I neglected to explain in my last post how I happened (so fortuitously) upon Dream Scenario, so this essay sort of works through that. The TL;DR of it, though, is relatively simple: as I was thinking through something related to Doppelganger, I ended up going back to Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and that, in turn, made me just enough more likely to fire up Nicolas Cage’s new movie. As I sat down to sort through all of my thoughts, I discovered that I wanted to remark on those parallels first, so I cut out the middle step.
If I’m being honest, though, the middle step (this post) will require a bit of a windup, and it may not be as interesting to anyone but me. And like plenty of other discussions of mine, I’m drawing here on ideas (in this case, Freud’s) about which I don’t claim any particular expertise. Caveat lector and all that.
Irony
If you’ve been following this site for very long, you’ll know that I circle around eventually to a handful of rhetorical tropes, which form the core of the project that I’m slowly trying to gather up and crystallize. Collectively, these tropes, I believe, provide a compelling way to understand contemporary discourse (and some of the problems that have emerged and persisted during much of my adult life).
For me, perhaps the most challenging trope to contend with has been irony. I’ve written about irony a few times now (here, for example), but it’s trickier than the other tropes because it’s seeped into our broader cultural vocabulary (and not just because of Alanis or Winona). It’s fairly easy to understand metonymy and synecdoche as relational operations (i.e., means of connecting one thing to another)—we rely upon them constantly and tacitly. But irony, for most folks, is more than that—it’s a vibe. Roy Christopher provides a nice overview of this, in his account of how pervasive irony has become culturally. “Resorting to irony,” he explains, “is the only response that quells the cognitive dissonance of dealing with such a contradictory world.”
Those scenes from Reality Bites that I linked above raise another problem with irony, which is that it’s difficult to define. The definition that Ethan Hawke’s character supplies—”it’s when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning”—is technically accurate (Christopher, among many others, paraphrases it at the outset of his piece), but it’s more appropriately a definition of sarcasm, itself a subset of irony. And that definition doesn’t really speak to the larger complaint of a culture grounded in irony.
My own personal, somewhat generic, definition has two features: first, irony creates distance between connotation (actual meaning) and denotation (literal meaning). It doesn’t necessarily require the “complete opposite,” but otherwise, that’s a softer version of the above. More crucially, I think, the second part of my definition is that irony is also a manipulation of context. This is, in part, why forms of ironic humor (like satire or sarcasm) don’t always travel well, and are often misunderstood on social media. I would argue that whereas metonymy and synecdoche are tropes that generate and reinforce context, irony is a trope that largely depends upon shared context, and manipulates it for effect.
Here’s an easy example. Rhetorical questions are a relatively mild version of irony. If I walk into a room, and ask someone “Is it warm in here?” my goal is most likely to get someone to lower the thermostat or to open a window, which I accomplish indirectly in the form of that question. Most of us recognize (and thus don’t actually answer) rhetorical questions as a matter of course, because we encounter them in specific contexts. There’s nothing that feels intrinsically dishonest about them.
The indirectness of rhetorical questions, to my mind, gets us closer to how irony actually functions, and I’d add that it’s a strategy that we use regularly, even if we don’t always recognize it as such. Think about how we modulate our language and self-presentation depending on our audience; reflexively, we tailor the things we say depending on to whom we’re saying them. If my mom, my boss, and a friend of mine all ask me how my day is going, they’re almost certainly getting three somewhat different answers. I’m not “lying” in any of those cases—the distance between connotation and denotation is one of the tools we have for adapting “what we mean” to different conversational contexts. And we build those contexts in collaboration with others—I don’t talk to my mothers every day, and so “how are you?” will mean something more like “how have things been going the past few weeks?” rather than “how are you at this moment?” Understandings like these aren’t typically an explicit part of our conversations—shared context emerges organically, at least among our most immediate acquaintances. And irony is pretty common, and innocuous, in that context.
