junk irony

I mentioned before that I think there's more than one kind of irony.  After Sep. 11, 2001, some jackass declared irony dead, and then old Michiko Kakutani hit back on Oct. 9 with a much-needed column pointing out that some of the very worst things that ever happened led to some of the greatest ironic fiction ever written, and that indeed irony has been one of mankind's greatest tools for dealing with horrific evil and devastation...  But I'm not being fair when I say "some jackass" because my whole point here is basically that the jackass and Kakutani* weren't actually talking about the same thing.

A friend (not stupid, not a jackass) recently said something about how we were headed into a new era of sincerity: basically his point was that, after years of George W. Bush, suddenly the stakes are just too high to treat everything as a joke, which is why people have gotten so serious about Barack Obama.  He (my friend, not the senator) postulated that irony might thrive in times of prosperity** and shrivel away under the U.V.-heavy light of hard times.

My response was that the irony that has taken over our society—thanks largely to the ad companies' successful cooption and conquest of the skeptical–ironic attitudes that had made Generation X so difficult to market to (q.v. e.g. Commodify Your Dissent)—was not irony but rather junk irony: a general attitude wherein nothing meant anything, everything was ridiculous, and a joke or sneer was the appropriate response to all imaginable stimuli.  This attitude, I'll agree with David Foster Wallace and with my not-stupid, not-jackass friend, is essentially problematic—pathetic, really (and I use that word here with some thought): it's a defensive posture, one of essential disengagement from reality,*** and just about as far from what I'd call real irony (what Kakutani was writing about: our best minds' responses to the World Wars, to the threat of nuclear annihilation, etc.—basically an incredibly noble, existential assault on all that arguably it is impossible to literally defeat****) as you can get.

And indeed I think I ended by claiming that there's a—what do you call it, inverse relationship?—between real & junk irony.  In a time of great prosperity, yes, I should think that junk irony might rule, but real irony might have little place; then, as things get rough, no one can afford the petty yuks and cynicisms, but true satire, a true awareness of the grotesque truth behind deceitful appearances, is all but essential.  Now that I think of it, maybe the difference between real & junk irony is pretty much the same as the difference between skepticism & cynicism...?

But so I said that junk irony was a defensive posture.  Defensive against what?

I end by putting a bit of a positive spin even on the junk—because that's just the kind of guy I am (now).  Why junk irony?  Why has our culture descended (or why had it descended, if you agree that it's now rising back out) into this kind of meaninglessness, so devoid of substance that it doesn't deserve to be called nihilism?  I submit (with Fromm) that our prosperity is largely illusory, that the good times are not so good, that people are not happy, no, not even so happy as they might sometimes seem, and that we are, in many ways, without realizing it, oppressed and kept down by forces we'd have a hard time identifying even if we were aware enough to try.  Maybe junk irony is a hobbled, half-blinded culture's try at real irony, a sign that even the dullest and deadest of us still have some sense, buried somewhere deep down, that something here just ain't right.

*  The stupidest person in New York City?

**  Side note, sort of an essay in itself: a few months ago I was sitting on the M79 and reflecting in a melancholy fashion on the question: Why Are Americans So Depressed?  And it occurred to me that maybe the reason so many of us are so miserable (and I am not excluding the ones who self-identify as ecstatically happy and content, not by a fuckin' longshot) is actually not in spite of our civilization's spectacular wealth and conveniences, and not even because of the holes and imperfections in that wealth and those conveniences or the dark underside of the same, but rather possibly because of the wealth and conveniences: human beings, arguably, are natural problem-solvers, and maybe—just as taking the shell off a turtle will kill it even when no predators are around—giving us plenty of food and shelter and nothing too serious to worry about turns us in on ourselves and just drives us batshit crazy like a dog in a dog-sized cage (to quote something I wrote a few years back).

*** One might say the deliberate affectation of what I've argued [in this post, but more so in my response to the comment on the post] DFW spent his life battling—which shows both how despicable the attitude can be and why DFW felt so strongly about irony vs. sincerity himself [q.v., e.g.].

**** This is what Gravity's Rainbow is about, by the way.