Ironic communication as a relational ambiguity (how to re-negotiate interaction). The ironist, skilled in the art of skimming and lingering, just like the mythological Janus Bifrons, has two faces: one which laughs at the weeping of the other. In this way, it is possible to define irony as a “Janus-faced” communication. The paradox about ironic communication is that, if you want to be understood clearly, you have to be misunderstood. In fact, the ironic comment is like a skin that alludes to the hidden content at the very moment in which it conceals that content.
Therefore, ironic miscommunication can be used as an ambivalent strategy, a “tongue in cheek” producing puzzlement and disorientation in the interlocutors. In fact, the “Janus-faced” nature of ironic miscommunication allows people, on one side, to calm their passions, while on the other one, to shift in their own favor the fuzzy borders between the different possible (and legitimate) interpretations of their comment.The ironist benefits both from the “effectiveness of the word” and the “innocence of silence”, to use the incisive expression. For this reason, we can speak about pragmatic polysemy in ironic communication. In fact, by means of a systematic process of “meaning negotiation”, in an ironic utterance speakers convey a communicative intention which allows the interlocutor to interpret it with different meanings. Irony as miscommunication is a complex communicative outcome in which different signaling systems interact at the same time. In particular, in the standard ironic comment, linguistic segments are combined in a specific paralinguistic (or supra-segmental) frame. The apparent opposition between these two signaling patterns generates the ironic meaning perceived by the addressee. On some other special occasions, when there are strong contextual constraints and clues, linguistic inputs are sufficient alone to create the ironic meaning. The basic ambiguity of irony allows one to negotiate and re-negotiate the meanings of an ironic comment. In this way, the ironist is not constrained to undertake responsibility for his/her word. This property of irony (being a skilful device to assure oneself of many more degrees of freedom than an explicit utterance does), arises from the ironic remark Anthony addresses to his friend Hillary. The lady goes to a cocktail party wearing a hideous dress and Anthony say: “Hillary! You’re so beautiful: just like Sharon Stone!”. “What do you mean?!”, George, Hillary’s husband, intervenes, irritated by Anthony’s sarcastic attitude. “Hillary is gorgeous, tonight! I was just paying your wife a compliment…”, Anthony pretends not to have been sarcastic, as if the meaning of his comment depended only on the linguistic input. In this dialogue the sense of the utterance is the subject of a skillful negotiation between them, because the semantic ambiguity of the ironic remark allows Anthony not to take full responsibility for his innuendo.
As useful outcome of ironic miscommunication, speakers have the chance and opportunity to calibrate the weight of the indirect meaning of their speech. An indirect expression of one’s thoughts, desires and feelings cannot only hide one’s real intention, but it can also define it and re-draw the limits of social interaction between interlocutors. First of all, according to the “tinge hypothesis, irony should express less condemnation and less approval than a direct utterance does (mitigation of the intended meaning). A criticism ironically made is apparently lighter and less offensive than an open insult; similarly, ironic praise is less positive than an explicit form. There is a kind of “regression to the center”, in which, on the one hand, the exultation is lessened, and, on the other, the aggressive charge is attenuated. Ironic criticism is used to emphasize condemnation rather than to dilute it: thanks to irony it should be possible to achieve one’s aims in a more pointed and controlled way, intensifying the meaning of an utterance (enhancement of the intended meaning).
Because of a cool detachment from emotions, irony may be used as a device for wounding someone in a much more cutting way than a direct criticism oriented in the same direction. In fact, an explicit insult can be produced in a moment of rage, as a consequence of the speaker’s mood in the contingent condition. Alternatively, an ironic insult can arise from a cold calculation, so as to express, besides blame, even the ironist’s intention of not losing his/her self-control in showing the interlocutor’s lack of success.Similarly, within a context of praise, irony is feasible when the speakers know each other very well.
