Romance, Irony, and Solidarity Author(s) - Ronald N. Jacobs and Philip Smith

Romance, Irony, and Solidarity
Author(s): Ronald N. Jacobs and Philip Smith

Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 60-80
Published by: American Sociological Association
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Romance, Irony, and Solidarity*
RONALD N. JACOBS
University of Pennsylvania
PHILIP SMITH
University of Queensland
Contemporary social theory has turned increasingly to concepts such as civil society,
community, and the public sphere in order to theorize about the construction of vital,
democratic, and solidaristic political cultures. The dominant prescriptions for attain-
ing this end invoke the need for institutional and procedural reform, but overlook the
autonomous role of culture in shaping and defining the forms of social solidarity. This
article proposes a model of solidarity based on the two genres of Romance and Irony,
and argues that these narrative forms offer useful vocabularies for organizing public
discourse within and between civil society and its constituent communities. Whilst unable
to sustain filly-inclusive and solidaristic political cultures on their own, in combina-
tion the genres of Romance and Irony allow for solidaristic forms built around toler-
ance, reflexivity, and intersubjectivitv.
In recent years there have been massive changes in the study of what used to be known as
"political culture" (Somers 1995a). The desire to understand phenomena such as the "pol-
itics of identity," the "new social movements,"' and the events of 1989 has revived a
number of slumbering concepts, among them "civil society," "community," and "public
sphere." Their attraction lies in the analytical purchase they provide for conceptualizing
the links among meaning, power, and social structure-a task that is particularly important
in an era in which politics has moved "beyond left and right" (Giddens 1995). That is to
say, the study of politics has increasingly less to do with struggles and alliances founded
upon polarized class interests, and more to do with complex, symbolically based issues
and solidarities. This theoretical movement has not only turned its attention to questions of
solidarity and identity, it has also shifted from the presuppositional to the propositional
phase of theory construction:2 that is, from metatheory to theory as "narrative with moral
intent" (Seidman 1992). For all of these reasons, the current theoretical treatments of
community, public sphere, and civil society usually feature a subtext that both recom-
mends a particular patterning of the solidaristic aspects of social life and suggests ways of
attaining such a goal.
This article, too, should be understood as both an analytic work of social theory and a
prescriptive intervention into ongoing debates about the forms and dynamics of political
''We would like to thank Jeffrey Alexander, Steve Sherwood, Eleanor Townsley, and Edmond Wright for
helpful comments on many of the ideas presented in this paper. Craig Calhoun and the anonymous reviewers at
Sociological Theory also gave us extremely helpful comments and suggestions. Earlier drafts of this paper were
presented at the 1995 meeting of the Australian Sociological Association in Geelong, and the 1996 meeting of the
American Sociological Association in New York City. Please address any correspondence to Ronald N. Jacobs,
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-
6220, USA; or to Philip Smith, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Queensland, Queens-
land 4072, Australia.
We use this notion of "new social movements" knowing full well that the historical veracity of the term is far
from settled (for critiques of the concept, see Calhoun 1993b, Tucker 1991). Still, the extensive debate over
"what is new about the new social movements" reflects the very change in theorizing we emphasize.
2 For a more detailed discussion of the different dimensions of theory construction and theoretical logic, see
Alexander (1982, v. 1, esp. pp. 36-63).
Sociological Theory 15.:1 March 1997

