What's a good critique of DFW's proposal for "New Sincerity"

Darren Wilson did nothing wrong.

So, the gist is that a return to sincerity is better than pure cynicism and irony but the new sincerity should also be held up to scrutiny and ridicule. Is that about it?

Could someone explain to me in simple terms what 'postmodernism' means.

>You can't simply revert to sincerity after postmodernism.
Why not?

Can someone explain to me what irony means in this case? As far as I understand, modernists in their prose are fixated with the idea that our outward world doesn't match our internal cognition. Is this the pessimistic view in question? That we can never truly know our fellow man? And that postmodernist sincerity argues we can understand our fellow man?

I'm not really passing judgement but it was an awkward end to class. I think he meant if we back away from the mental judgement and scrutiny of society that goes along with irony and accept things in their human gooeyness then we may lose the tool of outrage and proper approximation of what's actually happening, sincere or not.

I don't think the philosophical shift would have to be as major as people think.

Nihilism is a truth, and an inescapable one. Yes, abstracting all things, everything is meaningless and without merit. The lesson that will hopefully be eventually taught is that, using nihilism to question the notion that truth=what should be, we need to accept the arbitrary. Laws, property, society, hierarchy, culture, none of these things have real merit you can point to, but without accepting them despite their arbitrarity, you are left with a world of pain, the war of all against all that Hobbes wrote of.

Basically, if you want to feel good, pretend these things have merit and you will.

DFWs main argument is this: a) mass media arose as a defining cultural agent; b) postmodernists started using irony to attack mass media [think of books in which brands are mocked, characters ironically watch tv, characters are self-aware, the book is self-aware etc]; c) mass media not only accepted such postmodernist techniques but started employing irony itself; d) irony as a means of criticizing mass media has thus become obsolete.

He also immensely dislike people who try to be ironic all the time because irony presents no alternative. Irony is, in some ways, too easy. Think of those talk show hosts who are always cracking jokes with sarcasm and irony: does it help solving a societal issue?

Okay, thank you for helping me to understand. Well, I would argue that your question presupposes that postmodernism should help solve societal issues. Who's to say that it should and on what authority?

Postmodernism looks at the thing modernism says is good and true and calls it stupid and fake and that believing anything can be good and true is naive.

Should a serious writer of literary prose be concerned, consciously, about where they fall on the continuum between modernism and postmodernism?

>should
certainly not

Okay. Maybe it's better for writers to simply write and not worry about those other things.

It's like worrying about finding a style when any affected style will never be as good as just being yourself.

I dont get it. I mean: I do but I dont. Just write about the things you think are right in a sicere way and put a stamp on the last page:

Not that it should, but that it no doubt will be. For simply being sincere. Meaning exactly what it says with no snark.

Essentially, irony is the reaction to the absurdity of conflicting messages from media and late capitalism.

[I'm trying to make sense of DFW's argument as much as you are, I've only recently read his essay 'E Unibus Pluriam: Television and US fiction' and would love if other people could enter the discussion]

Another layer of his argument is this: even if we admit fiction shouldn't not seek to change/solve problems in the culture, pomo critiques of the American cultural milieu have become obsolete due to what I previously alluded in my other post.
Also, bear in mind he was dialoguing with a very specific branch of postmodern fiction (image fiction). His whole point is also embedded in the general discussions about how we consume entertainment and how entertainment consumes us.

See pic related for DFW's thesis written by the man himself. I strongly recommend that you read his essay. Even if you don't agree with his premises, it is an interesting read.

>you are, right now, completely free

Modernism says it's good to get married, have 2.5 kids, work 9-5, and go to church on Sundays.

Postmodernism says, look at the wageslave who hates his wife and fake smiles at the bluehairs on Sundays.

Well, if you attain nihilism atleast. Not only intellectually, but with your gut in everyday situations.

Irony is a Demon.

>Modernism says it's good to get married, have 2.5 kids, work 9-5, and go to church on Sundays.

we need infinitely recursive irony that makes ironic fun of making ironic fun of making ironic fun of ...

So modernism is written by and for people that like or at the very least tolerate the current state of affairs in one way or another and postmodernism is written by and for bluehaired punks and philosophy majors that feel a kind of pissed off feeling a lot of the time.

