Page 426 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics and Speech Act Theory
A concept that ranges from the mere bagatelle of a devious sophist to the organizing principle of the universe is a truly seductive chimera. The word 'irony' is often intended and usually understood in a variety of ways in modern discussions; yet, as often as it has been left underdetermined no umbrella concept called irony has been developed. Its movement from Classi- cal Greek lexeme to later Latin figure of speech to cosmic descriptor for the German romantics in the nineteenth century helped make the modern senses multifarious; American New Criticism privileged the word as a primary principle of structure in their tex- tual manipulations, and Schlegel's moral and phi- losphical uses of it have recently returned to prominence. It does little good to make a neat formal definition that neither the language nor even indi- vidual scholars can observe. The chimera can be neither slain nor tamed.
1. A Nondefinition of Irony
The simpler earliest reflexes of Greek eirein 'to speak' seem to have coalesced in a narrowing and pejorative sense around the behavioral characteristics of dis- semblance; Greek rhetor's origin in the same etymon, Indo-European *wer- 'to speak,' suggests the same progression from neutral discourse to suspect means of oratory manipulation. One of Socrates' targets in Plato's Republic is convinced that he has been conned by Socrates' eironeia; however, Cicero lauds the orig- inal Socratic irony, 'feigned ignorance in order to instruct.' In the political sphere, Demosthenes per- ceived the eiron as a civic evader of responsibility through feigned unfitness; yet again, Aristotle prefers the self-deprecating eironeia of Socrates to the bluster ofalazoneia 'exaggerated misrepresentation.' If Freud- ian joke tendentiousness is part of the ironic process, perhaps the opposite views of the speakers and the victims help to explain the polarity that was evident even early in the use of the concept. Cicero's use marked the movement from a behavioral charac- teristic to a rhetorical figure that blames by praise or praises by blame. Latin ironia had at least these two meanings, and Quintilian seems to have expanded the circumscribed figure to the manner of whole argu- ments.
It is not simply the complex history of the word that makes it impossible to control; it is also that irony usually involves intentions and always involves contexts. Neither of these concepts has lent itself to analytic representation so that descriptions of irony are at best either weakly induced from the all too
plentiful examples or artificially bounded for rhe- torical purposes. Instances of irony might be best gen- eralized as being set by a secondary representation that is in an opposition to a primary representation of the same territory; ironization occurs at the real- ization of a discrepancy between the two. 'To say the opposite of what one means' or the slightly less restrictive 'to say other than what one means' are the traditional formulations. Taking note of the oppo- sition addresses how the ironic instance affects under- standing. How one recognizes dual representation is intertwined with contextualization and the ironist's intentions, if indeed he or she happens to exist.
Reference to intent is at least plausible if one is dealing with the instrumentality of the ironist, but the accidental recognition of situational irony requires a shift so that the perceiver is the agentive ironist with a personal set of intentions; categorical collapses like self-irony require both the speaker and victim to be the same. Of course the description of irony as an instrument (trope, figure, mode, or structure) is much easier than the discovered situational ironies (acci- dental, cosmic, zeitgeistentsprechenol, or epis- temological). If intentions which differentiate irony frommetaphor,symbol,myth,allegory,jokes, riddles, and so on, were discoverable, then reductively defining irony as 'allegoria'—saying something and meaning something else—could be eliminated. All of the alle- goria above suggest two scripts that are mediated by an opposition: metaphor has tenor and vehicle; alle- gory has extended narrative references and external references; the riddle confuses many possibilities and its inferrable solution. While lying has sometimes been included as a form of allegoria, a lie projects only one representation; like any utterance or situation it could be discovered to be ironic, or even intended as ironic, but only in ways that are incidental to its function as lying. A lie does not succeed at lying when it is pen- etrated as irony must be. The potential of anything to be situationally ironic confuses the discussion. While any of the other allegoria may seek to move the hearer toward the second script, only irony has the purpose of negating the first script as an inherent part of its structure.
There are three abstract participants in the ironic instance that are easily related to the grammatical categories of first, second, and third person. The pos- tulated first-person speaker is the ironist; the second- person audience is the perceiver; the third person is the victim of the irony. The coincidence of any of these persons creates specialized situations like self-
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Irony M. Marino