? American Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW Washington, DC 20036
ROMANCE, IRONY, AND SOLIDARITY 61
cultures in an era of late- or post-modernity. Most solutions to the question of "the good
society" have been overly reliant on institutional and procedural "fixes," thereby neglect-
ing the autonomous role of culture in the construction of identity and solidarity. As a
result, there is too little debate about the kinds of discourses that should be staged in the
public spheres of civil society. As we will argue below, this lack of attention tends to
produce a latently mechanistic conception of human action; a failure to consider identity
as multiple, contradictory, hybrid, or public; and an inability to explain how democratic
institutions and procedures sometimes promote social outcomes that are neither just nor
moral.
Because of the above-mentioned problems associated with the rush to "solve" the
dilemmas of civil society, we prefer to linger on some of the vital issues and questions
related to political cultures. "Healthy" political cultures must be able to maintain inter-
subjectivity, solidarity, reflexivity, and tolerance. Intersubjectivity is necessary if individ-
uals, who are members of different groups and communities, are to understand and
communicate with one another. Without intersubjectivity, there is little possibility for
engagement in public between different groups. Solidarity, which allows members in a
group or community to feel a common identity and to mobilize together in action, is a
necessary prerequisite for the formation of a polity that goes beyond calculative alliances
on the basis of interests. Reflexivity is the distancing mechanism that allows individuals
to step outside of the culture of the groups and communities in which they are members.
By exposing the contingency/historicity of the linguistic and the social, reflexivity is
essential for the learning process through which an intelligent, self-aware, and flexible
polity emerges. Finally, tolerance is necessary in order for individuals and groups to
accept the existence of competing worldviews, either through indifference or, more ac-
tively, through care (cf. Bauman 1991,1993). Tolerance is a complement to reflexivity
and determines whether or not inclusion can occur outside of an assimilationist model
and avoid the paradox of universalism.3
Because we take as axiomatic the idea that civil society consists of a multiplicity of
public spheres, communities, and associations nested within one another, and also within
a putative larger "national sphere,"4 we see these four attributes as necessary elements of
any descriptive/normative civil society theory. In what follows, we draw upon and critique
Rorty's concept of a "poeticized culture" to suggest that narrative is a potential resource
for analyzing, constructing, and maintaining more democratic and open political cultures.
Specifically, we suggest that combining the genre forms of Romance and Irony as the
preferred organizing vocabularies of contemporary political cultures will enable the vital
characteristics of intersubjectivity, solidarity, reflexivity, and tolerance to emerge in public
discourse. In making such a claim, we recognize the danger of slipping into an overly
formulaic, structuralist, and reified understanding of genres as well as political cultures.
While we want to state from the outset that our preferred genres of Romance and Irony
have neither fixed referents nor solid boundaries, we recognize that we leave ourselves
open to such a charge through the very attempt to specify some of their important features.
Accordingly, the features we list are not meant to be exhaustive or typological in any
sense; rather, they are intended to provide some conceptual tools for talking about the
discourses of civil society that, to borrow a phrase from Rorty, "seem to work."
3 The assimilation model is based on the principle that things such as racial and ethnic identities should remain
in the private sphere of the lifeworld, so that the public sphere can be organized around a notion of an abstract
individual, absent of any race, gender, or national identity. The paradox, however, is that this model of the public
sphere tends to idealize and naturalize certain communities as "timeless": typically the European, Western, and
"civilized" man (Balibar 1990; Outlaw 1990).
4 For a more extended discussion in favor of our argument, see Eley (1992), Fraser (1992), Calhoun (1992),
Jacobs (1996a), and Taylor (1995).
62 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY
THE SETTING: WHAT IS AT STAKE
Notwithstanding recent debates about the "autonomy of culture," social theorists have yet
to provide a satisfactory account for how the formation of a morally aware and democratic
polity relates to meaning and solidarity. The result has been a tendency to understand
democracy and the public sphere primarily in institutional and procedural terms. This is
clearly the case with civil society theory. Civil society has been understood largely in
terms of the institutions and procedures through which a "plurality of democracies" (Cohen
and Arato 1992:415) can emerge. As Somers (1995b) has noted, the predominant theoret-
ical understandings of civil society and citizenship have been informed by a metanarrative
of social naturalism, in which the political culture concept takes on a noncultural identity
by being mapped onto a binary opposition between (sacred) nature and (profane) culture:
In this dichotomy, culture and politics are taken to mean the non-natural constructed
dimensions of the social universe .... [T]he division is articulated through a hierar-
chical delineation between that which is designated as "given"-unchanging, spon-
taneous, natural, God-given, law-like-versus that designated as "contingent"-
socially or politically constructed, hence temporal, coercive, arbitrary, vulnerable to
change or manipulation. Most important, that which falls on the "natural" side of the
epistemological divide and so exists ontologically independently of political or human
intervention is deemed ontologically prior-more foundational-to political life.
(Somers 1995b:254)
Somers's point is that when civil society theory is mapped onto the metanarrative of social
naturalism, what becomes naturalized is the normative imperative to establish a set of rules
or procedures protecting civil society from the historically constructed domains of social
life so that "reason" might emerge unfettered by contingency or coercion. And in this
respect there has been a seamless historical continuity, linking a wide range of theorists
who are otherwise quite different. For example, in the Scottish Enlightenment tradition of
David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, the background assumptions of the meta-
narrative of social naturalism made more plausible the argument that sociable and altruis-
tic motivations to act, learned through religion, would emerge "naturally" through
participation in public life and in market transactions. The same metanarrative of social
naturalism also lies behind the dominant contemporary approaches to civil society and the
public sphere, such as those of Norberto Bobbio and Jurgen Habermas.5 Bobbio (1987:24-
25) defines a democratic and inclusive society as minimally requiring (1) wide participa-
tion and broad possibilities of representation, (2) majority decision making, and (3) legal
codes underwriting basic rights of individual liberty. At the same time, Bobbio wants to
increase the democratization of civil society itself, because "if an indicator of democratic
progress is needed it cannot be provided by the number of people who have the right to
vote, but the number of contexts outside politics where the right to vote is exercised"
(Bobbio 1987:56). The idea here is that a more tolerant and just society can "naturally"
emerge so long as there are a maximal number of contexts in which democratic decision-
making takes place. For Habermasians, the procedural organization of idealized civil soci-
ety centers around the idea of a rational discourse ethic emphasizing equal participation in
5 While we limit our discussion here to the Scottish moralists, to Bobbio, and to Habermas, the influence of the
social naturalism metanarrative is present for other, equally diverse approaches, such as Parsons (1971) and
Keane (1989, 1992).
discussion and the procedures for establishing agreement (cf. Habermas 1985; Cohen and
Arato 1992). The assumption is that discourse ethics would allow reason to prevail through
the location of generalized interests by interlocutors. This would then be followed by
discursive convergence toward a vanishing point of mutual intersubjective agreement and
a corresponding expansion of the horizons of an intersubjectively validated lifeworld.
Habermas wants "rational" consensus to replace "merely empirical" consensus, so that
communicative reason might come to replace instrumental reason in the public sphere.
What all of these approaches share is the belief that the "right" kind of institutional or
procedural arrangements can allow more just and tolerant political arrangements "natural-
ly" to emerge. By contrast, we see three principal reasons why there is something crucial
at stake when culture gets marginalized through the metanarrative of social naturalism,
endemic to civil society theory. The first of these relates to a contradiction between moral
intent and deeply buried but ineluctable presuppositional foundations. By arguing that
human action is shaped in an unmediated fashion by social structure and patterns of inter-
action, prevailing theories have at their core a latently mechanistic conception of human
action (see Alexander 1982). This is not just a philosophical point. The ability of a theo-
retical logic to accommodate human agency is essential for social theory if it is to have
moral substance as well as moral intent (Alexander 1987). Indeed, all of the approaches
discussed above are based on a notion of civil society as a sphere of positive freedom,
wherein public opinion, influence, and commitment can develop (through the agency of
public actors) to challenge the system-world media of money and power. The problem is
that if public actors are restricted to certain kinds of institutional or procedural arrange-
ments, they are also prevented from entering the public sphere on behalf of their more
