Nietzsche in Greenwich Village: Visions of Politics, Aesthetics and Irony in the 1910s

You will find irony treated angrily, as though it were an acid or a poison, where men love ease. And you will find it merely ignored when men have wholly lost the sense of justice.

Hilaire Belloc, “On Irony”

Amor fati is the core of my nature. This, however, does not alter the fact that I love irony and even world-historical irony.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

Paul Fussell has influentially claimed that there “seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War” (35). In specifically literary terms, Fussell’s assertion is agreeably consonant with the emergence of the New Criticism, high modernism, and canonical postmodernism, all of which are thought to be distinguished by the salient employment of different ironies. “Irony” simultaneously describes a form of consciousness, a verbal trope, a mode of aesthetic representation, a characteristic of historical events, and a disposition toward various modes of signification; if these are all imagined to emerge from the wholesale failure to flout laws of unintended consequences, then perhaps the putative “rise” of irony really can be traced to the trenches of the Somme, whence it virally spread throughout the brains and books of the Anglophone world. What to make, however, of those years before “everything” putatively shattered into fragmented, disillusioned chaos; between the hopeful turn of the old century and the recognition that events in the new century might be more horrifying than any prediction? Was that period dominated by a single form of pre-modern, mid-modern, low-modern, mini-modern, or quasi-modern understanding? Are we to imagine that those years of apprehending, remembering, and representing the world were notably unironic, either by definition or in comparison with prior and subsequent epochs?

Of course not; irony was obviously as vital and vibrant before the war as it has been after September 11, 2001. To account for a seminal discourse about irony in the 1910s, I look at the work of two American theorists of irony as a way of considering how we arrived at particular visions of irony in general, especially in the context of irony’s putative enemy: activist politics. In the space of a few years, and within a few miles of one another, American writers Randolph Bourne and Benjamin de Casseres used the word “irony” as a way of describing particular intersections between aesthetics and radical politics: yet only Bourne’s concept of irony has been scrutinized and anthologized, and I attempt to draw some political conclusions from the exclusion of the equally prolific de Casseres. The difficulties of limiting the polysemous term “irony” to only one sense are notorious, and have been capably addressed.¹ Bourne himself advised that “Words are not invariable symbols for invariable things, but clues to meanings” (“John Dewey’s Philosophy” 332), and my concern is not to enumerate the multiple meanings of “irony” as classical trope, narrative mode, or dramatic recognition, but to suggest that the “meaning” of “irony” is usefully expanded by the context of contemporary discourses about photography, visuality, politics, and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. In doing so, I hope to destabilize the conventional opposition between a “disjunctive irony (the characteristic form of modernism), [which] strives toward a condition of paradox. . . before inevitably achiev[ing] an aesthetic closure” and a postmodern “suspensive irony,” with “its yet more radical vision of multiplicity, randomness, contingency, and even absurdity” (Wilde 10). In the New York Nietzscheans of the 1910s, I find in irony not just a term to describe particular aesthetic practices within democracy. Rather, I look closely at how Bourne figures irony through the language of aesthetics, and briefly at the opposing account offered by de Casseres. In this dialectic, I propose we read irony as a figure—what Donald Schön calls a “generative metaphor”—for reconceiving democracy itself quite differently from the influential “liberal democratic irony” of Richard Rorty and Hayden White, which values private irony but banishes public irony...