world to confirm or disconfirm his hy-
pothesis by answering his questions either "yes" or "no." In the same
way, experimentation in the field of human life involves submitting to
the consensus of our social partners. By means of communication, we
test our hypotheses about human life. In invoking the trans-subjective
authority of consensus, we seek some objective authority capable of
telling us what to do and what to desire. We trust in the infallibility of
this consensual authority insofar as we come to understand that it has
been none other than this social consensus which has always already
spoken through our own words, thoughts, and institutions, and which
has regulated our social world and mental life. This social consensus
thus seems to have the same authority and validity with respect to our
internal nature as the visible world does with respect to our knowledge
of external nature.
In this pragmatic context, the experimental way of life can be fully
enjoyed only insofar as we are able to reform our own private and
public self-images; otherwise, it leaves us deceived and dissatisfied. We
want to recognize in ourselves the selves that our communicative and
social partners imagine us to be; we desire to be gods ourselves, always
reliable because always able to give true answers. Such god-like omni-
science can be attributed to us because, as speakers and addressees, we
are presumed to know by means of language what our internal human
nature is, just as we are presumably able to know by means of experi-
mentation what the external nature of the visible world is. Because
each of our utterances is presumed to express whatever ultimate truth
our addressees might wish to know, we necessarily experience guilt
over our inability to express that ultimate truth. The only way to avoid
this experience of guilt would be to come to understand why we are
unable to be surrogate gods, namely, because we can no more discover
an ethical and political nature antecedent to ourselves than we can dis-
Poulain ? Irony Is Not Enough 167
cover a visible world existing outside ourselves and antecedent to our

descriptions of it. We respect the authority of our correspondence or
noncorrespondence to the visible world and our communicative part-
ners because these seem independent of our own desires, but we have
no direct access to either external or internal nature beyond the words
which put us in touch with them. Our only hope of redemption in
this pragmatic context would be to adopt an ironic attitude toward our
supposed "divinity," acknowledging the limits of our linguistic, cogni-
tive, and ethical-political powers and of our theoretical and practical
reason. This would be the pragmatist way of achieving modernity's
goal, that is, the goal of the Enlightenment, and of reconciling us
aesthetically with ourselves (Rorty 1989).
The goal of the Enlightenment, as of modernity, was to "de-divinize"
the world, making human beings solely and autonomously responsible
for their world, their society, and their own happiness or unhappiness.
Having expelled the Christian and Leibnizian God from existence,
modern man came to believe that he could free himself from reli-
gious alienation if, unassisted by God, he could discover his own and
the world's nature. Because unrestricted experimentalism teaches con-
temporary man that in order to know external and internal nature he
must invent them, pragmatists are doomed to the realization that such
"discovery" is, strictly speaking, beyond their capacity, that the abso-
lute certainty they seek is wholly unattainable, and that they cannot
achieve this secularized godhood that unrestricted experimentalism
seems to promise. Irony would thus constitute the only justifiable way
of enjoying oneself as a pragmatic being, and the highest duty that
philosophy could fulfill toward such a being would be to reconcile him
ironically with himself by showing him how to create his own worlds,
societies, and selves, thereby demonstrating to him the unattainability
at anytime in the future of a nature which would be as universal, atem-
poral, and eternal as the external and internal nature which once,
back in the days when one still believed in God, one could presume to
have existed antecedent to oneself.
Moreover, philosophy, if it adopted a sufficiently ironic attitude
toward itself, would teach us that we cannot regulate our affects, our
emotions, and our passions by means of philosophical proofs. This
task it would leave to rhetoric and literature, for only rhetoric and
literature enable us to cope with emotions, affects, and passions, offer-
ing, as they do, the only uses of language which can inhibit man's
cruelty toward his fellows, his absolute confidence in his own cog-
nitive and practical powers, and his arrogance. It is nonsensical to
expect that we could achieve through argumentation some consensus
about our desires and needs in order to articulate laws which would
be universally and eternally valid; thus to call upon public opinion,
as Habermas (1982) does, to legislate such matters would be only to

reproduce the same wrongheaded religious confidence in an objective
human nature exhibited by modern Enlightenment philosophers. In
order to reconcile ourselves aesthetically with ourselves, it would be
enough to learn from Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell how to recognize
our own hidden cruelty; it would be enough to admit along with Nietz-
sche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, and Derrida that our striving toward
truth has always been mixed with the libidinal and aggressive impulses
as well as with our will-to-power. We would then be in a position to
recognize that no vocabulary of our own can ever be considered final,
the language of ultimate revelation. This private self-liberation would
serve to reconcile us with our own inability to be the divinely infallible
truth tellers that our addressees have wished us to be. It would help
us, too, to achieve the liberal goal of tolerating any and every social
order that does not force us or anybody else to practice cruelty toward
our social partners.
2. The Pragmatist Way of Ironizing Human Life