Modernism is Leave it to Beaver
Postmodernism is Seinfeld

The guy you quoted is completely wrong. Do you think people like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Pablo Picasso thought " it's good to get married, have 2.5 kids, work 9-5, and go to church on Sundays."?

I'm that guy. I wasn't saying that that is what modernism says, but it could be an example of something a modernist might say as a sincerely held belief. Obviously there were modernist with different beliefs but the common thing was objectivism and postmodernist were more subjective.

Maybe I'm completely wrong here. I know I don't understand this subject entirely.

But modernism really isn't objective. Think of a Picasso cubist painting like the famous Demoiselles d'Avignon or Matisse's The Red Room. Think of the rise of atonal music and dadaism. All of these avant-garde artistic works and currents - in different mediums - shunned the realism of late XIX century. It was about moving away from objectivity and straight forward representation.

Wouldn't literature and visual art be changing on slightly different timelines though?

stop posting, moron.

kys

how about you keep your fingers off the fuckin keyboard when you have no clue what you're talking about.

Sorry. Is speech to text OK?

why?

Confirmed for never reading any modernist authors.

you have missed the point. it's not reversion but rather sincerity in spite of postmodernism. where all has been deconstructed into irrelevance, tradition, wholesomeness and virtue will rise like a phoenix, searing all of the scoffers, knowing, mind you, that not only is order arbitrary, but that this arbitrariness offers control and guidelines to those who enforce it. even wallace thought it would be reversion, so i can forgive your mistake.

It's basically putting on a pair of blinders on purpose. Once you go pomo you can't go back except through deliberate ignorance.

Read what I wrote and tell me what you thinkI haven't really tested that idea against anyone else so feedback would be appreciated

"Spiting" postmodernism is just another form of irony.
>We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

He's not critiquing postmodernism holistically, just the use of irony in postmodernism. It had existed in Western thought for a couple of decades before it became ironic appropriation and sign-play, but it didn't last much longer than that. Sure there's still irony -- both good and bad -- but it's not an avant-garde, artistic irony that was subversive and a short-hand for a distanced, affectless critique.

DFW was wrong, I think; he wasn't a thinker even if he could tell a story. Irony was exhausted of its cynical edge and, like most forms of human expression in 'postmodernity', appropriated in turn by the market. But the self-awareness of consumption habits still remains and if OWS was ironic, or countless thinkpieces about media also, or any of the activist art since the 90s, or non-Western art, etc. then I think we're seeing irony where it isn't.

It's really not that prevalent. There was no move to New Sincerity, just that moment of irony in postmodernism passed and we returned to regular postmodern art production.

I think it may have had a hand in the popularity of fantasy and science fiction. There you're not making comment on the world around you, so you don't need to adopt this cool and detached mode. These own worlds have their own conditions. From the popularity of Harry Potter, ASoIaF, Hunger Games, Marvel and DC. Maybe it's a YA thing. The young are pretty sincere.

actually, reading that you seem to have come to the same conclusion i have here, it's funny since i didn't really read the thread before, so it's nice to know that my thoughts aren't unique, and not even the terms are.
in the end it's about setting the rules, there was a generation deconstructing everything, our act of rebellion isn't reversion, but reconstruction. if anything, the generation that deconstructed was the one engaging in reversion, probably in horror against the responsibility of our growing technological prowess and awareness, philosophically what direction do you have besides up when you've hit rock bottom? wallace chose to dig six feet deeper. but there is another direction, up. society needs to rehabilitate itself from the drug of irony.
really it's about taking control. arbitrariness is freedom

if you want to make irony meaningless, then sure, everything is ironic. no spite is malicious and vengeful, irony can be a tool of spite, and spite can be a tool of irony, but they are not dependant on the other to exist.

Spiting something means you're reacting to it, and every reaction has a re-reaction. By trying to avoid it you only make appealing to the next generation that inevitably wants to rebel and try something new. The problem is that by its very nature irony doesn't allow things to be taken seriously, so "spiting" it is ineffectual. How do you spite a joke?

by not laughing. you're wrong that seriousness is not effectual against irony. what is proposed is seeing that a thing might be ridiculed, and ignoring it, and carrying on with it for its value. that value, once deconstructed into meaninglessness, ridiculed out of existence, gains power with those that subscribe to it. just as a comedian is often more funny simply because of the crowd laughing, he too can bomb if people decline to laugh, starve the joke. it's not fucking funny anymore.