particularized, local identities. The procedural and institutional focus of civil society the-
ory leads to a conflation of actors and agency, with the consequence that the identities,
motivations, and meaning environments of actors do not receive any serious consideration
(Alexander 1996).6
Our second argument is more immediate and practical. A theoretical inclination that
privileges social structure ignores the empirical fact that the public sphere-and, indeed,
power itself-is and has always been mediated by the dynamics of communal ritual, cul-
tural bias, and substantive personal and collective values. It is probably impossible for
private citizens to engage one another in public in any way that approximates the Rawlsian
(1971 ) "veil of ignorance." Yet this is precisely what would be required for the Habermas-
ian "ideal speech situation" to actually work. Engagement in public life can never be
denuded of ideal inputs; it is always grounded in cultural forms that are always already
situated within particular concrete historical settings. Acknowledging this allows us to
think about how cultural forces can contribute to the process of institutional and proce-
dural reform from the outset, rather than simply emerging as a reward at the end.7 Further-
more, when culture and meaning move to the forefront of civil society theory, it becomes
possible to move beyond the functionalist theories of identity and value integration upon
which the institutionalists and proceduralists residually rely. Etzioni (1995:17), for exam-
ple, argues that "communal values are only legitimate insofar as they are not in tension
with overarching core values." Habermas's theory of communicative reason requires a
functionally integrated self, in which the self can become transparently and reflectively
known through a Meadian dialogue-organized by a communication orientation-among
6 For example, Habermas has criticized social movements and identity politics as "degenerative intrusions" (cf.
Calhoun 1994).
7 For empirical demonstrations of this point, see Jacobs (1996a) and Smith (1996).
mind, self, and society.8 And Bobbio's focus on democratic procedures cannot account for
the injury done to those whose identities are delegitimated by the outcomes of democratic
decisions; nor, for that matter, can it criticize a "pathological" form of collective identity,
created and/or strengthened through public discourse, which produces unjust conse-
quences through democratic procedures. The problem is that none of these theories can
conceptualize the possibilities or consequences of multiple, contradictory, or hybrid iden-
tities, nor the ways in which these identities might be mobilized (or not) by particular types
of public discourses.
This point leads to our final argument, which invokes the "lessons" of history. In the
case of civil society theory we suggest that idealism and pragmatism are not at odds. To the
contrary, we propose that by exploring ideal forms in a systematic way, theorists of civil
society can present arguments that are not only less reductionistic, but also more strongly
grounded in the ironies and contingencies of human experience. For history shows that
democratic procedures and institutions are often powerless to regulate the formation of
sphere-specific cultural constructions.9 There is no reason why a democratized sphere
should necessarily or automatically produce a more just or moral society. At the end of the
day, there can be no guarantee that democratic institutions and procedures will produce
tolerant and inclusive outcomes in beliefs, practices, or the expansion of public spheres.
Authoritarian and populist regimes have, on many different occasions, extended, legiti-
mated, and consolidated state power on the back of repeated electoral mandates. Such
regimes may range from the relatively mainstream "authoritarian populism" of England's
Thatcherism (Hall 1988) to the quasi-fascist corporatism of Peron's Argentina (Blankstein
1953). Perhaps the most telling example remains the Nazi rise to power, which was achieved
(at least in part) through ongoing success at the ballot box during the 1930s, culminating
in a 99% vote in both Germany and Austria in favor of the 1938 Anschluss (Orlow 1973). 1?
Existing modernist theory, then, points almost exclusively to the need for institutional
and procedural change, where identity-neutral mechanisms for communication or decision
making are imbued with the ability to produce justice, tolerance, and reason in civil soci-
ety. While we agree that these kinds of democratic procedures are necessary for the for-
mation of a civil society, we maintain that they are far from sufficient. The central theoretical
problem with these approaches is that the meanings that might promote democracy are too
often pushed to the side. As a consequence cultural and symbolic inputs are given only a
residual status in mediating the connection between institutional and civic life. Even when
inputs such as discourse and communication are taken to be central to the task of building
democracy, as in the work of Habermas, they are treated as the emergent properties of the
institutional and discursive modalities through which citizens are shaped and through which
they communicate. In short, for institutionalist and proceduralist theories there seems to be
an uncontrollable urge to "get beyond" culture and meaning.
It is one thing to demonstrate a need for cultural theory to be included in analyses of
civil society, but quite another to put forward a prescriptive model of what political cul-
tures should look like. Yet, if cultural theory is to exert an influence, this is precisely what
must be done. After all, one of the major strengths of proceduralist and instititutionalist
8 See Habermas (1985, esp. pp. 72-77): "The Self to which he then relates is not a mysterious something; it is
familiar to him from the communicative practice of daily life; it is ego himself in the communicative role of the
first person" (p. 75).
9 For a more extended discussion of the sphere-specific production of substantive goods, see Walzer (1983) and
Boltanski and Thevenot (1991).
10 While the exact circumstances surrounding the Austrian plebiscite are hotly contested, considerable agree-
ment exists that "the Anschluss was endorsed by the Austrian episcopate, by the remnants of organized labor, and
in the plebiscite of 10 April 1938." (Buckley 1989:152-153)
theories has been an ability to specify concrete mechanisms for building a better society.
To take one example, Habermas's concepts of the "ideal speech situation" and "public
sphere" operate not just as critical yardsticks, but also as potential building blocks in a
process of social reform. Most institutionalist theories of civil society, in fact, can be
translated easily into checklists for international organizations monitoring the "progress"
of "developing," "modernizing" countries in the "transition to democracy." Cultural the-
ory, on the other hand, has for the most part opted for an analytic mode of inquiry aimed
at mapping political cultures and their consequences. Mindful of the need for proposals as
well as analysis, in the next section we propose a new map for thinking about culture and
solidarity.
GENERIC STRUCTURES AND SOLIDARY SPHERES
Although institutional and procedural theories still rule the roost, there is an emerging
body of literature arguing for the autonomy of culture in the construction of solidary
spheres. For example, the work of Scott Lash (1994) on aesthetics, Margaret Somers (1993;
Somers and Gibson 1993) and Craig Calhoun (1993c) on foundational narratives, and
Jeffrey Alexander (1992a) on binary symbolic codes suggests that civil and community
solidarity is in many ways the product of cultural process. In combination this body of
work suggests that solidarity can be seen as the product of circulating social texts that
mediate, and indeed underwrite, the impact of institutions and discourse procedures. This
turn to culture and language is part of a more general theoretical movement, described
most forcefully by Richard Rorty's (1979, 1989) anti-representationalism: the idea that
there is no neutral background shared by language and reality from which the former may
be judged. To put the argument in Rorty's vocabulary: "The world does not speak. Only
we do" (1989:6). The importance of this point, for the purposes of our argument, is that
social, political, or scientific changes do not occur because "reality" reveals itself to us a
little bit more. Rather, change occurs because people begin to use a new vocabulary to
speak about the world.
It is from this strong cultural-linguistic approach that Rorty (1989) suggests abandon-
ing the Enlightenment hope that politics become "rationalized" and "scientized." In his
view, the best we can hope of politics is that it might become "poeticized." Rorty is
suggesting that the search for an "Ur-language" of transcendent doctrinal foundations be
replaced by an attempt to open up political cultures to a multiplicity of languages: "a talent
for speaking differently rather than arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change"
(Rorty 1989:7). The result, he imagines, would be a mosaic of solidarities emerging from
the spaces opened up for imagination, freedom, and difference. From Rorty's perspective,
the modernist project of proceduralists and institution builders has had a 200 year trial. We
know its achievements and limitations, its tensions and problems.' I The attempt to re-solve
these tensions, in fact, tends to lead back to a "reflection theory" of political discourse, in
which "good" political language reveals the "truth" about political process and solidarity-
with "truth" inhering in something like divine order or the state of nature. Rorty's argu-
ment is that the time has come to try something different, that what we need is a "poetic
culture."
Rorty's approach is useful in that it points not only to the centrality of language for
political life, but also to the need for radical new cultural solutions to the issue of building
i i Eisendstadt ( 1996:31 ) has noted some of these tensions: between liberty and equality; between the "common
good" and sectoral interests; between individual sovereignty and community; between civil society and the state;
between utopian politics and procedural politics.
solidarity. It therefore provides a powerful counter to the institutionalist and proceduralist