How could one be sufficiently ironic so as to succeed in reconciling
oneself both with unrestricted experimentalism in human nature and
the world at large and with the absolutized language by means of
which we seek to regulate such experimentalism? Rorty's answer is
simple and convincing: just de-divinize the world, the community, and
the self, and the limits of one's public and private selves will stand
revealed. But how is this to be accomplished?
Rorty undertakes to de-divinize world, society, and self by correct-
ing the animistic theories of Peirce and Mead with the help of a David-
sonian theory of metaphor. No longer is the visible world to serve as
a transcendent authority to which questions are addressed through
physical experimentation and from which we may expect yes-and-no
answers that will definitively determine the truth-or otherwise-of
the experimenter's hypothesis. No longer is the world to be regarded
as independent of our desire for truth, now that we know the world
not to be what it is until we have formulated and tested our hypothe-
ses about it. No longer can we take for granted, as we once could, the
world's status as an atemporal standard of truth existing in and by
itself. No longer do we need fantasies of a god who responds to our
questions by confirming or disconfirming our scientific hypotheses,
invariably in a way that is favorable to ourselves.
To see how this is so, one should try conceiving of the formulation of
a scientific hypothesis as a kind of mental experiment involving words,
the use of which conditions the verifying or falsifying "answer" yielded
by the world. In order to be able to think up a scientific hypothesis,
one must transfer meaning from the particular domain of objects to
Poulain * Irony Is Not Enough 169
which it properly belongs to another domain, sometimes even to a

domain of objects which one has newly created. In the process, one
comes to recognize that the supposed verifying answer yielded by the
visible world only "literalizes" our own prior mental or verbal meta-
phor. The propositional content of the new predicates must transgress
certain syntactical and semantic rules that, until our new hypothesis
intervened, we had accepted as stable and valid. This brings home to
us the transcendental force of language and its ability to make reality
real. We can no longer believe that the world was already such-and-
such before we discovered the sum of the visible realities that our
verbal inventions make available to us.
Rorty de-divinizes worlds and languages by making us aware of
the contingency of our consciousness of truth, underscoring the non-
necessity of its occurrence, and by noting our inability to ground our
contingent sense of truth on some atemporal essence attributable to
the world. Modern man rejected human animism by expelling God
from the world and from existence itself. Rorty shows us that we have
yet to reject the particular animism that characterizes scientific experi-
mentation whereby scientists claim to make the world "speak," as if
it could, of its own accord, utter that ultimate language which would
constitute the end of the human scientific quest.
Just as with the world, so are human subjects not antecedent to
themselves and what they do, nor to what they think or say about them-
selves. They do not possess an autonomous internal nature existing
in and by itself and which they then simply express. Such an autono-
mous internal nature, that is, one enabling human subjects to judge
others from the vantage point of self-mastering, uncorrupted beings,
does not exist. Because it does not exist, we are obliged to be ironists
not only with respect to the world, but, first of all, with respect to
ourselves. The use of language allows us to determine ourselves by
formulating our beliefs, intentions, and desires, but it does not ex-
press anthropological constants inherent to us independently of this
use. Although we are obliged to commit ourselves to a kind of final
vocabulary by means of which we can justify our beliefs, intentions,
and desires, we must also acquire an ability to redescribe this final vo-
cabulary in terms of the final vocabularies of our fellows if we are to
have any hope of understanding them. By ironizing our own final vo-
cabulary, we learn to understand those of others. Moreover, our own
final vocabulary will come to be recognized as a contingent product
of chance, a contingent acquisition susceptible of being revised and
replaced by one which better enables us to fulfill our desires. Aware
as we are of the contingency of both linguistic and behavioral rules,
we no longer believe that such rules of language exist in themselves.
Ethical animism and linguistic animism alike have been invalidated,
rejected as nonsensical. The ethical self sheds its Kantian animism,

