Post-Irony (& The New Sincerity)

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

One of the things I love about young people is that they can respect my completely unironic appreciation for George Michael, while among my own middle-aged genX peers, there is a lot of "ha, ha, of course you only like this ironically because it is cheesy".

[minuspace]

I will close with a link to MACINTOSH PLUS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU8HrO7XuiE

My puter barely still gets on the Internet, so it might have been me breaking down, I'm not sure, but is the music supposed to stop abruptly at 5:05 right after he sings "time's running out"?

[Cramulus]

mmmm no

[minuspace]

Daahm.   Mea culpa.  I offer this indulgence,

One Small Step for Wishman

https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=eq3nhSQ30HI

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I don't like the way Wallace & many others suggest irony and sincerity are dichotomous. They're part of a cycle. Wallace suggests that irony has run its course and broken down everything it needs to break down (which makes me think that he's channeling Fukuyama: Seinfeld destroyed communism so now we can just be wholesome all the time), but the world is full of shitty ideas that need to be challenged, and an ironic stance is useful to the point of almost being necessary for challenging certain kinds of ideas.

The ironic stance is like the veil of ignorance: it allows us to observe ideas out of context and criticize them for their form rather than their effect. This is so powerful that it's almost equally capable of shredding good ideas as it is of shredding bad ideas. But, without it, all we have is identity politics without intersectionality.

Some problems are hard to see without stepping outside yourself and looking unsympathetically at the situation. Other problems are hard to see without empathy grounded in experience. Ignoring either set of problems leads to awful results, because the world is a mish-mash of soulless machinery and fragile human guts and understanding only one leads to breaking both.

Another nuance here is that there's no such thing as ironic enjoyment. If you're feeling something, that feeling is sincere, even if you feel it as the result of actions taken from an ironic stance. Someone whose self-conception is related to irony (which I think is the core criticism of New Sincerity: lifestyle irony, rather than an ironic stance in of itself) will see sincerity through an ironic lens, but while delusional posuers may be annoying they can hardly be considered a real threat. Basically, any position taken ironically is at least partly genuine and should be considered as genuine, because the idea that an ironic stance excuses actions taken under it has never held water.

[minuspace]

while delusional posuers may be annoying they can hardly be considered a real threat.

Until they hit a critical mass that enables actualization of the virtual and it's fusion with the real.  Sincere pretention can actually cause quite a bit of collateral damage. What I find terribly interesting is that there seem to be different levels of play.  On the lower, delusional fronts are engaged/harnessed in polarizing and self perpetuating conflict.  In this engagement, there is a total leveling-down and normalization of the combative stance.  Essentially you have an army of useful idiots that can be dispatched in service of any horizontal campaign for which they are given a position of fitting narrative agency.  The hero's quest for dummies.  I'm thinking of grown baby-men, shirtless fascists, chugging gallons of milk in protest, defiance and un-ironic misunderstanding of what is actually significant in terms of genetic selectivity.  On the other, and here comes my own sincere naiveté, I would like to believe that someone else also thinks this makes the spectacle of pretension flagrantly untenable.  When instead this cognitive dissonance goes to fuel the "kayfabe" of it all, then I think delusionals can pose a real threat.  I'm sure I'm prolly preaching to the choir.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

What I'm saying is, despite their claims, they are in fact wholly sincere. They are just unable to imagine themselves being sincere about anything.

It's not the irony that's threatening. It's positions they would be holding regardless of whether or not they had an ironic stance to hide behind. That stance makes them feel safe, which makes them able to be more open (with themselves and others) about it.

[minuspace]

There's that.  And I can tell I'm skirting around registering the codetermination of irony/sincerity.  And then I have like this pet peeve or bone to pick about being "hoisted by one's own petard." The levity of irony can also be used to decouple people from direct connection with the object of concern.  People actually competing with each other about who cares less. Dangerous territory.  And to end with another mismatched idiom, re: being hoisted, "if they can lift you, they can move you". 
[Author regrets nothing about above word-salad]

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The levity of irony can also be used to decouple people from direct connection with the object of concern.  People actually competing with each other about who cares less. Dangerous territory.

Decoupling people from direct connection with the object of concern is, I think, a core part of the utility of irony when used for positive ends. It becomes dangerous when it's not paired with empathy, but that's less a problem of too much irony and more a problem of not enough empathy: the lack of empathy has to be present in the first place in order for competing for irony points to actually begin to occur in a situation where empathy matters. (I.e., ironic performative racism isn't going to be popular with people who have deep concerns about racism, even if they would otherwise be willing to use an ironic stance in other situations, but those people will also take an ironic stance toward racism in a way that isn't a performative and 'ironic' embrace.)

[minuspace]

The problem then is that the most common ironic stance has become too clever by half, neglecting how irony is itself grounded in a form of concern that takes issue with the importance of what people care about.  The shortcut from irony to abject nihilistic pretense is pathetic, I agree.  Like Witgenstein said of logic, irony (not concern!) is a ladder that can be discarded after use, or something like that.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

That brings up the point that perhaps irony is the sole privilege of the relatively well-off. A parallel you could draw would be with the affected aristocratic languor of the nobility of days of yore. Perhaps cultivation of irony is a privilege of people without any significant, immediate threats to their day-to-day survival.

"Things are going well so far."
- A French Aristocrat being taken out to the guillotine.

Irony is possible to anyone at all.  It is, however, a bad habit.

[Cramulus]

[minuspace]

I may of had a bit of the vapors upon me yesterday, but I was frankly amazed by boards of Canada's roygbiv
https://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=yT0gRc2c2wQ

So I cued it up to show a friend, and, well, it was still cool, but the compression algorithm was misbehaving. So I cycled through all quality-settings, top to auto to 140p/whatever and back again, all for nothing... Point being is that there was another "layer" to the video, really driving it home.

Instead of fuzzy edges, there was a 'Lego-block' VFX applied to characters and objects. So cars, cans and people would fully turn into "fake" and artificial/prefabbed representations.

Now it just seems like I have an overactive imagination, but I know what I saw, it was the Berkeleyan real-truth version of vaporware