emphases we discussed above. But although Rorty has done more than anyone else to
theorize the need for a poetic culture, there are serious flaws with his position as it stands.
In order to articulate our position with clarity we must first come to terms with these
problems. At their core lies a retreat from meaning to a relativistic sort of pragmatism, in
which the goal of the philosopher is to provide translations between different discourses
(Rorty 1979:317). For Rorty, the impossibility of a pre-linguistic understanding means
that what is left is hermeneutics: the particular, the concrete, the personal, the experiential.
Yet, as Alexander (1995:116-123) has argued, there is no reason to posit a binarism, as
Rorty does, between hermeneutics and universalism. "The movement toward universalism
is inherent in contextual interpretation itself, for actors make efforts to understand their
own understanding in increasingly general ways" (Alexander 1995:119). Because Rorty
refuses universalism as part of a poetic culture, his position ultimately devolves into a
distrust of poetics itself. Nancy Fraser (1989:95-96) has made this point in another way,
arguing that in much of his writing Rorty seems unable to trust poetic culture, fearing it
will give rise to the counter-democratic politics of the Sorelian "strong poet."
In an attempt to salvage his vision, Rorty advocates an uneasy compromise in which
poetic practices are banished to the private sphere, while the public realm is regulated by
a Deweyian-Millsian pragmatism. In Rorty's (1989:63) normative vision, public actors
and public discussions should be devoted simply to optimizing the balance between leav-
ing people's private lives alone and preventing suffering. This domestication of the poetic
and the aesthetic almost inevitably surrenders the public sphere to bureaucracy, technoc-
racy, and the triumph of instrumental reason, and sends meaning back to the lifeworld
(Fraser 1989). As Thomas McCarthy (1990a:366) has pointedly observed, "Rorty is left
with his poets on the one side and his engineers on the other." Rorty's theory, it turns out,
is not one of a poeticized public sphere. Rather, it seems to represent a retreat from pub-
licness toward "private irony and liberal hope" (Rorty 1989:73-95).
Rorty's inability to realize a workable vision of a poeticized public sphere comes not
only from his liberal individualism, commitment to pragmatism, and distinctive reading of
the history of philosophy as is commonly argued (see Bernstein 1987, Habermas 1984,
McCarthy 1990a; Alexander 1995), but also from an erroneous vision of existing political
cultures. Put simply, Rorty, like the modernist proceduralists and institutionalists dis-
cussed earlier, fails to appreciate the poetic traits that have always existed in political life.
This is due in part to Rorty's lack of serious engagement with sociological and historical
research (McCarthy 1990b:654), which suggests that political culture is already, and indeed
always has been, poetical in nature. Hunt (1988) has pointed to the poetical features of the
French Revolution. Bakhtin (1965) has indicated the parallel existence during the Middle
Ages of both the world of official seriousness and the unofficial world of the carni-
valesque, and the ways in which the liberating force of the latter opened the way for
Renaissance consciousness. Even with the attempts to banish it from the spatial and tem-
poral environments of "civilized society," it has continued to exert its force at the level of
fantasy and imagination (Stallybrass and White 1986:193). Today's media-saturated world,
simultaneously providing news and MTV, represents a continuation of these processes of
public poetics (Featherstone 1992).
Rorty's desire to push the poetical out of public cultures rests on a lack of historical
vision and leads him wrongly to accept a denuded, (inevitably) instrumentally regulated
public sphere. What we want to suggest here is that a poetic public sphere (or, more
accurately, multiple and overlapping public spheres) is workable. Far from retreating to
"private irony and liberal hope," Rorty would have done better to theorize a fully poetic
public sphere. Our task below is to show why poetics are important for public cultures, and
to suggest how the poetic features of the public sphere might be best described. Our aim is
not to develop an encompassing and systematic model but rather to point to cultural forms
and balances that seem to us to offer likely pragmatic success in encouraging solidary,
reflexive, tolerant, and intersubjective public cultures.
A central theme in existing public sphere literature is the argument that political life is
structured by narrative forms and genres. These seem an appropriate place to start; after
all, narratives are rather more "poetic" than norms, values, and even symbolic codes. More
importantly, narratives offer a middle ground between Rorty and his critics.'2 Thanks to
their structural and aesthetic properties, narrative forms open up and foreclose imagined
possibilities and social solidarities in ways that are broadly circumscribed, but not as
restrictive or logocentric as foundational values and axiomatic principles. Narratives, then,
can act as resources shaping and texturing the language games of the polity in an open-
ended way that provides for creation and contingency (even if writing about narrative can
never adequately capture this sense of openness and contingency).
Existing literature argues that narratives allocate identity, provide for the moral regu-
lation of collective consciences, and generate solidarity and difference by linking personal
and institutional forms of life (Alexander and Smith 1993; Somers 1992; Steinmetz 1992;
Hart 1992; Kane 1994; Jacobs 1996b). We argue that narrative is absolutely central for the
creation and mobilization of collective identity and collective memory. This is true in a
double sense. On the one hand, there is an ontological dimension, wherein social life is
itself "storied" (Ricoeur 1971, 1984; Somers and Gibson 1993; Taylor 1989). On the other,
there is the role of genre, or what Bakhtin (1981) has called the "chronotopic" function of
narrative. It is this generic function that we are primarily concerned with here. Genre gives
force to representation, making narrative events concrete by linking temporal and spatial
relationships to a plot and its characters. We argue that genres carry with them aesthetic
responses that correspond in an approximate way to what Raymond Williams (1977) calls
"structures of feeling." These feelings have consequences for political cultures and the
solidaristic motivations and perceptions of actors within those cultures (cf. Jameson 1981,
1993), as well as regulating the permeable boundaries of solidaristic groupings within
society. Taken as a whole, this literature suggests that narrative and narrativity could pro-
vide a new vocabulary for Rorty's poetic culture: not as the private attitudes of philosopher-
citizens, but rather as a shared, collective, and mythological structuring of public life.
Core narratives of vital political cultures can be described fruitfully by turning to two
central genres. While imperfect on their own, in combination the genres of Romance and
Irony can provide a workable foundation for pluralistic and open public discourses so long
as they are understood as the products of collective public life rather than as the mindsets
of elite, free-floating intellectuals (see Fraser 1989:108). The tension between them allows
the delicate balance to be maintained between the need for contingency (in Rorty's com-
bined sense of difference and openness) and the need to provide reasonable guarantees for
the emergence of solidarity, intersubjectivity, tolerance, and reflexivity.
Romance
Romantic narratives have two key characteristics that make them appealing within a poetic
political culture. First, they are founded upon a "theme of ascent" in which individuals and
12 Modernist detractors argue that by abandoning the search for transculturally valid foundational values, Rorty
opens up political life to risk and nihilistic moral relativism (Alexander 1992b, Bernstein 1987, Habermas 1984,
McCarthy 1990a). Rorty (e.g., 1991, also Baumann 1994) counters that such efforts stifle contingency and
intellectual imagination and reproduce the domination of the center over the periphery. Rorty also argues that
charges of relativism are meaningless once a representationalist epistemology is abandoned.
collectivities move toward a more perfect state. Romance is at the core of the discourse of
civil society, which from its earliest articulations has been a utopian discourse. Second,
they assume the existence of powerful and overarching collective identities that can unite
persons in the pursuit of this utopian future. For these reasons Romantic narratives provide
the basis for a civic culture based upon both communitarian virtues of service and com-
mitment and a powerful utopian moment of mission. Such narratives thereby encourage
maximal participation, solidarity, and trust in a common political culture. The power of
Romantic narratives to promote social change, participation, and inclusion is well docu-
mented in the platforms of those new social movements that have coalesced around pow-
erful new collective identities and destination agendas. It is notable that the progress made
by the Civil Rights movement is strongly associated with Romantic narrative forms that
engendered solidarity, common identity, and a sense of destiny, translating then-present
circumstances through a future-oriented exodus narrative (Omi and Winant 1994, esp. pp.
99-100; see also Walzer 1985).'3 The subsequent stagnation of these programs might be
attributed, for better or worse, to the resurgence of discourses that challenged the Roman-
tic narrative. Advocates of minority groups within each movement pointed to the fractured
and contested nature of African-American identity, while the New Right spoke of the
futility of collective struggle and the need for new, more individualistic forms of salvation
(Omi and Winant 1994:113-125).
But if the weakening of Romance has its cost in terms of the collapse of affective
solidarity and collective action, there is perhaps a far greater price to its intensification. As
Craig Calhoun (1993c) has noted, the project of civil society has often been hijacked by
nationalism. We would suggest that this process has important narrative foundations. Anthony
Smith's (1979:17-42) research, for example, has found that there is a "millennial" dimen-
sion to all nationalist movements. The point of these movements, Smith argues, is "to
present a total picture of communal development, and to tie together the community's past,
present, and future" (1979:27). This can be accomplished through the politicization of
ancient millennial religious traditions, as was the case with the Franciscan Spiritualist
roots of Jacobin France and the Kimbalinguist roots of Congo nationalism in the 1920s.'4
It can be accomplished through the cultivation of "poetic spaces" and the commemoration
of a golden age, as was the case with Zionist, Palestinian, Bohemian, and Finnish nation-
alisms. But regardless of the specifics of its development, nationalist ideology is built
upon the Romantic narrative of a "national" community with a distinct and ascending
destiny. And it is this destiny that provides such a strong mobilizing force.
But given the solidaristic power of nationalism, what is so wrong with it? The problem
is described well by reference to Durkheim's (1951) notion of altruistic suicide. Overpow-
ering Romantic discourses tie individuals and communities too closely to national agen-
das, providing little room for critical thought, little space for acknowledging contingency
and difference within the national community, and no opportunity for constructing a sol-
idarity in common with those excluded from the national community. In sum, the cultural
logic of Romance facilitates a slide from nationalism to nationalist authoritarianism-a
point well illustrated by Smith's discussion of ethnic nationalism. As Habermas (1987) has
correctly pointed out, the "romantic" overthrow of established institutions by the likes of
13 Take, for example, the statement by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1965:272), that "The ultimate aim of SCLC is
to foster and create the 'beloved community' in America where brotherhood is a reality"; similarly, John Killens
(1965:365) argued that the "ultimate salvation of America is in the Negro. . . [who] loves America enough to
criticize her fundamentally." This type of discourse was shaped by a rearticulation of Romantic discourse, which
implies a discursive history of Romance. The presence of this Romantic narrative before the civil rights move-
ment is examined in Harding's (1981) historical study of the struggle for freedom among African-Americans.
14 More extended discussions of the millenial roots of nationalist movements can be found in Smith (1979:17-
30), Ballandier (1955), and Cohn (1957).
Hitler and Mao should be taken seriously as a potential implication of a non-critical,