abandoning its moral dream in the knowledge that it possesses no in-
fallible moral consciousness capable of dictating right action. The self
can no longer be considered the personification of ethical or moral
infallibility, the last word in matters of morality. When one comes to
recognize that rules, beliefs, intentions, and desires exist only insofar
as one has articulated them, one is able to see oneself ironically and
to adapt oneself to the contingent events by which, beyond anyone's
ability to predict or contrive it, selves nevertheless achieve harmony
with each other.
From this it follows that we no longer need to consider societies or

communities as worlds of needs and laws to be approached asymptoti-
cally in the long run, as if human beings were advancing toward some
focus imaginarius which had been awaiting them since the world began
and which, once achieved, would be the optimal world of human rights
and laws. Once it has fully grasped its own contingency, the human
self has no further need of belief in such a utopia, knowing then that
there is no Platonic social truth. Social rules, like those of language,
only register, in a supplementary and haphazard way, the fact that
the private desires of certain persons have been acknowledged as a
common need by the other members of their society. This social trans-
formation of a private desire into a common need requires no other
justification than its own occurrence. The de-divinization of our soci-
eties and communities allows us to be ironic toward our own social
systems, to tolerate the multiplicity and variety of ethical systems even
while we acknowledge the validity of only our own system and follo
only its rules. De-divinization allows us to accept the ways in which
others justify their own social systems, absolving us of any obligatio
to force them to obey our rules.
Irony toward the world, its societies, and oneself appears to be a nec
essary and sufficient condition for the existence of a liberal society, the
members of which need no longer practice cruelty toward each other
A liberal society is one whose ideal can be fulfilled by persuasion rather
than by force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open en
counters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new
practices. But this is to say that an ideal liberal society is one which has n
purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how such en
counters go and to abide by the outcome. It has no purpose except to mak
life easier for poets and revolutionaries while seeing to it that they make
life harder for others only by words, and not deeds. It is a society whose
hero is the strong poet and the revolutionary because it recognizes that it
what it is, has the morality it has, speaks the language it does, not becaus
it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain
poets and revolutionaries of the past spoke as they did. (Rorty 1989: 60)
For irony suffices to establish harmony in this society because it allows

each member to enjoy all of the happiness to which he can gain access
by freeing other people to pursue their own happiness.
To see one's language, one's consciousness, one's morality and one's highest
hopes as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were acciden-
tally produced metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for
citizenship in such an ideally liberal state. That is why the ideal citizen
of such an ideal state would be someone who thinks of the founders and
the preservers of her society as such poets rather than as people who had
discovered or who clearly envisioned the truth about the world or about
humanity . . . as people who did happen to find words to fit their fanta-
sies, metaphors which happened to answer to the vaguely felt needs of the
rest of the society .... To sum up, the citizens of my liberal utopia would
be people who had a sense of the contingency of their language of moral
deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their community.
(Ibid.: 61)
But the citizens' acknowledgment of their own contingency does not

magically secure for them the autonomy they desire.
The sort of autonomy which self-creating ironists like Nietzsche, Derrida or
Foucault seek is not the sort of thing that could ever be embodied in social
institutions. Autonomy is not something which all human beings have within
them and which society can release by ceasing to repress them. It is some-
thing which certain particular human beings hope to attain by self-creation,
and which a few actually do. (Ibid.: 65)
Therefore, there is no need to regard Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Der-

rida with suspicion, as Habermas continues to do. For they are not
involved in promoting social welfare, but only in seeking "to accom-
modate the ironist's private sense of identity to her liberal hopes,"
because the "poeticized" culture that Rorty advocates is one which has
abandoned the attempt to unite "one's private ways of dealing with
one's finitude and one's sense of obligation to other human beings"
(ibid.: 68).
3. Consequences of Pragmatist Irony: Harmonizing Literary Shamanism

