I don't understand what is wrong with postmodern irony. Isnt the opposite what we have today...

I don't understand what is wrong with postmodern irony. Isnt the opposite what we have today? A culture that takes itself too seriously where the "big picture" is obscured by self importance? Like without david Letterman we get jimmy fucking fallon. Where did all the funny-mean people go?

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Because it's used as a catch-all shield against criticism. When you're detached from what you're saying because everything is buried under 14 layers of irony, you and your actual opinions are safe from judgment

dfw was an idiot and didn't know what he was talking about.

this isn't always true but it can be.

Maybe I dont really understand irony then because pynchon and delillo and letterman all seem to have clear statements about the world despite being ironic.

This is like a second or third order simulacrum right here. For some, or possibly most, the irony is a mask to conceal the fact of there being no actual opinions.

Was Letterman really funny-mean though? He seemed to be just happy living with the establishment and prosecuting the establishment. It seems to me like a very controlled kind of mean-ess, not any worse than the roast me show on comedy central

irony is the central rhetorical device of literature, or at least of fiction, so irony in and of itself isn't the problem.
it becomes a problem when people use irony for irony's sake, which is where you get people with no opinion at all, like said, who make like intentionally stupid, unenjoyable, ignorant things then basically say "lol jk"

It's only a problem when it's abused by retards who have no idea what they're doing ie: most "ironic" pop-culture figures, thoughts, and memes.

the significance of irony, not only *sniff* as a kind of distancing filter from your present *sniff* social reality, can often be the very mask which hides the fact that you are deadly serious: for example, I once met these two guys –black, and signed their books, –*sniff* I could not resist an obscene joke. I picked up their copies and intimated *sniff* or something like I got them mixed up: "You blacks are like asians - I can never tell the difference". They embraced me and told me you can call me nigger. You see? Like, I make fun of his race and we become *sniff* friends with the guy! Not real friends, but haha you know *sniff* what I mean, you know? Like, I would never feel comfortable *sniff* associating with negros, but, my godt, they're stupid enough to hang off my every word even though I've directly told them about *sniff*, how to feel about their culture, biogenetics, and so on and so on, You know?

All men die and their ideas with them.

there's humor and then there is earnest sincerity. humor can entail the use of irony. humor can be used to criticize, thus irony can be used to criticize.

irony used as a device for sincerity is essentially not sincerity at all, it is irony. what in the fuck is so complicated about this simple concept? sophists love to muddle reality by copying a thought and folding it inwards upon itself over and over again and attaching an 'ism' at the end it. DFW was against irony being the default state of things, because it would allow people to never look at things without the bullshitting lens of what people think is "fashionable irony." what is postmodern irony? it's the awareness that something is wrong, yet denying that wrongness as normal, and that denial in itself becomes normal and endemic to the sense of wrongness in society, instead of critically analyzing what is wrong in the first place; WHAT TO FIX.

can you give some examples of what exactly someone might say that's stupid, unenjoyable, and ignorant followed by a "lol jk"?

I feel like I'm on the cusp of grasping what irony even means, and I feel dumb.

the only real life examples i can think of right now for some reason are from popular music, but Ariel Pink makes ironic music, in that the many of his songs are intentionally kitschy and grating retreads of well-worn novelty or advertising song tropes. So someone might say that "these songs sound bad" or "this is stupid" and he can just smile and say "that's the point." The irony isn't indicating anything other than the irony.

a more straightforward example would be like, if a man who ostensibly sympathizes with feminism were to say to a female friend "bitch get me a sandwich." like it's ironic in that it's not what you'd expect someone who knows better to say, but it's not really ironic because he's just mimicking stereotypically misogynistic behavior, which is and has been a cultural norm.

i don't know if i'm explaining this well.

>Ariel Pink
>Bad
nigger related

I actually like Ariel Pink and saw him in concert, it's just an example that I thought demonstrated the criticism.

We're still here but have been pushed into the shadows by people that think be passive aggressive faggots = humor

anything h3h3,filthy frank and sam hyde related is pathetic irony
especially their fanbase of
everybody is using irony as a safeguard when they say something stupid without taking the full blow of being wrong.

I'll never understand this criticism of irony. If you know what you're saying is stupid and it's meant as a joke, how is it "safeguarding" anything? It's just making fun of a stereotype of some other person.

They always use the word 'insult' with me, but I don't hurt anybody. I wouldn't be sitting here if I did. I make fun of everybody and exaggerate all our insecurities.

because it's not meant as a joke.
they meant what they said but didn't get the response as expected so the fallback is
"lol im jking"

I mean I'm sure some people occasionally do that, but do you not think that most things calling themselves parody or satire are, in fact, parody or satire? Do you believe Jonathan Swift was actually in favor of eating babies?

If Jonathan Swift literally ate a baby and said it was satire, then that would be post-irony. Filthy Frank actually acts like a retard in public to "parody" retards or something

If you truly believe that everyone who says they do things like that ironically is lying, then obviously that type of humor is not for you. I can assure you you're wrong, though.

but Swift is using irony to point out problems in the society around him. it's a literary choice meant to impart something to the reader.

doing stupid shit or doing something that gets a negative response then saying "jk lol faggot" because you vaguely understand irony is intellectually/artistically/culturally empty and cancerous.

If I picked up a piece of dog shit from the ground, ate it, and told you it was an ironic act - it doesn't change the fact that I just ate dog shit. Even if I did that to parody shiteaters, the very act makes me an actual shiteater.