poeticized culture. In this context we would suggest that the empirical association of both
communism and fascism with totalitarianism is quite possibly driven by a common cul-
tural logic of exclusively Romantic narratives that posits a simplistic unitary identity while
remaining resistant to the accommodation of difference (cf. Jameson 1981, White 1978).
The narrative form of Romance, by subsuming identities within the body corporate, can
operate as an ideology that both legitimates authoritarian rule and motivates actors to
confer an excess of sovereign power upon the state. In sum, Romance can provide for
strong levels of solidarity that, in Habermas' s terms, strengthen the ability of the lifeworld
to confront the alienating steering media of money and power. However, the danger of
Romance lies in the easy slide from an inclusive solidarity toward an ultimately exclu-
sionary, culture-driven nationalism and tribalism, and from a differentiated democratic
polity toward a centralized dictatorship.'5
Leaving aside the more political problem of dictatorship, Romantic narratives also pose
cultural problems for communities located within civil society. In positing common goals
and identities, Romantic narratives are often insensitive to the needs and wishes of the
constituent communities within the wider solidaristic sphere of civil society, as well as to
the distinctive contributions that each of these groups might make. The result is an aes-
thetic and narrative version of Tocqueville's "tyranny of the majority." Confronted with
the specter of such a romantic union, marginalized groups with a concern for maintaining
their own cultural autonomy are forced to choose a path of either "exit" or "loyalty," where
the latter implies assimilation and the loss of distinctive identity. The Romantic narrative
of civil society, which helps to construct the polarizing discourse of citizen and enemy
(Alexander 1992a), refuses the option of "voice" to those who would act in terms of their
distinctive identity as opposed to their national identity. 6 Indeed, as Anthony Smith (1991)
has noted, the only "voice" that marginalized groups have at their disposal is that of a
counter-nationalism, which is in effect a revolutionary form of exit (e.g., Northern Ireland,
Basque Spain, Quebecois Canada). In such cases Romantic narratives can be said to have
generated suspicion and distrust rather than tolerance, solidarity, and intersubjectivity; as
a result, the wider civil society is delegitimated through its association with particularistic
and dominant ideologies.
A third problem is that Romantic narratives do not encourage reflexivity, a character-
istic necessary for personal integrity, cultural vitality, and physical survival in the late-
modern political order (Giddens 1995, Lash 1994, Beck 1992). Romantic narratives suffer
from "an excess of plot," in which the teleological power of mythically validated past
origins and future destinations precludes reflexivity and the interrogation either of present
or of possible destinations. The pragmatic implications of living in the shadow of an
all-seeing myth hardly need reiterating here, while the moral problems arising from this
position have been nicely analyzed, albeit in another context, by Karl Popper.17 In his
famous indictment of Hegel and Marx, Popper (1957) argued that teleological narratives
of ascent operate to justify repression in the present in the name of a utopian future con-
dition and the good of the collectivity. Although we consider Popper to be insensitive to
15 Greenfeld and Chirot (1994:123) have noted that "the association between certain types of nationalism and
aggressive, brutal behavior is neither coincidental nor inexplicable. Nationalism remains the world's most pow-
erful, general, and primordial basis of cultural and political identity."
16 The metaphor of exit, voice, and loyalty is here borrowed from Hirschman (1970).
17 Whilst we cite Popper's analysis of the ethical problems of Marxist determinism here we by no means
embrace all aspects of his thinking. In particular we would suggest that Popper to some extent reproduces a
Romantic narrative-a "romance of science"-that provides a mandate for scientific activity that is insufficiently
reflexive about its goals and ethics and excludes and marginalizes other forms of knowledge. A little Irony might
go a long way in leading to a more balanced evaluation of scientific activity.
the more positive, solidaristic aspects of Romantic narratives, we take seriously his call for
a culture that includes critical reflexivity. But whereas Popper's thesis, like that of Haber-
mas, looks toward procedural rationality for this critical sensibility, we take a more cul-
tural turn and argue that a culture of critical communicative reason might be reinforced,
rather than eroded, by including the vocabulary of Irony in public debate.
Irony
The genre of Irony provides a mirror image of the virtues and vices of Romance. In civil
society, particularly in contemporary civil society where we find the normalization of the
awareness of strangers, Irony is a necessary component of a reflexive consciousness that
will promote tolerance based on care for and engagement with the Other, rather than a
mere indifference toward the Other.'8 Whereas Romantic discourses can lead to authori-
tarianism, Ironic discourses prove highly effective in subverting totalizing conformist dis-
courses by deflating pretensions and deconstructing assumptions about putatively common
interests and realities (Brown 1977; Lemert 1992). The potential of Ironic discourses to
disrupt established, intolerant narratives of power is well illustrated by the attacks on
modernist and surrealist artistic movements initiated by fascist and communist regimes
during the 1930s, which preferred instead the heroic and romantic-realist genres. This
point is confirmed in the theoretical works of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht, which argued
for the potential of unorthodox, confrontational, and deeply Ironic aesthetic forms to con-
front the totalizing discourses of modernity. More recent "cultural studies" work on "resis-
tance" can also be read as embracing Irony (e.g., Hall and Jefferson 1976; Fiske 1989), as
can research in the symbolic interactionist tradition, which has explored the various ways
in which ironic patterns of action and behavior can confront alienating structures of power
and authority in settings like total institutions (Goffman 1968) and public executions (Smith
1996).
Turning this in an even more positive direction, Irony may well be necessary for a civic
learning process to take place. This point may need some support, given the familiar
perception that Irony is capable only of carping, trivial critique without moral intent (cf.
Frye 1957:40-41). In a highly original interpretation of ethnomethodology and phenom-
enology, the philosopher Edmond Wright has argued for the centrality of Irony and story-
telling in the processes through which intersubjectivity is attained and perceptions are
modified (Wright 1978, 1992). Although a Romantic narrative of commonality still pro-
vides the necessary basis for intersubjectivity (as Ragnar Rommetveit (1978:31) has put it,
we must "take the possibility of perfect intersubjectivity for granted in order to achieve
partial intersubjectivity"), it is the presence of Ironic moments in discourse that provide
for the possibility of correcting naive perceptions and illuminating differences in world-
views (Wright 1978). Put simply, it is the juxtaposition of perspectives that disturbs the
naive, indolent slumbers of the lifeworldly consciousness that assumes common under-
standings.
Similarly, the literary critic Wayne Booth (1974) has indicated a positive role for Irony
in the critical works of Voltaire, Swift, and Orwell-authors, we would point out, who
were all deeply committed to the project of civil society. At the level of the self, Kierke-
gaard (1966) suggested that Irony, operating as "infinite absolute negativity," was a disci-
plinarian which would give birth to a rejuvenated, self-aware personal life. In this respect
Rorty's own arguments about the merits of private Irony as a resource for liberal "self-
creation" reprise those of Kierkegaard, albeit in a more secular mode and bearing a remark-
18 This distinction between tolerance as indifference and tolerance as care is influenced by Zygmunt Bauman