with the Autistic Structure of Unrestricted Experimentalism
This de-divinization of world, society, and self completes the critique
of epistemological ideals and goals begun in Rorty's (1979) Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature, where he explained how the quest for cer-
tainty characteristic of modern Cartesian philosophy and contempo-
rary analytical philosophy alike was doomed to failure, having based
itself on a false image of human knowledge: the image of the image
itself, namely, the image of the mirror. Like the moderns before him,
contemporary man expects to find a single method and a single logic
which, constraining him to think nothing but the truth, would elimi-
nate any possibility of error or sophistry. But no formula can make
anyone the oracle of Truth that his addressees require him to be.
Nor can any formula exempt any hypothesis, including life hypotheses
of the kind constituted by any and every utterance or thought, from
being subjected to contingent confirmation or disconfirmation by the
world at large or by the equally contingent social or individual hap-
piness which may be the consequence of any particular hypothesis.
No absolute rule, no constant human nature, no "natural society" can
guarantee the success of our words and deeds.
The ironic consciousness of these contingencies ought to be suffi-
cient to prevent us from imposing our theoretical views and practical
decisions upon others. Such an ironic consciousness ought to suffice to
keep us from subordinating our knowledge to our will-to-power, as it
ought to help us transform our uncertainty about knowledge, duties,
and desires into a caring and tender attentiveness to the sufferings and
needs of others and to enjoy our own finitude, thereby reconciling us
with ourselves. The ironic liberal would even seem to be in a position
to protect his social partners from his own will-to-power, as long as
he continues to heed the lessons of Proust, Nabokov, and Orwell. The
ironic consciousness delights in the annihilation of its own supposed
divinity and can therefore coexist not only with every kind of success
in life, but also with every kind of failure, and thus can better tolerate
the pain of failure.
If it can cure arrogance, irony nevertheless cannot recognize or
judge cruelty as such, nor can it change the affects which dictate our
conduct toward our social partners. Irony can easily be reduced to
a kind of anesthesia of the consciousness, a condition to which the
pragmatist is especially susceptible, doomed as he is to a generalized
uncertainty. Irony cannot prevent all facts from acquiring equal truth-
value, and if all confirmatory facts have the same truth-value, then
the most contradictory theories must be equally true; all that is re-
quired is for each theory to be consistent with at least some facts. The
consequence is that we are faced with an array of multifarious facts
from among which we are at a loss to choose those belonging to reality
or those embodying knowledge. Nor is it any easier to choose those
actions that ought (or ought not) to be undertaken or, among one's
desires, those which ought to be fulfilled. All representations of action
have the same value from the point of view of realization, all represen-
tations of desire the same value from the point of view of fulfillment.
Such representations, thus deprived of the cognitive content that once
made discrimination possible, have come to possess only an energetic
and dynamic charge.
This uncertainty which has begun to afflict man, an effect of his
pragmatist experimentation on himself, would seem to have been pro-

duced by his own will-to-power, his desire for mastery over himself,
the world, and his social partners. Blinding himself to everything apart
from his own activity, he loses sight, in particular, of those experiences
he is forced to undergo: that is, he cannot even recognize them as ex-
perience. This negative experience registers only as a sense of one's
inability to transform oneself, as human beings have sought to do since
the outset of modernity, into a being who exists in harmony with one-
self, with one's fellow beings, and with the facts. Failing to recognize
this experience for what it is, one registers not the experience as such,
but only its negative effects, as if one were damned to be identified
with one's own will-to-power and as if these necessary, negative, and
deadly effects were to be one's fate for eternity. The experience is the
tragic one of a cultural shipwreck during which we are forced to main-
tain a lucid self-awareness. The context of accusation and nihilism in
which this experience unfolds seems to corroborate the diagnosis of
postmodernity as an era in which an exploding modernity has left us
bereft of hope or any sign of a way out.
These effects will continue to be as necessary, negative, and deadly
as they threaten to be so long as irony remains the pragmatist's pre-
ferred means to avoid having to face up to his own failure. For irony is
ambiguous: ironic de-divinization cures us of arrogance, but it also re-
inforces the process by which we repress not only our use of judgment,
but even that figurative identification which, since the beginning of
humanity, has served to link us to the world and to others. The trans-
figuration of our pragmatist uncertainty by the ironic consciousness of
our own finitude helps us to forget this uncertainty, and the aesthetic
accommodation of our self-image to what we are doing to ourselves
thereby acquires its specific and deadly anesthetic power (on the role
of anesthesia in aesthetics, see Welsch 1990).
Such accommodation stems from the way we are obliged to identify
ourselves with the sounds that we hear and utter in order to be able to
see, move, or enjoy our physical being at all. As Arnold Gehlen (1939)
has shown, man is an imperfect organism constrained to use language
just to see and therefore also constrained to subordinate the instru-
ments of movement (i.e., hands and feet) to the sensory apparatus
(vision). Without language, the human being remains in a kind of sus-
pension, unable to link vision with movement, to see or to act, a passive
receptor of mere sensory intensities, which, constituting neither per-
ception nor knowledge, fail to override the inhibitions on the human
being's neurophysiological programmes of physical action. Born a year
premature, the human being has only intra-organismic instincts-nu-
tritional, sexual, and defensive-and must construct its own world-
its visual world, its world of action and desire-by making that world
speak. As Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836: 176) discovered, the use of

