Question is; To Know What We Want

“…the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it.”
Fredric Jameson

“The question is, to know what we want. If we are prepared for war, plagues, famine, and massacres, we don’t even need to say so, all we have to do is carry on.”
Antonin Artaud

The ironic is, today, I am coming to see, a sort of delivery device for white supremacist thinking, which term itself is often problematic. But the colonial mind set has never left white society in the West. Nor anywhere, I suppose. The resistance to letting go of white control of industry, government, and most institutions has not changed. But today, post modern racism is ironic racism.

But I think one has to unpack what irony really is, a bit more, to see how this all works, and because I am increasingly aware that irony is a very slippery idea in some ways. And my interest here is in contemporary culture, although that only makes sense if some sort of historical perspective is included. And contemporary means, according to many, a postmodern definition. And this is really North America and Europe that is being discussed here.

The postmodern, which I think is a highly problematic label, is, however, in aesthetic and social terms, the arrival of a fragmenting and dissolution of the conventional notions of the bourgeoisie and culturally speaking the arrival of a hegemonic mass culture and electronic media, and global capital. What began in, roughly, the early 1960s, was a project of disrupting the canon and conventional hierarchies of taste in the University, coincided with a resistance to the conformism of post war America, and with a resistance to U.S. foreign policy in the form of the Viet Nam war. This is, needless to say, a whole lot more complex than how I am laying it out here. The notion of post modernism in the arts is, perhaps, most obvious or at least best tracked, in fiction. But the infusion of *paraliterary* thinking (per Roz Krauss) and practitioners such as Umberto Eco or Jerzy Kozinski. D. M. White, or John Barth, or Rushdie even, today seem anything but radical, and in fact seem far more dated and superficial than artists of the time (speaking of literature) who were not officially presenting their work as experimental or post modern and who at the time may have even been labeled old fashioned. That lineage of early post mod writers probably leads to DeLillo and Auster and for certain bled into MFA programs, and it has in general left, now three or four decades later, a legacy of almost nothing worth reading at all.

The problem, in hindsight, is that this idea of disrupting authorial voice, or authority, was always already being disrupted, and all this idea strikes one as a very narrow paradigm for analysing or writing fiction (or, uh, meta fiction, or whatever). Post structuralists simply created a new vocabulary (Derrida and Foucault, and to some degree Barthes) that could better point out certain conundrums or paradoxes about textuality. Wittgenstein was doing something not dissimilar, at least in effect. When Eagleton said Doctorow was without historical depth, he was right. He or may not have been right for the right reasons, but in fact anyone who can read Ragtime today and not find it a sophomoric cartoon must really not read much. Rushdie is the same, only worse. And the influence of both has been unfortunate. Doctorow, in my small anecdotal experience, is not even talked about anymore. Rushdie seems to self promote enough in his rabid reactionary and slightly hysterical way, so he does get mentioned. But rarely is his work mentioned. I am not sure at all that in another thirty years if Maxine Hong-Kingston or Sandra Cisneros or Steve Erickson or Dave Markson are going to be read at all.

Barry Lewis wrote a sort of seminal essay (to some) on the topic of post modern fiction and suggested there was a “epistemic break” that took place in the md 90s. First and second wave post modern fiction writers. This might be useful, in fact, but looking over the lists my first response is that the second wave has become even more reactionary. I think Lloyd Spencer was the one who actually applauded post modern fiction as being reactionary. In fact, it was intentionally anti Utopian (which is a dog whistle for anti-Marxist, and anti socialist or communist, and if it wasn’t a dog whistle when he said it, it is a dog whistle now). The problem is, of course, that is if you visit various listserve type sites and quickly glance down at the top fifty post modern novels, you will find Sebald next to Kathy Acker and Kafka next to Mark Danielewski. But oh, I guess that’s sort of post-moderny too.