(1993) and David Chaney (1994:93-99).
able resemblance to Giddens's (1992, 1995) arguments for the centrality of life-politics to
contemporary public sphere engagement. Pursuing this point even further, we would sug-
gest that the critique embodied in Ironic discourses permits the renewal and revitalization
of public cultures as well as personal life. An example of such a process would be the
Harlem Renaissance, in which deepening cynicism about the merits of integration into a
racist society, exacerbated by a growing critique of the Washingtonian discourse of assim-
ilation and accommodation, created an efflorescence of African-American artistic creativ-
ity and newer, stronger forms of romantic collective identity (Baker 1987; Lewis 1981).
Irony was a fundamental component of the public discourse of W.E.B. DuBois, Langston
Hughes, and Alain Locke, and was hinted at by Frye in his discussion of the cycle of
genres and the eventual movement back from Irony to myth. Although we reject Frye's
teleological assumptions, we accept the analytic point that Ironic discourses might open
doors to new cultural-political creativity as often as they lead to dead ends.
Further support for the positive role of ironic reflexivity is found in the work of contem-
porary sociological theorists. For example, the work of Jeffrey Alexander (1991, 1992a) on
civil discourses shows the centrality of the reflexive process to democratic life. The process
through which members reflexively and sometimes ironically typify from events to the moral
codes of civil society is critical for building a democratic, self-aware culture that is resistant
to abuses of power like Watergate and open to changes in political life like glasnost (Alex-
ander and Smith 1993). In related ways, Scott Lash (1994) has argued for the significance of
post-traditional reflexive communities, and Giddens's (1990, 1995) theory of "radicalized
modernity" places great faith in processes of institutionalized reflexivity. Irony, in our view,
remains central to these kinds of processes in which the boundaries of communal and insti-
tutional life are arranged and rearranged. It provides the critical distance from which the con-
tingency and limits of the present are revealed, and through which possible futures are made
available for negotiation at individual and collective levels.
This potential of Ironic discourse to foster reflexivity as well as to deflate and combat
the power/conformity nexus points to the importance of the social figure carrying the
genre: the ironist. What we have in mind here is Rorty's (1989:73) notion of the intellec-
tual ironist, who has radical doubts about the vocabulary she uses, rejects the idea that new
vocabularies reflect impartial efforts to get beyond language or metaphor to what is "real,"
and instead wants simply to play the new vocabulary off against the old one. Theoretical
fields marked by Irony and ironists are invariably more open and contested than the Roman-
tic narratives of high modernist theory. They permit the formation of multiple identities
and allow for the construction of multiple and overlapping reflexive communities. This is
because Irony is at its core a relational discursive practice, where the meaning resides in
the relationship between the said and the unsaid, as well as among the author (i.e., the
ironist), her targets, and her readers (Hutcheon 1995:58). The meaning of Ironic discourse
cannot be separated from the context of its use, which means in turn that it cannot be
separated from the vocabulary of its target. The ironist can help produce a combination of
Romance and Irony that we see as vital for the formation of creative new forms of public
cultures.
We can examine the creative effects of the ironist by considering those theoretical
developments grouped together under the label "postmodernism."19 While the wide vari-
19 We realize that the debate between modernism and postmodernism is one in which the two sides can agree
neither on terms, issues, nor principles of evaluation. Those who would like to win the contest for the modernists
try to pitch the debate around whether there has been an epochal break from the modern, even though many of the
arguments of postmodernism have nothing to do with sequence (Bhabha 1994:4). Postmodernists want to argue
the debate in terms of whether there can be any final authority of knowledge, but they ignore completely the
modernist commitment to emancipation (Habermas 1983; Rorty 1992). As Lemert (1994:142) notes, quite rightly
we think, "the history of this controversy is not much more than a night of ships passing at near but divergent
courses."
ety of positions and discourses encompassed by this label makes it quite problematic as a
descriptive term, we maintain that what is common to virtually all "postmodern" theories
is the figure of the ironist. As Bhabha (1994:4-5) has noted, "the wider significance of the
postmodern condition lies in the awareness that the epistemological 'limits' of those eth-
nocentric ideas are also the enunciative boundaries of a range of other dissonant, even
dissident histories and voices." It is the role of the postmodern theorist as ironist to point
out these enunicative boundaries and their consequences. Queer theory, for example, points
to the ways in which mainstream social theories naturalize an opposition between the
"natural" heterosexual and the "exotic," "unnatural," or otherwise "Other" homosexual. It
also notes how gay-affirmative, social-constructivist accounts have ironically served to
reinforce this opposition, and how queer theory should try to construct a new vocabulary
that avoids the homosexual/heterosexual opposition altogether (Seidman 1994; Namaste
1994). Similarly, postcolonial theory criticizes Western assumptions of binariness as being
inadequate for conceptualizing subaltern consciousness, and criticizes anticolonial resis-
tance for reproducing other, equally problematic binarisms.20As Bhabha (1994:207) notes,
the cultural hybridity of the subaltern consciousness "resists the binary opposition of racial
and cultural groups, sipahis and sahibs, as homogeneous polarized political consciousnesses."
"Postmodern" theories also have in common a desire to restore Irony to the somber
seriousness of modernist political theory, "by deflating the pompous march of [dialectical]
historical necessity" (Benhabib 1991:143). Romantic narratives of inevitable historical
progress inevitably require victims; only certain types of people are considered as the
active subjects of historical progress, while all others are relegated to being passive objects
of dialectical change. This can lead to problematic positions for the Romantic modernist,
such as Habermas's insistence on separating the lifeworld activities of childrearing from
the realm of legitimate and instrumentally valued paid work, because such a penetration
would be seen as a "pathological" application of instrumental reason to the sphere of
communicative reason (see Fraser 1991:256-259). Or it can lead to the colonized subjec-
tivity of the oppressed, a persistent theme in the work of DuBois (1903) and Fanon (1968).
Chatterjee (1993:5) has noted, in a similar regard, how "Europe and the Americas, the only
true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial
enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolo-
nial misery."
Finally, the presence of the ironist can help, even within fields of Ironic discourse, to
remind that the new vocabularies are only vocabularies, which in themselves tend to create
still newer enunciative boundaries. Thus, as Patricia Hill Collins (1990) has argued, Black
women intellectuals are situated within the hybrid and conflicting demands of Afrocen-
tricity and feminism, each of which, in adopting a specific subject position, tends to main-
tain certain background assumptions that reinforce essentialized and/or unitary notions of
identity. Gay and lesbian people of color have launched similar critiques against "main-
stream" queer theory, arguing that the romantic counter-articulation of queer identity pro-
duces its own tendency to mask that identity's multiple and hybrid character (Seidman
1994:171-173). The point is that the existence of Irony-and of ironists-in theoretical
fields marked by the label "postmodernism" (or any other label) helps to maintain an