It’s when we expand our horizon (or scale up context) that things begin to get tricky. As someone with a pretty dry sense of humor, the first few weeks of teaching any course are always a little challenging for me. I sometimes catch myself saying things that feel sardonic to me, that the students might take too literally, if I’m not careful. And that’s to say nothing of the gazillions of times on social media platforms where users get shamed, piled, or driven off for daring to attempt understatement, exaggeration, sarcasm, satire, or parody. Irony “works” as a rhetorical device when an audience is able to perceive the message, the intention, and the distance between them1.
What does this have to do with culture? Well, some of the qualities that we juxtapose with irony—authenticity, sincerity, earnestness—are the same qualities that contribute to the building of shared context. Sharing a context with someone requires a certain amount of vulnerability. When you take someone seriously only to find out that they were “just joking,” it can be embarrassing or shame-inducing. It’s far easier to adopt an ironic distance first. This is how irony propagates itself and spreads. Ian Bogost writes that irony “sticks to everything. Fractal, irony reproduces itself within, below, around, and above itself. Eventually, the ironic actor doesn’t even know whether she is earnest or contemptuous.”
Tropelganger
I was thinking a great deal about irony as I made my way through Klein’s Doppelganger, for a couple of reasons. Irony is quite literally the process of taking some thought or intention and doubling it (differently). If Naomi Wolf had continued on the original path she’d set for her career, the confusion that Klein encountered would have been an occasional annoyance. But it was when Klein overheard people speaking poorly about her (and attributing Wolf’s shifting attitudes to her) that she began the process that became her book. The distance between what Klein meant and what Wolf was saying became too great for Klein to ignore any longer.
And her book, especially in its discussion of “Mirror Worlds,” is very much about the way that irony spreads and disables our ability to resist it. “When the figure of the buffoon becomes central to public life, the problem is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including—especially—the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing.” This is one of the places where she hearkens back to her work in No Logo: in the same way that corporations were able to decontextualize culture for marketing purposes, the ironic adoption of critical discourse neuters it. It’s in this way that Doppelganger builds on her previous work:
The story beneath the story [in No Logo] was the normalization of the disassociation between words from reality, which could only usher in the era of irony and flat detachment, because those seemed like the only self-respecting postures to adopt in a world in which everyone was lying all the time.
While Klein only uses the word a handful of times in her book, the ubiquity of irony (and the folks who exploit it for personal and political gain) is one of the themes that underlies her entire account.
But there’s a little more to it than just demonizing irony. I’ve already quoted Klein’s citation of Hannah Arendt a couple of times: regardless of how circumscribed our brands (and self-representations) may be, we contain multitudes. And so for Arendt (and Klein), “the process of thinking [is] a form of doubling” as well. Our ability to conduct internal dialogues, to grant the possibility of legitimate opinions other than our own, and to engage with them in good faith, perhaps changing our own opinions (or at least nuancing them)—this is a mark of healthy thought. I think that this is compatible with what Dannagal Young calls in Wrong the cultivation of intellectual humility, one of the correctives she suggests in place of the identity distillation machine she describes. To play “devil’s advocate” with one’s own ideas or another’s is to deploy irony strategically, whether its purpose is to strengthen one’s own case or think through the implications of a particular choice.
Towards the end of Doppelganger, Klein explains that “Negotiating that doubling—between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves—is a part of what it means to be human.” But she’s also quick to note that “living a good life” depends far more upon “what we make together,” and perhaps that’s an insight that we can build upon in figuring out how to distinguish between the productive, humanistic irony of Arendt and the corrosive cultural vibe that her book (and others) warn us of. It’s a topic I’ll eventually need to broach both here and in my larger project. But I’m going to take a different tack today.
Doppeldreamer
One of the things I mentioned last post was the serendipity of happening upon Dream Scenario at a time when it seemed to overlap so fruitfully with Klein’s story. To a fair extent, it was accidental, but that connection was primed for me by a detour that I took last week, dipping into Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. It stretches credulity a bit, I know, but it was having read some Freud that prompted me to watch the Cage movie rather than the other way around.