II. 3. The types of Irony
A person expounding the irony has to know how to encode his message, pays attention to cultural and national habits, and tunnels of the media through which his message will be sent. Television's The Daily Show takes other television footage out of context and creates its own 'fake' news coverage that ironically highlights the limitations of the television medium. When someone speaks to you in the voice of a radio disk jockey they ironically emphasize how the context for speech has changed when the medium of the radio is absent. Many critics agree that affect is a vital part of irony, as different types of irony have different feelings or colors that are not experienced in its absence. Most theories of rhetoric distinguish between three types of irony: verbal, dramatic and situational.
Verbal irony is a disparity of expression and intention: when a speaker says one thing but means another, or when a literal meaning is contrary to its intended effect. An example of this is sarcasm. Sarcasm is stating the opposite of an intended meaning especially in order to sneeringly slyly jest or mock a person situation or thing.
Dramatic (or tragic) irony is a disparity of expression and awareness: when words and actions possess a significance that the listener or audience understands, but the speaker or character does not.
Situational irony is the disparity of intention and result: when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect. Likewise, cosmic irony is disparity between human desires and the harsh realities of the outside world (or the whims of the gods). By some older definitions, situational irony and cosmic irony are not irony at all.
Verbal irony is distinguished from situational irony and dramatic irony in that it is produced intentionally by speakers. For instance, if a speaker exclaims, “I’m not upset!” but reveals an upset emotional state through her voice while truly trying to claim she's not upset, it would not be verbal irony just by virtue of its verbal manifestation. An emotion is a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts. Personal virtues are characteristics valued as promoting individuality. This distinction gets at an important aspect of verbal irony: speakers communicate implied propositions that are intentionally contradictory to the propositions contained in the words themselves. For example: as pleasant as a root-canal.
What about tragic irony it can only take place in a fictional context. In this form of irony, the words and actions of the characters belie the real situation, which the spectators fully realize. Tragic irony particularly characterized the drama of ancient Greece, owing to the familiarity of the spectators with the legends on which so many of the plays were based. The theatre of ancient Greece, or ancient Greek drama, is a theatrical culture that flourished in ancient Greece. Irony threatens authoritative models of discourse by "removing the semantic security of one signifier, so, irony has some of its foundation in the onlooker’s perception of paradox which arises from insoluble problems. A paradox is a true statement or group of statements that leads to a Contradiction or a situation which defies intuition. For example: In the William Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo finds Juliet in a drugged death-like sleep, he assumes her to be dead and kills himself. William Shakespeare.
Situational irony is a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by 'perverse appropriateness'. For example: If someone were to go on a trip and decide not to take a plane because they are worried about crashing, and take a bus instead, it would be ironic if a plane hit the bus they took, thereby realizing their fears of crashing with a plane, despite measures taken at the outset of the journey to avoid such a fate.
II. 4. Irony and Clerisy
To cultivate the self is, in effect, to discover that there is no self to cultivate. From a pedagogical point of view, in particular, to do it right is to get it wrong. Irony constitutes the crisis of the clerisy. At the same time, and as it were ironically, clerisy represents itself as the resolution of that crisis.
Both "irony" and "clerisy" emerge into peculiar discursive prominence during the romantic era. Irony's provenance as a rhetorical term dates back to antiquity, but its usage receives a new birth through the theorizing of Friedrich Schlegel, emerging in his writing as something rather different than the "merely" rhetorical strategy through which one says one thing and means another. For Schlegel (and in his wake) the divide that characterizes its traditional rhetorical definition becomes an allusive point of departure for rethinking the divided nature of subjectivity. "Clerisy" is Coleridge's coinage for a learned class of (more or less) state functionaries responsible for the preservation and dissemination of the national heritage. The role of such a class—its centrality and importance to the nation-state—is developed in various ways, theoretical and practical, throughout the nineteenth century and, in Britain, usually with explicit reference to Coleridge's formulation (see Knight, Prickett, and Readings).