awareness that all theoretical vocabularies create their own enunciative boundaries. Yet
because Ironic discourses are both intensely self-reflexive (e.g., the novels of Proust or
Musil or Mann) and construct identity in response to the presence of the "Other" (e.g., the
20 See, for example, Spivak's (1993 [1988]:613) discussion of the practice of widow sacrifice in India: 'The
abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of 'White men saving brown women
from brown men.' . . . Against this is the Indian nativist argument, a parody of the nostalgia for lost origins: 'The
women actually wanted to die.' The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters
the testimony of the women's voice-consciousness."
postcolonial fiction of V.S. Naipaul, the cinema of Spike Lee or Hanif Kureishi), they
prove highly resistant to the Romantic quest for a singular, universal Truth or Emancipa-
tion. Discursive fields marked by Irony and ironists exist in a state of "permanent revolu-
tion" guaranteeing creativity and openness.
But like Romance, Irony is not without its dangers. Where positive goals and destina-
tion narratives are missing, there is always the possibility of a nihilistic form of Irony
coming to predominate in political cultures. Such a perspective is most visible in those
individualistic ironic perspectives that slip from healthy critique toward fatalism and dis-
engagement; or that replace participation in civic life with the egotistical pursuit of desire,
spectacle, and pleasure; or that shun the movement toward hermeneutic retrieval in favor
of a play of surfaces (see Jameson 1993, Lash 1994, Sherwood 1994). When taken to
extremes, Ironic forms can see any utopian moment as a mere bid for power, and under-
stand any attempt to open up dialogue and establish intersubjectivity with the "Other" as a
form of discursive domination.
In this guise, Irony is inevitably hostile to the expansion of solidarity and the civil
sphere. When they are grounded in a relentless hermeneutics of suspicion, Ironic forms
create cynical and directionless political cultures which, lacking a rudder of popular will
and solidarity, might be unable to resist the tide-like incursions of what Habermas terms
the "system world." Such a culture, despite being charged by a potent narrative impulse,
comes to resemble the destinationless political ontology of the proceduralists. At best it
can create the atomistic, negative solidarity of Rorty's (1989) liberal intellectuals or Cou-
pland's (1991) "Generation X." Such a negative solidarity might perhaps be capable of
generating privatized resistance to power in the form of Konrad's (1984) "anti-politics" or
the aesthetic retreatism (cf. Merton 1968) of the kind discussed by Arno Schmidt (1994),
but it is unable to generate a powerful form of positive communal solidarity in the same
ways as collectivistic Romantic narratives.
This danger of Irony has been commented upon often, and refers primarily to the fear of
moral bankruptcy-a threat which curiously inverts the problems of excessive moral com-
mitment and closure that we argued were associated with Romantic genres. Irony, in this
critique, is held to be unique among genres for its corrosive potential to generate anomie
rather than purpose and commitment. Frederic Jameson's (1993) well-known discussions
of postmodern art and architecture provide an eloquent exposition of this argument. Jame-
son's primary targets are playful productions that lack (in his reading) moral intent and
that, through the complex practices of pastiche and the play of surfaces, dissemble them-
selves and thus elude interpretation. He suggests that there is nothing that can be learned
from them and that the viewer is rendered politically and emotionally inert from the expe-
rience.
We would extend this point, noting the same possible developments emanating from
ironic formulations with specific moral intent. The not-very-playful philosophy of Jean-
Paul Sartre provides a case in point. In his early existentialist philosophy and in his novels,
Sartre developed a deeply ironic understanding of the human condition in order that peo-
ple might realize they were condemned to freedom. But freedom for what? Having rejected
the transcendence of values and community, Sartre's ironist position could not bear any
moral weight whatsoever despite its utopian wish that people should be set free from the
shackles of bad faith.21 In a world characterized by an all-pervasive absurdity, what did it
matter if people at last took responsibility for their own actions? Much the same point can
be made for Nietsche and Dostoevsky. Their assault on customary morals made use of
21 Sartre was unable to produce the study of ethics that he promised at the end of Being and Nothingness (1956)
and it is symptomatic that in Existentialism and Humanism (1948) he suggested that morals were the foudation-
less product of arbitrary personal choices. It is no accident that in his later work Sartre turned toward the more
Romantic genre of Marxism in order to anchor his project within an emancipatory and progressive metanarrative.
relativistic and perspectival Ironic devices, allowing them to point to the arbitrary nature
of the good and the evil. Breaking down the walls imprisoning the human spirit, however,
there was nothing but a void left in its stead. What this suggests is that moral intent alone
may not be sufficient to constrain the danger of Irony; once it is set loose, there is a
potential volatility to the genre which must be countered in some way if there is to be a
culture of concern and active civic engagement. This is what Schlegel (1849) referred to as
the "irony of irony": one becomes weary of it if she is confronted by it everywhere and all
the time (Muecke 1969:201). It is in order to prevent this kind of anti-solidaristic, direc-
tionless culture of despair from emerging that we argue for Romance as a complement to
Irony.
Beyond the questions of morality, commitment, or "ultimate ends," however, there are
more immediate and pragmatic dangers to the use of Irony in public discourse: namely,
that the audience "won't get it," or that they will "get it wrong." Because Irony is always
relational and always conditional, the effective reception of its intended meaning requires
cultural competence, grounded in the the sphere-specific nature of interpretive communi-
ties. This is true for all forms of communication. With Irony, however, misreading is much
more problematic, because of the importance of recognizing the contrast between said and
unsaid. The danger of misreading is compounded by the fact, noted by Hutcheon (1995:152),
that "the fewer the signals, the 'better' the irony." That is, the (potentially) strongest forms
of Irony are those where the risk of incomprehension and misunderstanding is greatest.
But this risk can have disastrous results for public discourse in civil society. Hutcheon
notes several examples of this, including the 1989 Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto) exhi-
bition, "Into the Heart of Africa." That exhibition was intended as an ironic portrayal of
colonial museum exhibits, and as a critique of the imperialist ideology that had brought
these cultural objects from Africa to Canada. What it produced instead were charges of
racism by the African-Canadian community, and a court injunction by the museum to stop
picketing against the exhibit. In this instance, the misrecognition of Irony led to the oppo-
site of its moral intent.
Another practical problem of Irony in political cultures is its tendency toward elitism,
and the endemic binarism of superiority/inferiority between those who get it and those
who do not. This is a major concern, expressed well by Rorty (1989:91-92), about Irony's
ability to cause pain through humiliation. Indeed, these pragmatic problems reinforce the
fact that Irony-as a public or political practice-is risky business. Too much ineffective
Irony can create an aesthetic of despair, discouraging engagement as well as the search for
a positive vision. On the other hand, Irony that can successively deceive all (or most)
readers for a time and then require all (or most) readers to recognize and cope with their
deception can provide just the type of learning process described by Edmond Wright-one
thinks, for example, of Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (see Booth 1974:105-133).
INSTITUTIONALIZING GENERIC FORMS:

