My thoughts on Post-Irony and why nobody seems to get it

[Zyler]

I've gotten a lot of good feedback from the last few essays I've written in this forum- all of which has caused me to reconsider my views and adjust my thinking accordingly. This time I'd like to discuss something that has floated around the edges of my cultural understanding, the concept of post-ironic expression- at least as I understand it. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the subject as well as whether you feel my conceptualization of this topic is reasonable.

To start with, I believe that the concept of post-irony falls under the umbrella of what is sometimes called the New Sincerity movement, which has become somewhat of a cliche term in some circles. It essentially refers to the idea that we are now living in the time of a cultural movement searching for a new sense of authenticity and sincerity as a backlash to the culture of narrative deconstruction within post-modern movements of the past few decades.

Every young cultural movement of at least the past three centuries has been a response to a previous one. For example, the Enlightenment movement was a response to the perceptibly strict scriptures and blind faith of religious movements; Romanticism was a response to the perceived soulless and passionless rationality of the Enlightenment; Art Noveau was a response to the perceived loss of individuality and craftsmanship of the Industrial Revolution; Modernism was an attempt to consolidate cultural ideas into a rational and 'modern' structure in the wake of movements such as Romanticism and Art Noveau that had scattered them into many pieces; finally, Post-Modernism deconstructed the structures established by Modernist thought as a response to the perceived lack of truth and meaning in established thinking.

That was obviously an oversimplification of multiple very complex ideas, but I hope it still holds true in the general sense that it is illustrative of the reasoning behind the presumption that post-modernism will or already has been subsumed by another counter-cultural movement in the style of many cultural movements beforehand.

That movement is, I believe, New Sincerity- the search for genuine sincerity in a post-modern world. The New Sincerity movement results from, is primarily based on and is essentially tied to the internet and internet culture as a whole. There are essentially three ways to produce genuine, brand-less expression in our modern age which is proliferated by the branding and marketing of ideas and concepts, the first, Post-Irony, is to be so ironic in your expression that it becomes genuinely unclear whether or not you are being ironic, to the extent where you seem to both believe and not believe something at the same time.

This only works because what is being conveyed is not a series of political arguments in a narrative format but rather an appeal to emotion such as a general feeling of dismay at the perceived illegitimacy of modern branding in providing real meaning to our lives or a vague and general distrust of the intentions of authority figures and mainstream news media. In this sense, post-ironic memes are the internet equivalent of punk culture in the sense that it is not a concise political movement per se with a set of clearly defined goals but rather a general emotional and aesthetic movement. At most, It can be defined as a critique of the language surrounding post-modern political discourse and how it is inadequate for displaying the nuanced thoughts and emotions of individuals who are not considered within the traditional post-modern analysis of power structures.

After Post-Irony, the second form of genuine expression that can be accomplished, under the umbrella of New Sincerity, is to make something so genuinely unappealing that no brand agency would ever think to use it as marketing, even ironically. This is an extension of 'Kitsch', the idea of creating a work that is endearing because of the quirkiness of its off-putting qualities, except rather than being endearing this form of what I'm going to call Post-Kitsch is genuinely off-putting and it is left unclear whether the poor craftsmanship of the work is deliberate or not. Post-Kitsch is very similar to Post-Irony in the sense that in both cases the creator plays with the idea of sincerity and how it is mixed up so easily by whether or not they wink at the camera to let us know that it is all a joke and they were merely pretending to be retarded.

The third way of communicating genuine expression in a branded world is to simply make your form of expression so loud that it drowns out everything else. We can see this in the form of the Loudness War in modern music, where modern bands are getting louder and louder to literally drown each other out, as well as the increasing proliferation of Industrial genres of music. Like Post-Irony and Post-Kitsch, this form of cultural Escalationism revels in playing with the idea of sincerity by skirting the idea of music as a melodic composition compared to just pure noise.

What these different prongs of New Sincerity all have in common is that they all question the authority of Post-modernism, which is a much more implicit kind of authority to that of the concrete structures of modernism and is primarily based in language. It also means that, much like the punks of yesteryear fought against the authority of the conservative institutions within governments, universities and business, the modern internet post-ironics rail against the current perceived authority figures of left-leaning news outlets, politically-correct universities and the socially-minded techno-liberal corporations of today. As with the punks however, the modern equivalent post-ironics see these authority figures as a useful scapegoat for their general angst against the now post-modern structures of society.