I get what you're biting at. Question: how would people know that your "seriousness" is not in fact ironic? What would make you any different from hipsters? There are "neo" revivals all the time that never go anywhere. As I said, the beauty/horror of irony is that it is infinitely malleable, and can even infect itself.

it would not matter if people contribute tonwhat they see as ironic, as long as the movement is one founded on sincerity. if you subscribe to virtue ironically, you're still being virtuous, what the hell does it matter if you're jeering at it from the other side of your face? you're still following the rules.

but i will say, this insecurity will eventually implode. people will get tired of being made fun of constantly, wish to not be laughed at. i think there is a yearning for that even now, i think it's called war, in some minds.

why isn't this just the irony thread still, exactly?

he later rescinded these statements but he was kind of right.
Twilight, Hunger Games, and Fault in Our Stars are all examples of this trend. Deeply sincere books but ultimately shallow.
The next movement will be some weird middle-ground I'm sure. I think that's how things go: a resistance, a response, a melding.

is twilight shallow because of its sincerity, or rather because the one revealing themselves was shallow? i don't think complexity or depth necessrily suffers from sincerity, something of note in turgenev's works.

i think the person was shallow.
the writer was a sex-starved mormon (read: dumb) with clearly narcissistic fantasies.

Irony is the only position a self-respecting adult can take to our present situation, where the state's decision-making is optimized, and the only thing you and I have the power to do is make things worse with our naive and selfish ideas.

It doesn't seem as difficult, or impossible, to try and be sincere in what you do as this thread seems to make it sound. I honestly try to be sincere, but if I want to affect irony then I don't think that contradicts new sincerity exactly. And if it does, I don't mind.

jumping into this thread just now, but I think New Sincerity has arrived, and it's pretty ugly.

Its the SJW vs Alt-Right culture battle. While the establishment left and right are busy concerned with mundane governing, there is a pretty active battle between the fringes for a sense destiny, a future utopia or at least a dystopia averted.

I'm involved in a pretty active literary/art scene in Kansas City/Chicago, and I'd say that nihilism, post-modern irony and absurdism are looked upon with derision. Everyone is overly sincere about politics (and within the art community this generally means leftist politics).

When I think of "post-modern" writing, I think of something like Tao Lin or even William Burroughs. No one has any tolerance for that kind of "nothing matters", "life is hell", attitude. To cultivate an ironic distance from events, from the suffering of the world, is quite frowned upon. How can you have ironic distance in the face of police brutality, or when muslim terrorists are going to kill everyone?

I actually really dislike these forms of political sincerity. The culture battle is tedious. If anything, I think some Irony, some Distance from Reality, is what is actually needed right now.

that's my point though, it's not sincerity that's the problem in that movement, but rather that those people are fuckin stupid. don't give up on new sincerity because some foos made a few lemons.

This is a joke, right?

New sincerity is very real. Even John Green knows that.

When the hipsters turned into genuine lovers of craft and the youtube reviews became video essays and the films in recent years--my god the sincerity in filmmaking these days nearly pulls around to being absurd again--these are the tells of new sincerity.

And yeah, like user said here it isn't philosophy, it is fact. The only thing that can possibly buck irony is honesty. What else is there?

that's what i alluded to before here,
and no, irony is what got us to this place to begin with. enough jeering, what we need is a good fist fight, what's more sincere than that?

>New Sincerity
So do people enjoy writing anymore or do they start with genre templates and trudge through it according to existing schematics like they were building a radio on an assembly line?

what is post-modern fugue?

writing isn't about joy, you faggot. it's a fucking crippling disease that restricts us from identifying with humanity and shit like that. fuck you!

hnnngh!!

>there are people who post on this board who have LITERALLY NEVER been in an ironic fistfight to the death

What does that mean? That it's pomo to Rebel against authority? And enforcing the law is "sincere?" What does this mean.

Wait, everyone's being ironic?

I think I fucked up...

>Writing is a fucking crippling disease that restricts us from identifying with humanity and shit like that.