I was thinking this week of how significant is the work of Peter Handke. Perhaps nobody in European literature has stood up as well, save perhaps Thomas Bernhard, who is now dead, and in theatre Pinter. But Handke may really be the greatest writer of this era. And his early work, both in prose and theatre, feels far more radical and unsettling today than the junk turned out by Rushdie or Auster. But more on that below. The ascension of Foucault, in particular, but also Lyotard and Baudrillard, shaped an entire several decades of thought in terms of the imprint of this idea of descontstruction. And indeed, especially with Derrida, Edward Said and others, there was some significantly good work applied to aesthetics that came out of this. But the influence, on art, was mostly regressive. And this is worth discussing, firstly (probably) by examining *irony*.

Irony is usually traced back to Socrates. But Hayden White, in the 70s, was already decrying the idea of history, which itself has built in ironic aspects. And often, as an example, Shakespeare is discussed in terms of irony. And this is a part of the problem, today, I think. Yes, on the one hand Shakespeare’s vision of court intrigue, of power and desire for power, was commenting on a certain illusory notion of inherited royal virtue, on venality and greed. But his works, the ways in which they commented, were not themselves ironic. The plays have ironic meaning, as one of their meanings, as it were, but these are not ironic plays. To question certain historical truths is not necessarily automatically to make them ironic. The re-reading of texts is, in one sense, exactly what mimesis is. In Plato, irony is a lie that is meant to be recognized. Already, however, the question of identity, of ‘the speaker’ is being raised. Socrates leads in a pretty direct line to Kierkegaard, and there is perhaps a greater influence there than is conventionally assumed. Adorno, in his early work on Kierkegaard:

“He who as philosopher steadfastly challenged the identity of thought and being, casually lets existence be governed by thought in the aesthetic object.”

For Adorno, Kierkegaard’s failure to see art/poetics as giving form to experience in some way, was only reflecting on the aesthetic process itself. In other words a kind of ironic distance was inserted and the material object and physical world lost. It is important to note the distinction between what a John Cage was doing, and what Brian Eno or Laurie Anderson are doing.

Irony through the Renaissance was a part of rhetoric, a way of saying one thing, but sub textually meaning another. It fell under the same umbrella as allegory.

Claire Colefield writes, in her book Irony: “When the Greek and Latin descriptions of Socrates became available to Renaissance writers, irony was still not what it was to become for the Romantics (an attitude to existence). Irony was a rhetorical method. The Latin rhetorical manuals known in the Middle Ages had their origin in juridical and manifestly politicalsituations; they instructed how best to construct speeches for the purposes of defence, praise or public persuasion. There was very little that was ‘literary’ or creative in such uses of rhetoric. Ironia, as defined by those who followed Cicero and Quintilian, had little to do with creating an artful mode of self and consciousness.”

Irony was a method, a rhetorical device. The Romantics are credited (or discredited) with injecting attitude into this device. And also making it, what would be called today, a ‘lifestyle’ (only a very slight exaggeration). It is important to realize that irony, in the middle ages, through Shakespeare, and beyond, really, was operative to some extent and dependent upon context. A Papal decree, read aloud, given a shift in political reality, might have taken on an ironic import. Might have meant other or more than intended. Irony was, in that sense, simply a contextual recognition on the part of the audience. But again, looking at Shakespeare, and taking the Mad Tom on the heath scene, in King Lear, and asking is it ironic– has to do with a certain juxtaposition of factors within the play, not with any question of sincerity on the author’s part. Or the actors. The man who dies of thirst a few yards from a fresh water spring he doesn’t see, is an ironic death. But not an insincere one. It is tragically ironic, if anything. The evolution of literary irony, of its uses, is exemplified by the way in which late Modernist poets and critics saw language. The poetry of Black Mountain poets, for example, was looking to infuse language, words, with additional layers of meaning. They were metaphysical, often, and certainly allegorical almost always. Today language is being stripped, not enriched. Irony is there to question ideas of meaning but by eliminating its fixed nature, and doing so by denying history any validity. What post modern irony really does is to erect intellectual and social check points. It is a strategy of exclusion.