[Boilermaker]

I question the attribution of post-irony or New Sincerity specifically to internet culture. I used to have similar views that the introduction of the Internet led to post-ironics, but literature has made me become less sure about that. Don DeLillo's White Noise seems to encapsulate a lot of the ideas you are talking about (mockery of post-modern academics, negative views on the future of technology, negative effects of consumerism) and it was written in 1985. In DeLillo's case, television essentially took the place you are giving to the internet, so I think post-irony's tie to the internet itself is not an essential one.

Im leaning towards the idea that the Internet and internet culture has simply made New Sincerity more prominent in forms of media considering that one of the Internet's primary contributions to society is the enabling of the production of information by the populace as opposed to the consumption of information, which was made available by television.

[Zyler]

[QUOTE=Boilermaker;51510859]I question the attribution of post-irony or New Sincerity specifically to internet culture. I used to have similar views that the introduction of the Internet led to post-ironics, but literature has made me become less sure about that. Don DeLillo's White Noise seems to encapsulate a lot of the ideas you are talking about (mockery of post-modern academics, negative views on the future of technology, negative effects of consumerism) and it was written in 1985. In DeLillo's case, television essentially took the place you are giving to the internet, so I think post-irony's tie to the internet itself is not an essential one.

Im leaning towards the idea that the Internet and internet culture has simply made New Sincerity more prominent in forms of media considering that one of the Internet's primary contributions to society is the enabling of the production of information by the populace as opposed to the consumption of information, which was made available by television.[/QUOTE]

I think you're definitely right in that these ideas were floating around before the inception of the internet, to be sure. If you read many of the the literature written by the people who laid the groundwork for internet technology in the 1980s, they had many of the same ideas all the way back then, particularly people like Ted Nelson and Tim-Bernard Lee, who envisioned the idea of user-generated content as the basis of future cultural progress and a skepticism towards existing post-modern concepts of cultural information.

I believe the internet was conceived of by people who related with Don Delillo's work or at least were part of the same generation of thinkers whom were beginning to critique aspects of post-modern theory and the failings of existing forms of media.

In particular, Ted Nelson envisioned a new form of hypermedia that is even more advanced than today's social media and tries to deal with the problems outlined by Delilo (that can be applied equally to television and the modern internet), and he's still working on it today.
[video=youtube;72M5kcnAL-4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72M5kcnAL-4[/video]
The hope is that by changing the way information is presented to a user, it may be possible to create a world that is free from the pitfalls of misinformation, branding, marketing and the influence of cultural propaganda (because everything is connected and everything can be traced back and checked) as well as maximizing user-generated content while at the same time remaining economically viable and properly crediting creators. That's the idea anyway.

[Zyler]

[QUOTE=Marbalo;51511067]And what kind of world would that be without these essential things that keep us on our toes and hone our critical thought?[/QUOTE]

Critical thought would still be required, it would just be much more easy to use it because any claim could be instantly verified by clicking once to trace it back to its source.

Critical thinking would be encouraged and incentivized rather than the opposite (clickbait) being economically incentivized.

[Boilermaker]

[QUOTE=Zyler;51510920]
I believe the internet was conceived of by people who related with Don Delillo's work or at least were part of the same generation of thinkers whom were beginning to critique aspects of post-modern theory and the failings of existing forms of media.
[/QUOTE]

One of the important things about post-irony, at least in literature, is that it is not so much a criticism of post-modern irony as much as it is a [I]reaction[/I] towards it. Postmodern writers often used self-irony and criticism, which is also prominent in the works of postmodern academics. Post-ironics dont so much as disown this aspect as they attempt to find meaning or 'sincerity' in spite of it. Delillo has been often called a late postmodern writer, but it is often pointed out that he has much in common with modernism as well, which I think is what makes him attractive to post-ironics as modernism had established meanings.

Outside of literature, I still highly doubt any kind of technology will remove these kinds of grievances, but I still believe that Internet-based technologies have helped shape postmodernism and/or post-irony in some new manner.

[Daniraldo]

This discussion brought to mind an essay I've read sometime ago that you guys might be interested in. It relates deeply to the topic you're talking about.

[URL="https://www.thefreelibrary.com/E+unibus+pluram:+television+and+U.S.+fiction.-a013952319"]E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction, by David Foster Wallace.[/URL]