CRINGE

I fucking hate your kind of person so much.
I bet you like absurdism, are a strict believer in the sanctity of subjective interpretations and are a naively closeted narcissist.
FUCK OFF

Modernism was the era of assuming the future would be great because it came after the past. Surely, we must be able to create great and novel forms of expression in this, the modern world of the turning 20th century.

Postmodernism is literally just the come-down from that high, characterized largely by wryness absurdism and irony.

Think Joyce vs Pynchon. People often conflate the two because their styles can be somewhat labyrinthine, but Joyce's writings were all love letters to the lifestyles he described whereas Pynchon liked to show just how thin the line between realism and absurdity really is.

Twilight was shallow because it was shallow. It did well because it was sincerely written the way teenage girls think because the author sincerely hadn't grown up much since youth. Such is the state of american society.

Interestingly, this is not the case for the hunger games as their writer, Suzanne Collins was a fairly decent YA writer beforehand, making it much more obviously a cash grab.

John Green is honestly hard to get a read on and I haven't actually interacted with any of his work to know better. If what he claims is true, he is sincere and that's pretty believable. If not, it's just as believable, really, and in either case his success is still due to the same phenomena as Stephanie Meyers'. That is, people were starved for unironic content, no matter how shit.

i hate abstract art and literature, i'm a strict believer in an objective truth in god, and i'm so empathic that i have no true personality, just echoes of others, and it makes me despise myself at times.

*absurdism
sorry.

empathy and having a personality aren't opposed ideas/realities. You relate yourself to them, you don't become them. It's transactional, not total embodiment

not for you, maybe, but for me, i walk in their shoes and can't get the fuck out of them.

If you look at the culture/political battle on Twitter it's the same kind of ironic distancing tweeted at the opposition and retweeted when someone finally manages to say something that isn't able to immediately be dismissed with a base ironic reaction.

The over ironic tone of postmodernism is actually very useful in denouncing the many ways with which society (and not the modernism one of the 20th century, our society right now) engage in mindless forward thinking (i.e progressive beyond any other measure).

Consider what is, perhaps, our most prevalent, persistent and uninterrupted forward thinking since the Industrial Era or even before: that more technology is always better for society. No one in their right mind ever go up to a political speech and claim we need less advances in any one area, such as food, medicine, telecom, etc. Even military research is made a just cause from the fast and reliable results it generates. Our contemporary world is built for [and slave to] innovation, regardless of it being a good thing or not.

The only place where we can ever sit back and consider that science could/should just back off sometimes is within the ironic lenses of postmodern media. Dystopic tales of alternative futures (that are at times not very alternative at all), such as the Black Mirror series, or even pessimistic humour such as the Fallout games (lulz videogames ain't art boi) are good in reminding us that even tech can go too far. Of course, the whole problem with it being ironic is that elsewhere the forward thinking remains: it is not true opposition to the issue but a mere escape. But still, it's the only way to bring some things into question nowadays, because even though alt-right and lefty types are sincerely opposing each other, they have much more in common than their past counterparts. So much, in fact, that even if the prevailing left-leaning culture gives way to a right-leaning one, we would probably not see much change at all, and it would merely shift the economical focus to different values and goods.

Yes you can, its called having an individual body and a brain and a soul and past and collection of memories. There, you're out. Do people spend most of their time inventing weird abstract things to worry about in order to feel cool or something?

>nihilism, post-modern irony and absurdism are looked upon with derision.
I don't think we're looking at the same movement. On the far right side of things that may be true, I don't know, but the regressive left is completely founded on those things. The post-modern notion that societal constructs need to be identified and abolished at all costs is what fuels their fire, and that is an inherently nihilist departure from notions of right and wrong and authority and subservience

The greater connection to nihilism of course, is the end goal. They want communism on the most part, and communism could not be a better incubator for crippling nihilism and aimlessness.

you don't have to use the vehicle of irony to deny progressivism

anime is popular because it (the Japanese aesthetic + marketing toward children + particular evolved norms and attitudes of the genre) is an especially sincere form of media, and 4channers (people spending lots of time on the Internet, really) are precisely the sort of disaffected youth who most yearn for sincerity whether they know it or not

y/n?