language begins with the child's figurative identification with his own
language. As animistic as primitive man, the child makes the world
"speak" whenever he himself utters a sound, attributing his own pho-
netic powers to the visual world just to be able to see that world and
in this way transforming vision into an act of consumption. Convert-
ing aggressive and repulsive sensations into gratifying and positive
ones, the child links the gratifications of listening to the world with
those of seeing it, thereby coming to perceive the world as an entity
which speaks to him. He projects onto the world the privileged access
of communication he shares with his mother, and, since the mother's
responses are presumably always gratifying to the child, he comes
to perceive the speaking world and the visual world alike as always
providing a positive response, simultaneously expressing a need and
fulfilling it.
The whole of individual life and human evolution can be inter-
preted as a succession of attempts at self-regulating desires and ne
whereby human beings gradually repress the illusion embodie
this original pathological animism. The problem of modernity
contemporaneity alike arises from this repression of man's "inte
nature," for, in repressing his original animism, man simultaneo
represses his need for action, knowledge, and satisfaction. Repre
ing his desire for knowledge by subjecting his hypotheses to the c
firming or disconfirming verdict of the visible world, he neverth
remains animistic, requiring the visible world to judge in his ste
Rorty has rightly denounced this scientistic animism, but the prob
persists nevertheless. Irony is powerless to dispose of this residual
mism because it insists upon having the world judge in the scienti
stead, although the latter is now being called upon to recognize t
the world's "answer" is contingent upon his own contingent form
tion of the hypothesis in the first place. The denunciation of anim
science fails to restore the scientific "speech act" to the scientist,
it does reinforce the repression of the latter's faculty of judgment
adducing the ironic consciousness of our own finitude as justificat
for the cognitive uncertainty inherent to unrestricted experimen
ism. In this way, not only truth but perception, action, and acts
consumption all become effects of "speaking nature."
Experimentation on life hypotheses in terms of the criterion of
piness or unhappiness similarly calls upon our "internal nature"
speak in our stead. If all that is required of us is that we approac
such experimentation ironically, then we need not judge our acti
or desires in themselves, but need only measure these against the
piness or unhappiness resulting from our experimentation. Howe
in seeking to repress the speech of our "internal nature" and our
ternal judgment" by treating our desires as tangible forces internal to

