my power pop addiction, no. 41 (113)

When people refer to irony nowadays, they're generally not talking about the subtle irony you learn about in your 9th grade English class, the kind you find in Herman Melville and Charles Dickens, but rather irony as the common syntax of the postmodern condition, where it’s become virtually synonymous with cynicism. Irony has become such a pervasive and seemingly natural part of the collective consciousness that we often find ourselves in conversations where it’s difficult to discern whether the other person is being ‘serious’ – which is to say transparent, pure, true, earnest – or ‘ironic’, as in playful, sarcastic, obtuse, opaque, and what have you. I frequently have this problem in my own family. No matter how hard I try to make a simple declarative statement as to how I feel or what I think, they assume I’m pulling their leg, poking fun, and internally undermining what I present in its immediacy as the truth. And the funny thing is, I often lose track of whether I’m being serious or not myself! All meaning is slippery and always already deconstructed. There was a time, not so long ago in relative historical terms, when irony was subversive. These days it’s different. Irony as cynicism engenders paralysis, stagnation, and puts us all in a prison house of unstable language. We don’t know what to do or say, how to be, what to think. We don’t know what the truth is. And the ‘undecidability,’ as the post-structuralists refer to it, seems so stuck in time, monolithic and indestructible. Heidegger has a notion of modernity as a ‘fallen moment,’ which I think is more applicable today than ever. The more you look for the truth, the more you realize that it’s not out there. It’s why Fox News garners a whiff of respectability. When relativism becomes the dominant paradigm and everything becomes a text to be subjectively interpreted, then who’s to say that Rupert Murdoch’s truth isn’t every bit as legitimate as Noam Chomsky’s? It’s hard to imagine a turn back to transparency or to a naïve belief that the truth will set you free. It would be like returning to travel everywhere by bicycle after 100 years of riding around in cars, which, come to think of it, we may actually have to do at some point in the not-too-distant future, so who knows but that there might be an epistemological return of some sort… When and how did irony become conservative, I wonder? I’m thinking off the top of my head here, but it was probably in the 1970s, in the wake of the seismic social changes of the previous decade that uprooted so much of the long established meanings and assumptions. It’s sad that progressive social change turned into its opposite, but that’s the dialectic of enlightenment for you. The 60s were the peak of human civilization. And yet, the conservatives are correct (though not for the reasons they think) when they hold that the 60s are also responsible for the beautiful world we live in today…