Communism is about human fulfillment not nihilism. Post-modernism is about identifying impositions and political violence rather than abolishing societal constructs. This is seen as right and just, rather than an absence of or departure from either right or wrong, and definitely not absurd. People aren't ironically communist, but they may adopt an ironic attitude to consumer society to expose and combat its inherent meaninglessness, rather than to bring about a revolution of nihilism.

It scratches other itches, but yes its often sincere.

I don't know if "sincerity" exactly encapsulates the spirit of "anime" as a whole, only particular artists, directors, studios. So, that's like most every other thing around.

the left is not about nihilism or irony. It's about sincere multiculturalism.

Try to see the left as it sees itself. The "progressive" left see itself as a building a multicultural utopia free from ethnic/nationalist/religious violence.

Set aside whether you think this is possible, or if it offends your own position.

the left do not see themselves as nihilistic destroyers of tradition and culture. They don't have tolerance for nihilism, ironic distance, or any attempt to mitigate reality.

well, true enough. i'm mostly thinking of e.g. the nature of the interpersonal interactions that happen in most anime/manga; it seems like there's a certain sort of sincerity there.

i don't exactly know what i mean really.

i think some of it, certainly, is simplicity in characterization, plot, and dialogue. but beyond that, there seems to be something more -- some ineffable quality, some sort of intrinsic earnestness, that's often lacking in western media.

I have a tangential note: just came back from a Thailand+Vietnam trip. The most flagrant cultural takeaway, I found, was that glaring gap occupying the reserved spot for irony. You see it in the unpalatable corniness of their music, of their television, and it would be easier to say that this aesthetic discrepancy is not the proponent of a correspondent, underlying difference in the basic mindset of the population if I hadn't seen, with my own two fucking eyes, people who had just entered drinking age going to public squares in a Saturday evening to play tug-of-war, jump rope and yes, reproduce those same melodramatic ballads and read manga, all the while nurturing their nationalism/ populism with entirely straight faces.
So yes, I agree

Well when you compare it to western media, then yes. I agree completely.

Have you noticed how many of these bluehaired bay area fucks blatantly identify as nihilists? Or communists? Often times, fucking both simultaneously? As contradictory as it may be to their own beliefs, their obsession with image and in particular the "too cool to care" archetype means that nihilism is hip and agreeable

I'm not saying communism IS nihilism, I am saying that communism creates nihilism. Communism is a society without hierarchy and humans, believe it or not, truly do not like that on a primal level, despite what they may think. Humans need that "up" to aspire to and that "down" to feel superior to. Across every culture EVER created by humans, hierarchy has been a significant if not defining aspect. Rob that from people, and they have nothing to compare themselves to. If the mere shaking of religious foundation gave birth to nihilism, just imagine what the destruction of hierarchy would cause!

>!
!!

>Across every culture EVER created by humans, hierarchy has been a significant if not defining aspect.

But those cultures haven't lived in advanced capitalist societies. And if Marx is to be believed, the process of history has been the lower class overthrowing the upper class. His conclusions are based on this idea, and whether or not humankind finds its true potential under communism, he is right to bring up that established hierarchies tend to end in this way.

I like you

Yeah, like I said, try to set aside how you perceive leftists and try to understand them in their own terms.

To them, gender/race/nation/religion/class/caste/etc are arbitrary categories that allow one group to oppress another. These categories create justifications for supremacist thinking.

The left does not see itself as embracing nihilism. They see the erasure of categories as a means to achieve equality. they see the categories as arbitrary, as false distinctions, as historical weapons.

I don't know what leftists you are talking to who self-describe as nihilists, but I've never met them. The leftists I know would freak the fuck out if I described myself as a nihilist, they'd accuse me of being unsympathetic to suffering. They'd connect my nihilist to white privilege and my ability to exist outside of systems of oppression.

back to OPs topic. Today, the left and right are deadly serious and sincere about their politics. The left no longer tolerates existentialism, nihilist, absurdism or ironic distance from reality. While some of these trends were popular in the left 10-20 years ago, today it's not seen favorably. It's seen as a copout.

Does anyone else get the odd feeling that they are getting glimpses of the infinitude of banality when reading internet comments, even ones that are well-thought out and on-topic?