ourselves, we also end up repressing "reason," the power of judgment
we acquired by identifying ourselves with our "thought," our commu-
nication with ourselves, the world, and others. Throughout modernity,
human reason was regarded as the regulative faculty present in our
use of thought which ensured this metaphysical harmony with the
world, ourselves, and our social partners. We now know that reason is
not some divine or magical power residing in us and deserving of our
worship, but we repress and deny reason when we assimilate it to our
will-to-power and our animistic self-image. We are obliged to do this
whenever, blinding ourselves to the alleged existence of this faculty,
we substitute consensus with our social partners and ourselves for our
faculty of judgment, thereby completely eliding the question of the
objectivity of this consensus and of the judgments we express through
our words.
This ironic denial of judgment has already become one of our readi-
est means of evading the deadliness of uncertainty and of transfigur-
ing it into a conscious aesthetic pleasure. The act of denying oneself
the faculty ofjudgment is autistic, the pragmatist's first and final move,
whereby he checkmates himself and his own life and delights in his
own failure. In checkmating himself, the pragmatist gets exactly what
he deserves: external and internal worlds that are equally autistic.
Like primitive man, the autistic child uses animistic speech in a
magical way. The only difference lies in the autistic child's denial and
repression of the act of speech, which transforms the magic power
of language into a negative power. Because the use of language and
thought creates links to reality and allows him to perceive things,
the autistic child believes that he need only avoid speaking in order
to prevent a recurrence of the past trauma, the repetition of which
he associates with his own death (see Bettelheim 1967; Tustin 1972;
Deligny 1975-76). The fact that this event does not recur confirms
for him, albeit negatively, the magical power of his own silence and
aphasia, that is, of his refusal to speak. His aphasia having apparently
forestalled the traumatic repetition, the autistic child is reinforced in
his belief in his own negative magical power, his personification of
negation.
We are doing exactly the same thing when we blindly seek consensus
with ourselves and our addressees in a pragmatist way. Such consen-
sus will, we hope, yield the cognitive, regulative, or aesthetic power
needed to prevent our becoming the failures we suspect we already
are. Speech-act failure is inevitable if we insist on addressing ourselves
and our addressees as if we could all be beneficent oracles of divine
truth. Because we cannot be divinely infallible, because we can always
be accused of falling short of the perfection that we supposedly ought
to possess as speakers and agents, we seek to appropriate to ourselves

the power of consensus, but by doing so we have in effect, like the
autistic child, rejected and denied our only link to reality and, with
it, the reality of our own language. The result is the same for us as
for the autistic child, although at the level of self-reflection, namely,
that of denying to ourselves the faculties of self-judgment and of self-
reflection itself. Such an act of self-denial is called for precisely because
it is these faculties of judgment and self-reflection that are responsible
for our sense of our own failure.
Because the use of speech links our visual world with our powers to
move and to manipulate objects, thereby channeling our energies, the
autistic child, by refusing to speak, disconnects vision from action, in
effect neutralizing both. Thus, the autistic child's aphasia in turn pro-
duces agnosia (the undifferentiated perception of the visual space),
apraxia (the transformation of bodily motion into unconscious and
stereotyped discharges of energy), anorexia (the absence of any desire
to eat or otherwise consume anything), and ataraxia (the neutraliza-
tion of feelings of pain as well as unconscious defense mechanisms).
The autistic child can actually manage to neutralize, with a degree of
success unmatched even by Indian gurus, the autonomic nervous sys-
tem itself. By refusing to speak, and thereby reversing his biological-
impulse channels, the autistic child is transformed into the only living
organism capable of making itself die. The so-called crisis of ratio-
nality, legitimation, and motivation repeats this autistic neutralization
at the level of civilization as a whole. It afflicts institutional life as a
social experience because the latter, too, is created by our identifica-
tion with language.
At present, this autism expresses itself as a generalized phenomenon
at the level of consciousness and can therefore be cured. It becomes
inevitably lethal only insofar as we remain unconscious of the linguis-
tic mechanisms that make it possible. There is no need to transform
it into some kind of inescapable, Holderlinian tragedy. Effective ther-
apy is possible, but only on condition that it not be either exclusively
moral or exclusively aesthetic, nor some mixture of the two, but rather
philosophical therapy. For we are unable either to moralize the problem
away or to resolve it in purely ethical-political terms; neither should
we regard ourselves as merely passive, non-responsible, and heterono-
mous beings, patients who can and must be cured, even against our
own will. By addressing this problem of autism, we address the deep-
est problems of both modernity and so-called postmodernity. Such
problems can only be solved in and by means of philosophical theory,
by reasserting at the level of theory the primacy of the theoretical sub-
ject over the practical subject, the primacy of theory over practice; in
other words, by reclaiming the use of our judgment, which we have so
successfully denied ourselves while indulging in the deadly pleasures