The topic for this volume in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series was intended as something of an experiment. The initial impulse in soliciting articles under the heterogeneous rubrics of "irony" and "clerisy" was to consider each in the nature of a metonymy for broader generic and ideological questions raised in romantic writing. The irony as a stand-in, so to speak, for the romantic topoi of self-consciousness and self-division: contradiction, fragmentation, dissolution. Of course, the aporias of irony turn out to be, in many ways, the inevitable condition of clerical intervention and authority, even as the call for such intervention and authority testifies to an ironic consciousness that their influence can by no means be assumed.
One way in which these two seemingly heterogeneous strands of romantic discourse come to be linked occurs thematically through the concept of Bildung or cultivation. Irony for Schlegel played many roles not the least of which was to designate the human capacity for playing many roles. The ironist stood away from himself. He arrived at perfection to the point of irony—to the point, that is, of reflection and reversal. Perhaps the best shorthand translation for specialists in British romanticism would be Keats's negative capability.
The figure of "revolutions" evoked the radical provocation of such aphorisms for the business of Building—that lead for the production and reproduction of culture. The ongoing chain of irony must, to be genuinely ongoing and genuinely ironic, include itself as one of its links. "What gods will be able to save us from all these ironies?" Irony ends, as Schlegel himself writes, as "irony of irony," a fate from which no (human) history can escape. This has been the emphasis of most contemporary readings of Schlegel.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that an identity-oriented or traditionalist concept of the clerisy operates without its own quite deliberate ironies. The very project of instituting a social class responsible for culture bespeaks a certain ironic consciousness in and of that culture. Coleridge's account of the "idea" of the clerisy in On the Constitution of Church and State is thoroughly ironic, if by irony one means the deliberate conjoining in one form of two absolutely irreconcilable intentions (a definition that is, at least, very close to Schlegel's "antithetical synthesis. What On the Constitution of Church and State calls the "national church" comprehends "the learned of all denominations" .
Theology is not one among many, but the "head of all" the liberal arts and sciences, and yet the reason Coleridge gives for its place in the hierarchy of learning is anything but theological. Under the name of Theology, or Divinity, were contained the interpretation of languages; the conservation and tradition of past events; the momentous epochs, and revolutions of the race and nation; the continuation of the records; logic, ethics, and the determination of ethical science.
To associate its spiritual or "sacerdotal" function with its national one "is to be considered as un-growth of ignorance and oppression." At the same time, Coleridge refuses to make the final disciplinary cut, one that would separate sacred and profane truths with all due finality. On the contrary, he insists at several points that without reference to the sacerdotal, all other sciences would be reduced to so much empiricism and utilitarianism. There can be no national church without an other church, antithetical to the nation-state, antithetical even to the very idea of the nation-state, as its quasi-teleological framework. I write "quasi" teleological only to emphasize that actually to arrive at the telos would be, for Coleridge, to regress into "ignorance and oppression." (The structural affinities with Fichte and Schlegel are evident.) From the point of view of the nation, religion is a productive blind spot. Though, of course, from the point of view of religion, it is the nation that sees through a glass darkly.
Institutionally, the interplay of theology and nation-state is embodied in Coleridge's vision of a specifically Anglican clerisy. The guardians of culture not only may but must be embodied in the sacerdotal figure. England, of course, is peculiarly fortunate in that its national church is also a Christian one, but in any case priestly authority must be responsible for the heterogeneous though interdependent functions of national and spiritual well-being.
Two distinct functions do not necessarily imply or require two different functionaries. Nay, the perfection of each may require the union of both in the same person. And in the instance now in question, great and grievous errors have arisen from confounding the functions; and fearfully great and grievous will be the evils from the success of an attempt to separate them.
The clerisy as the guardian not just of the state's civilization but as Coleridge repeatedly insists of its culture must always be, as it were, in touch with a nominal realm "outside" the nation if it is indeed to arrive at anything approaching culture. And yet that realm must never be equated with the cultural mission of the nation-state as such. Practically, to do so would be to equate transcendental conditions of morality to the particular mores of a time and place—at an extreme, to institute not a clerisy but an inquisition. Even ideally, Coleridge cannot permit himself to imagine such an end to his project, for it would lose its antithetical and productive power. Human history and divine providence would be at all times and everywhere the same.