ENTER THE BARD AND THE JESTER
The genres of Irony and Romance provide complementary vocabularies for constructing
and reconstructing intersubjective, solidary, reflexive, and tolerant political cultures.
Romance provides for powerful levels of intersubjectivity, solidarity, collective action,
identity, and utopian motivation. Irony allows for reflexivity, difference, tolerance, adjust-
ments to intersubjectivity, and forms of healthy critique in both civil society and commu-
nity. What we propose here is not so much a synthesis of narrative forms (such may be
impossible) but rather a balance between two sometimes contradictory strands of public
discourse. The result is reflexivity not at the institutional or personal level, but reflexivity
built into the cultural system through the tension between competing generic forms. This,
we suggest, represents a specifically cultural solution to the question of political cultures.

It recognizes the need for cultural as well as institutional differentiation and the need for
narrative as well as procedural contours to public sphere debate.
Of course culture is never entirely free floating. A limitation of this article is that,
although we have described narrative forms as we think they should be, we have given
little indication of how they might be institutionalized. To make matters even more com-
plicated, talk of institutionalization can all too easily lead to the kinds of non-cultural,
procedural "fixes" we criticized at the outset. Clearly, this is a complex issue that cannot
be addressed fully within the context of the present article. However, we offer three ten-
tative suggestions as a way of beginning to think about this problem. First, we repeat
previous calls for public spheres that are open to multiple voices and can sustain local
narratives and identities (e.g., Calhoun 1992; Fraser 1992; Taylor 1995). However, while
embracing this agenda, we see it as a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for the pro-
liferation of solidarity, reflexivity, tolerance, and difference. Like the institutional solu-
tions to community building discussed earlier, this solution does not directly address the
issue of cultural form.
Our second suggestion builds on the work of Bakhtin (1965; see also Gardiner 1993;
Tucker 1996) and more indirectly Durkheim, and calls for the reintroduction of the carni-
valesque into public life and public space. The great civic rituals of modernity-such as
coronations, military parades, and the like-were built upon Romantic and nationalist
narratives and emphasized a common destiny within the state. As such they could only
foster difference as an unintended consequence, by encouraging the negative solidarity of
the excluded. Yet there have always been other spaces (reinforced today by forces of
globalization and postmodernization) for more ironic and playful forms of cultural engage-
ment, which have generated collective effervescence and solidaristic feelings of commu-
nitas. London's Notting Hill Carnival and Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras stand out
as prime examples. Although these events emerged from community action as a form of
protest and as a way of affirming difference, their massive popularity comes from being
simultaneously open to romantic readings by outsiders. For these outsiders the events
serve as the expressions of a broader solidarity that cuts across differences while acknowl-
edging the validity of difference as an enunciative principle. Irony and Romance are there-
fore promoted by the same lived text (cf. Cohen 1993).
Our third and final suggestion is to call for the institutionalization of social roles through
which generic forms might be disseminated in the public sphere. Individuals with these
types of generic responsibilities were to be found, in fact, throughout the court system in
the European Middle Ages. We are thinking here of the bard and the jester, as two ideal-
typical figures propagating Romance and Irony, respectively. The role of the bard is to
disseminate the "operative, iterative, and validatory" myths (Kirk 1970:254). Typically
this will involve epic stories and legends that mobilize intense feelings of cross-cutting
solidarity and link the social to the sacred sources of social order (Eliade 1963). In other
words, the bard provides a social role guaranteeing Romance in public discourse. On the
other hand, we can get a handle on the social role of the ironist by examining the Greek
root of the word: eiron, the dissembler. It is fitting, therefore, that the ironist should be a
type of trickster figure who works with deflated genres such as satire, and does so as a
medium for questioning authority and embarrassing public figures (Auge 1978; Casseg-
rande and Vecchio 1979; Gross 1984; Vad-de-Gejuchte 1993). The jester's unpredictabil-
ity embodies the disorder and contingency of the periphery, and his masks and tricks
threaten stable categories and taken-for-granted knowledge (Willeford 1969). These pos-
itive qualities, celebrated in Shakespeare's King Lear and Erasmus's Praise of Folly, cre-
ate reflexivity and self-understanding, and make the jester a bringer of wisdom as much as
mirth. Doran (1966) has noted that during the medieval period the jester performed the
same kind of social role as the modern intellectual. Cassagrande and Vecchio (1979) have
argued that the Franciscan preachers of the thirteenth century, by adopting the jester's
techniques, dramatically increased their impact on public audiences.The jester is not only
a comic figure of temporary diversion and amusement, but also a (potentially) powerful
bearer of reflexivity and tolerance.
In arguing for jesters and bards we are neither calling for figures in curly shoes, harle-
quin suits, and hats with bells to patrol downtown streets; nor for harp-plucking balladeers
to perform around shopping mall campfires (though we see nothing intrinsically wrong
with either image). We are also not arguing that the social roles themselves, simply because
they are institutionalized, could ever be sufficient. The presence in public discourse of the
vocabularies of Romance and Irony is far more important than the institutionalization of
social roles that can only in principle guarantee their existence. What we do suggest,
however, is that these sorts of figures provide a way of thinking through the kinds of
analogous and contemporary public roles that might be established to support the vocab-
ularies of Romance and Irony, thereby retrieving these genres from the largely depoliti-
cized and private sphere-oriented world of novels, movies, and comedies. Indeed, as Dayan
and Katz's (1992) research on media events suggests, there are certain ritual events in
which the media play a type of bardic role for the public. It seems reasonable for there to
be other ritual events in which the media play a jester role. It even seems reasonable for the
media to extend their routine commentary about political events, which relies on figures
representing the left and right, by also including figures who take Romantic and Ironic
perspectives. In this way Romance and Irony would be able to exist in parallel without
either being institutionally privileged over the other. By opening up the genres of public
discourse, it is possible that what might be opened up in the process are the very languages
for "thinking the public square."22
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Author(s): Ronald N. Jacobs and Philip Smith

Sociological Theory 15.:1 March 1997

THE SETTING: WHAT IS AT STAKE

GENERIC STRUCTURES AND SOLIDARY SPHERES

solidarity. It therefore provides a powerful counter to the institutionalist and proceduralist

Hitler and Mao should be taken seriously as a potential implication of a non-critical,

INSTITUTIONALIZING GENERIC FORMS:

we suggest, represents a specifically cultural solution to the question of political cultures.

1997. Neofunctionalism and After. Oxford: Blackwell.

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