of our autistic irony.
Freeing us from the burden of our supposed infallibility, irony
allows us to mimeticize, transfigure, and even enjoy our everyday crises
of uncertainty. With irony's help we learn to enjoy our own finitude,
for the aesthetic pleasure of irony derives from its ability to replace
our guilty awareness of having failed our social partners with a light-
hearted acceptance of our finitude, absolving us once and for all of
responsibility for our speech failures. This anesthesia of our inevitable
"speech crimes" is altogether autistic and shamanistic. Art theorists
have often observed how art and aesthetics function as compensation
for inescapable cognitive and ethical-political failures, such as in the
face of catastrophic injustices (Marquard 1981: 42). Art allows one
to forget the crisis by transforming it into a means of satisfying one's
appetites, whether cultural or more basic. Although the use of lan-
guage usually serves to regulate our nutritional, sexual, and defensive
lives by constraining stimulation through imperatives and interdic-
tions, it can also help us to forget our crisis by allowing us to mimeticize
and metaphorize it and by making of this figuration a stimulus to unre-
stricted hyperconsumption, overriding all of our ordinary imperatives
and interdictions. By contrast with the institutional language which
coordinates stimuli, bodily reactions, and acts of consumption into a
manageable order, shamanism and art empower the mimesis of the life
crisis to link this crisis itself with whatever gives pleasure. Motivated
by the will to forget the crisis, this hyperactivation of pleasure rests
upon what Gehlen (1959) has called the undifferentiation of impulses
and upon a mechanism which is deeply rooted in the use of language,
namely, the reversal of the direction of our impulses. Because man
is not a well-formed animal, he is not the prisoner of stimuli which
would otherwise trigger bodily reactions and acts of consumption. By
identifying himself with sounds and with language, he transforms the
reception of stimuli (i.e., the input phase of the life processes) into
the act of consumption itself (i.e., their output phase). The only link
between the two is either word reaction or the shamanistic/artistic
figuration of the crisis. Either way, the reaction is at once sensory and
motor, auditory and verbal, allowing the organism to enjoy it simul-
taneously as an energetic discharge and as a means of orientation.
The reaction becomes an end in itself, an act of consumption that, by
figuratively representing all the other phenomena of life, transforms
these into further acts of consumption in their own right. Thus every
phase of the life process can be transformed into a gratifying mimetic
experience. This linguistic, artistic, or cognitive experience is usually
regulated internally and retroactively by its ultimate success or fail-
ure, but this internal regulation can lapse, for example, during the
shamanistic or autistic experience. Here the hyperactivation of plea-

sure by the shamanistic or aesthetic discharge of energy becomes the
human being's sole object of desire, his sole pleasure.
The ironic exemption from self-judgment can be extended to every
life experience, making reflection a pleasurable activity which anni-
hilates itself by self-denial. One needs reflection in order to relieve
oneself of guilt feelings. Thus one finds oneself repeating the very ploy
by which primitive man protected himself from his own lucidity: he
projected his own ability to pass judgment on his knowledge, actions,
and desires onto the gods, making them the only entities in the world
entitled to pass such judgment. In the same way, irony reactivates in
us a kind of a priori judgment of our own finitude, in which we take
pleasure and which extends to us the same protection from ourselves
that primitive man derived from his gods. Any act of judgment which
frees us once and for all from the necessity of judging ourselves, our
speech acts, and our experiences must be considered autistic.
One can cure oneself of arrogance and overcome one's everyday
pragmatic uncertainty not by mimeticizing these autistically by means
of irony, thus de-divinizing oneself, but only by using one's judgment
and by judging for oneself the objectivizations of experience which are
made possible by one's human identification with language (Poulain
1991). All of the problems of the modern and contemporary eras
are caused by the way we let language and thought lapse into idle-
ness while we seek to transform ourselves by adopting methodological
prescriptions, by embracing moral or political programmes, or by mi-
meticizing our life crisis into literature. This quest for transformation
originates in our ignorance: we cannot conceive of a theoretical use of
language, or of the necessity of judging our own judgment, because
thinking about what we are saying or thinking usually coincides with
the belief that there are no limits to what we can do when we under-
take to think or to "do theory." We believe this because we are able
to express everything we want to express. We cannot conceive of an
objective and transcendental use of judgment as a primary charac-
teristic of language because we are so immersed in the practical and
aesthetic uses of language which promise us access to reality and a
means of regulating our actions and fulfilling our desires. When we
pragmatically seek a blind consensus, we reproduce the process by
which primitive man, setting strict limits to his world, came to asso-
ciate every experience of perception, knowledge, action, or pleasure
with the supposed existence and response of a god whose function was
to personify the free enjoyment of this experience. Moreover, we also
reproduce the way that modernity, losing its momentum, absolutized
the thinking subject as the very substance of the world, gratifyingly
capable of answering himself because he possessed, together with his
miraculous ability to think, the faculty of judging all of his experi-

