DUDE

DUDE
SINCERITY
LMAO

Not really though.

it's really hard to not be sarcastic. i try but i can't help it. i hope i get to feel something if i remove some of it from my personality

wtf I hate sincerity now

Not only that but I'm pretty sure total sincerity is impossible. I've tried it, and I always look back thinking "What the fuck was I saying . . . "

Sincerity leads to the embrace of mediocrity.
He knew this, its why he killed himself.

I honestly think we should try it for a few weeks. This includes online on Veeky Forums

>It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife

>irony
called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

any good anti-irony texts/books?

This pasta mang?

meant for

>There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.
>literally quoting something DFW quoted.

I don't disagree with the diagnosis, but I do disagree with the "solution". What would "fixing" it be? A return to quaint midwestern sentimentality?

New myths for new humans. That's what needs articulating. Values the world has not seen yet. Perhaps the only reason irony seems ike poison is because we have yet to find the correct orientation towards it. Perhaps what's actually poisonous is a withered and decaying sincerity hidden underneath postmodern irony.

It's like the way every atheism is shaped in terms of the theism it grew out of.

DFW didn't have the answers. At best he developed a new antagonistic stance on literature.

...

Fiction has always been more prominently critical than progressive. Dystopias have an easier time surviving in the public consciousness than utopias. You've read Notes From Underground but it's doubtful that you've read What Is to Be Done. You can't really blame irony and ridicule for an attitude of inaction that has always been present. Equating irony with critique and sincerity with construction just seems fallacious.

And someone should have told DFW that people aren't afraid of sincerity, they mostly just point out overt sentimentalism and inappropriate seriousness where it exists.

I don't think I'm blaming irony for an attitude of inaction. I am accusing postmodern irony of secretly being sentimental. Holding on to some kernel of sentimental truth but only seeing it negatively.

It's like looking at some trashy art student postmodern shitshow of a piece, and thinking "that's not art" and then, through that negation, having some inner sense of what art "is" and being a bit precious about it.

DFW was doing something like this, I think.

I agree with your last two sentences though, I'm just not sure how they apply to my comment.

Sorry, I meant to quote the post below yours.

Veeky Forums types tend to be lazy and generally anti-utopian

he couldn't write; he couldn't think; he hadn't any discernable talent

Irony is simply the displacement of meaning. Walrus has attached this whole dull artistic teleology to it centered around some lame generation x narrative where he's going to recapture a lost authenticity for the future. Lame As Fuck, and boring too.


When the meaning of a thing becomes saturated to the point where it stops meaning much at all [ward cleaver, for DFW], essentially when it becomes a cliche, irony allows for the displacement of essential meaning from absorbed meaning. DFW himself, his "sincerity," has itself become a ward cleaver, a saturated mess of nonsense signifying nothing real at all.Irony and the formation of the cliche go hand in hand, there is no end to either. Meaning accrues to the point of absurdity; irony comes along and begins its fanciful displacement, retaining the protean while disabling the caricature.

I think you raise good points but I'm not sure if it's at all possible to achieve that sort of pure unsentimental irony.

Sincerity is saying what you think and telling it like it is. As for irony, just read what user wrote.

>I am accusing postmodern irony of secretly being sentimental.

Irony is full of sentiment. It's often from affection for a thing molested by inconsequential meaning that irony comes most forcefully to the fore. That to which someone is indifferent is rarely taken notice of, let alone subjected ironic dissection.

Purifying isn't the word.

I think we need to start getting explicitly sentimental about irony, rather than secretly sentimental inside it.

Or do away with irony, but by going through it, not behind it. RADICAL

Well there you go.

What I'm arguing then is that DFW sets up a position supposedly in opposition to a certain kind of irony, but in fact, just furthers the logic of that which he opposes.

>split infinitive
>in a DFW thread
leave Veeky Forums forever