I wouldn't put h3h3 in there or Sam Hyde, since they both do have worldviews, it's just instead of promotion they express it with defamation.
When DFW mentions PoMo Irony I always felt he is talking about a very specific, niche problem limited to postwar middle-class America, and experienced only by people who have both the time and intelligence to consume that culture in vast amounts. In his essay on Dostoevsky, he sort of sums up his problem with irony in that in prevents authentic expression. Authentic expression and people, to DFW, was captured by the drama/philosophy in The Idiot, TBK, or Crime and Punishment; characters who developed honest schema based off their (unknowingly limited) information and experience, and tried to apply them to the "big questions", the one's concerning identity, metaphysics, ethics, etc.

But with irony, the authentic conflict between the individual and the world becomes diluted, and instead of the individual proposing an answer, the individual takes down answers other proposes. Or, the irony instead pushes the authentic conflict into the background, while a self-consciously less authentic conflict takes place in the foreground. DFW thought both types of irony had become too prominent in the literary world, with the likes of Pynchon or Gaddis who made (knowingly, he seems to imply at some points) Stephen Deadalus-esque books: esoteric, hyperintellectual, and with a 2smart4u attiude. That Dosto essay attempts to structurally reflects this writing, with Wallace stuffing in existential questions in-between his review on why Dosto is still interesting.

Now where Dave falls apart is that he tried to reconcile the supposed divide between hyperirony and authentic living. Unfortunately he never seemed to pull off either quite well, writing a 1,000 page doorstopper with over 400 footnotes, while at the same time making it a thoroughly easy-read and about the same ethical solutions of an Oprah book club. We see the worst of it in Hal Incadenza, whom DFW sought to make an intellectual but isolated as his own fault, but instead comes off as neither. His intellect barely comes off as being shocking (Kierkegaard influencing Camus is underrated?) and his isolation never feels quite as persuasive as K's, Ishmael's, or Stephen's, or the Bartlebly's narrator, or Pessoa's, or any really any canon author whose tackled authenticy vs. irony or intellect vs isolation or whatever. Nevermind the weakness of the adversting or consumer culture themes; Joyce covered the issue brilliantly in Bloom, what with personal hygiene being tied to a cultural imperialist force, which also ties to advertising being used to internalize and create personal anxieties, while also being tied to its inherent class implications. What Joyce could do in a couplet and offhand comments, pulling from a history of soap, DFW does in 300 pages, pulling from the hyperreality of middle-class America.

>the individual proposing an answer
this is the crux of my problem with dfw

good post user

Bretty good post, good job.

>what with personal hygiene being tied to a cultural imperialist force

More on this? I'm interested.

>pulling from a history of soap

I haven't read Ulysses in a while. Can you cite which pages/chapter Joyce does this?


Good post btw.

I only recently heard about it since I'm trying to put together an essay on wandering in Moby-Dick and Ulysses. Here's the essay (titled All to Beefs to Heels were in: Adversting and Plenty in Joyce in case the link doesn't work), particularly Chapter 5:
digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1175&context=etd

Some of the more interesting bits:

" As a colonized people, part of the United Kingdom, the Irish were
especially prone to the Victorian British obsession with cleanliness. Anne McClintock explains
that as the British people acquired more and more colonies possessing raw materials to produce
soap, they developed an almost fanatical interest in hygiene. According to McClintock, ―By the
1890s…[British] soap sales had soared…[to] 26,000 tons of soap a year,‖ with advertising for
the product bringing a kind of ―moral and economic salvation to Britain‘s ‗great unwashed,‘‖ a
considerable number of whom were Irish slum-dwellers (271-72)...

The self-exiled James Joyce was the opposite of his hygiene-focused creation Leopold
Bloom; rather, he resembled Stephen Dedalus, ―a hydrophobe‖ who, on 16 June 1904, had not
bathed since ―October of the preceding year‖ (U 550). In his biography of Joyce, Richard
Ellmann asserts that believing that ―there was no advantage in being clean,‖ Joyce once
identified ―[s]oap and water‖ as his ―pet antipathy‖ (66-67). If Joyce in his private life devoted
attention to not being clean, it is likely that he uses Ulysses to critique the influence of the
personal-hygiene movement in Ireland. Joyce‘s presentation of Bloom and Stephen with
contrasting dispositions as regards cleanliness suggests that he was aware of the public discourse
on daily washing, as well as the advertisements that reinforced it.

Soap is personified in the fantastical ―Circe‖ episode of Ulysses. At one juncture,
addressing him as ―Poldy,‖ Bloom‘s wife asks him if the lotion she uses helps makes her skin
youthful again. Remembering that he forgot to pay for the lotion at Sweeny‘s, Bloom becomes
flustered and declares, ―I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop
64
closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning‖ (U 360). During this incident,
Bloom notices the soap he had acquired on the morning of 16 June in an extraordinary tableau:
―HE [Bloom] POINTS TO THE SOUTH, THEN TO THE EAST. A CAKE OF NEW CLEAN
LEMON SOAP ARISES, DIFFUSING LIGHT AND PERFUME‖ (U 360). The soap offers a
couplet: ―We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. / He brightens the earth. I polish the sky‖ (U
360). This paring of the soap and Bloom through a verse that resembles an advertising jingle
underscores the penetration into middle-class Irish society of the commercialized doctrine of
personal hygiene.


Take from it what you will, Ulysses interpretations can get pretty crazy, but at least its novel.

Interesting stuff. Thank you.

No problem lad