ences in an invariably favorable, successful, and true way, thanks to his
so-called reason. Reason presumably empowered anyone to transform
himself into what he knew infallibly he had to be. The pure use of
reason was always already present, enabling man to take pleasure in
every experience without having to judge his own judgment because
this judgment was supposedly perfect already, embodying as it did the
voice of the consciousness with which he had been endowed by his cre-
ator. When we seek a blind consensus, hoping thereby to evade once
and for all the accusations of our fellows, we reproduce the modern
thinking subject's loss of momentum that occurred when, undertaking
to think about his own relation to himself, he lapsed into animism.
If we reintroduce objective judgment to the use of language as a
necessary theoretical move, we will reconnect what we know about our
own reality, and about what we must do, with what we know that we
can and must enjoy being. Art would no longer need to serve as a mere
compensation, a therapeutic tool enabling us to forget our deadly and
inescapable crisis; nor would it need to serve as the symbol of a quasi-
divine and impossible morality. Art would become, rather, a way for
our environment and our social and mental life to appear increas-
ingly attractive as realities with which we wish increasingly to identify,
both because we would be increasingly less able to avoid such identi-
fication and because we would increasingly feel the need to recognize
ourselves in our social and mental lives and our surroundings without
seeking therein any kind of direct biological interest, that is, without
having to link this identification to the fulfillment of some basic desire
or other. This theoretical, regulative, and hedonistic submission of
oneself to the law of truth is the only means of recovering the modern
orientation toward thought insofar as this submission already governs
every assertion and every artistic figuration, regulating our cognitive
and practical powers. Moreover, this self-judgment about the truth of
what we happen to be and what we have to do constitutes the one
pleasure which can regulate and coexist with every other pleasure. Its
use would alone relieve us of the necessity of judging ourselves and
our partners, of becoming moralists, even in the aesthetic sphere.
References
Bettelheim, Bruno
1967 The Empty Fortress (New York: Free Press).
Deligny, F.
1975-76 "Cahiers de l'immuable," CERFI 2413(18-20).
Gehlen, Arnold
1939 Der Mensch (Frankfurt: Antheneum).
1959 Urmensch and Spetkultur (Frankfurt: Antheneum).
Habermas, Jurgen
1982 Theories des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp).
Marquard, Odo
1981 Abschied von Prinzipiellen (Stuttgart: Reclam).
Poulain, Jacques
1991 L'Age pragmatique ou l'experimentation totale (Paris: L'Harmattan).
Rorty, Richard
1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (London and New York: Cambridge
University Press).
1989 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (London and New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press).
Tustin, Frances
1972 Autism and Childhood Psychosis (London: Hogarth Press).
Von Humbolt, Wilhelm
1836 Einleitung in die Kawi-Werke (Berlin: Dunckler).
Welsch, Wolfgang
1990 Asthetisches Denken (Stuttgart: Reclam).

Irony Is Not Enough

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Irony Is Not Enough

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Irony Is Not Enough: The Limits of the Pragmatist Accommodation of Aesthetics to

Abstract The pragmatist aesthetics advanced in Richard Rorty's Contingency,

1. The Ironical Accommodation of the Self

internal alike, to reason. Modernity sought to produce a Copernican

cover a visible world existing outside ourselves and antecedent to our

as Habermas (1982) does, to legislate such matters would be only to

2. The Pragmatist Way of Ironizing Human Life

which it properly belongs to another domain, sometimes even to a

rejected as nonsensical. The ethical self sheds its Kantian animism,

From this it follows that we no longer need to consider societies or

For irony suffices to establish harmony in this society because it allows

But the citizens' acknowledgment of their own contingency does not

Therefore, there is no need to regard Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Der-

3. Consequences of Pragmatist Irony: Harmonizing Literary Shamanism

pragmatist experimentation on himself, would seem to have been pro-

speak. As Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836: 176) discovered, the use of

ternal judgment" by treating our desires as tangible forces internal to

to possess as speakers and agents, we seek to appropriate to ourselves

successfully denied ourselves while indulging in the deadly pleasures

shamanistic or autistic experience. Here the hyperactivation of plea-

miraculous ability to think, the faculty of judging all of his experi-

Você também pode gostar