A big part of that was Klein’s emphasis on doubling (and the way that her discussion overlapped with my own attitudes toward irony). There are a number of thinkers over the past few hundred years who have taken up the major tropes2 in the way that I’m trying to do with my own work, and it will sometimes surprise folks to learn that Freud was one of those. In Interpretation, he lays out the “operations” that our minds perform as they dream, and those operations map across the major tropes (condensation = metaphor, displacement = metonymy, etc.). At the same time, I’ve always struggled a bit with how irony fit into Freud’s scheme.
None of this would matter if I weren’t planning on a chapter of my book that talks about how the major tropes have been taken up across the centuries. The question of how Freud takes up irony is not a huge deal, but it’s always been something that itched at me a little. Klein’s emphasis on doubling, though, prompted me to revisit that itch, and to return to Freud for the first time in a long while. And that in turn encouraged me to try and hew a little closer to understanding irony less as vibe and more as rhetorical operation. (The results of that nudge are part of what you see in my first section.)
Anyway, for Freud3, the tropes function as psychic operations that our minds conduct as we’re dreaming. The fourth operation (the one corresponding to irony) is one that he describes as “secondary revision” or “secondary elaboration.” The dreams that we remember upon waking, he explains, have undergone a transformation in the process of making them accessible to our memory. “The result of its effort is that the dream loses the appearance of incoherence, and approaches the pattern of an intelligible experience.” What we remember, in other words, is not the dreaming itself, but a representation of it, a secondary elaboration “at the hands of a psychic function similar to our waking thought.”
This may not sound like a big deal (and perhaps it’s not), but what we remember as our dreams are in fact doubles of the dreaming thoughts our minds generate as we sleep. Freud likens this to the way that our conscious minds will overlook typographic errors because we tend to see what we expect to see (magic tricks exploit this same tendency). What we think of as our dreams are interpretations themselves of our dreaming, revised to make “sense” to our waking selves. If you’ve ever read French theory, you’ll recognize this as one of the fundamental features of language—there is no necessary relationship between the words we use (signifiers) and the things in the world that we’re referencing as we use them (signified).
In other words, there’s an inescapable degree of irony baked into communication. Just as the dreams we recall are only ever faint approximations of the dreaming we’ve done, language can’t hope to capture the full complexity of our thought. But the reason that language still works, for the most part, is the vast, infinitely complex social contract (and shared context) that we negotiate among each other. I wrote above that irony manipulates the distance between thought (what we mean) and word (what we say) for rhetorical effect, but those effects rely on context, a host of shared assumptions that run deep, even to the level of individual words—we can by and large take it for granted that you and I mean roughly the same thing when we talk about a dog or a tree. (Freedom, love, and other abstractions are another matter entirely, and in part, that’s why spend so much time talking about them.)
The double-edge of irony is that while we can use it to nuance our thoughts and build our shared contexts, and achieve better understanding, it can also be used to corrode those social connections. And that’s part of what Klein’s describing in Doppelganger. Irony can be deployed dissociatively; the toolkit of social media cruelty—trolling, dogpiling, sea lioning, gaslighting—is full of behaviors that I’d define as subcategories of irony. And that’s to say nothing of what we’ve settled for when it comes to our economic and political leaders.
Like I said, this may only be of real interest to me. I’m not sure that I’ve done the best job articulating this, but returning to Freud helped me shift around some of the puzzle pieces in my own brain, and it helped me fit a few of them together. And because I was thinking about dreams, I watched Dream Scenario, which felt like a double bonus. It’s gotten me a little closer to what I want to say, and that’s a nice feeling. More soon.
This is one of the reasons that digital conventions like smiley faces (and others) emerged. On Reddit, for instance, commenters frequently add “/s” after a sarcastic remark to signal their intent, lest they be accused of supporting the very thing they’re arguing against.
One of the incidental pieces of this work that I’ve never really cared for was the fact that metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony are described as the “master tropes.” I recently read a piece by Canadian scholar Nancy Partner where she calls them instead “major tropes,” and I find that an appealing alternative.
I feel obliged to qualify that this is my take on Freud, and I’m not exactly an expert. Your own mileage may vary.