“The history of irony’s elitism goes back to its emergence in Greek thought. Not only was irony defined as an art in keeping with an urbane and elevated personality, it was also recognised as practised primarily in sites of political power. Irony, as a trope, is a means of effective persuasion in speeches and therefore already relies on the established speaking position and force of the orator.”
Claire Colefield

I suspect that there is a line that can be traced from Roman and Greek aristocracy, and political class, through to the ‘rentier’ class of later bourgeois Europe in the middle 1800s. The ironic was the pose of a dying class at that time. But that was also linked, more linked, to German Romanticism. And by further extension to Keats and Shelly and Blake. However, there is still in all the 19th century writers a sense of sincere ironic fatalism. That is what changed, or began to change, mid 20th century, I think. Deleuze is right that the impulse of post modernism to merge differences. Especially on the political/social front. What I am calling the ‘new irony’ is one that is not read as critical. Ironically wearing fascist regalia is not a neutralization of the symbolism of fascism, it is just advertising. And whatever potential might once have existed for ironic subversion, it is long since past. It is also, all of this reactionary nostalgia, a valorizing of white centered discourse. It re-creates white superiority.

But I continue to find a strange confusion, or rather multiple confusions, in the relationship to the experience of art. Whether this is theatre, or fiction, or painting, or photography; the disruption that those such as Hutcheon posit, does not occur, the challenge (to use a more fashionable word) does not occur in the changing of the externality. Theatre that occurs in a parking lot is not challenging the *idea* of theatre in a building with a proscenium stage. That is only the cosmetic surface.

Here is Linda Hutcheon ….arguing against Eagleton and Jameson: “Eagleton sees that postmodernism dissolves
modernist boundaries, but sees this as a negative, an act of becoming “coextensive with commodified life itself”. But historiographic
metafiction like Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman works precisely to combat any aestheticist fetishing of art by refusing to bracket exactly what Eagleton wants to see put back into art: “the referent or real historical world”. What such fiction also does, however, is problematize both the nature of the referent and its relation to the real, historical world by its paradoxical combination of metafictional self-reflexivity with historical subject matter. How, then, could Cortázar’s A Manual for Manuel be reduced
to celebrating “kitsch”? Is all art that introduces non-high art forms(here, those of journalism and the spy story) by definition kitsch? What Eagleton (like Jameson— before him) seems to ignore is the subversive potential of irony, parody, and humor in contesting the universalizing pretensions of “serious” art.”

“Metafictional self reflexivity” ?

I don’t feel like defending Terry Eagleton today, but the problem here (the first problem) is that art is not an essay. One of the things that post modern fiction seems to be doing is to manipulate arguments, and concepts, into bad fictional form. And then call that form ironic and post modern. And this brings us back to the top of narrative, again. One does not do away with mimetic relationship to story by writing bad stories full of tricks and self referential jokes. It *is* what Hollywood is increasingly doing today. And this would suggest Eagleton is right. But Hutcheon wrote this in 97, and it feels and sounds like it. Its a very 90s set of ideas. The 90s were a long time ago, apparently. Nobody, I don’t think, I hope, would today argue that irony and parody were subversive. Especially in a movement that wants distance from the pretensions of ‘changing the world for the better’ (oh, I’m being ironic there). Only one that has a certain level of privilege can ridicule the Utopian. Later Hutcheon writes this: “In using parody in this way, postmodernist forms want to work toward a public discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization.” Now, I am spending this much time on a minor and twenty year old book, because I find that these arguments are fairly common even now, albeit filtered through more au currant jargon. But there you have that seed of a regressive populism that is so common on both left and right. What does political self marginalization look like? Like not voting for Bernie Sanders? Hutcheon writes that modernism is “defined itself through the exclusion of mass culture and was driven, by its fear of contamination by the consumer culture burgeoning around it, into an elitist and exclusive view of aesthetic formalism and the autonomy of art.”The idea is that post modernism embraced commodity culture, in an effort to critique while also assimilating the artwork into this system of advanced capital. For Hutcheon also, post modernism was questioning the distinction between history and fiction. This all feels rather dated, I admit. But such thinking has shaped a lot of the new left today, who see mass culture as the grammar of contemporary society, and hence the currency of creative expression. This new stance is schizophrenic, at the least, but its also the same logic that allows the racism of a Zizek to pass as somehow a radical and *ironic* critique of ideology. If there is no history, if history is a fiction, and authorial voices are just phantom texts floating in the zeitgeist, then all opposition fuses and becomes one with what it opposes. And this is the revanchist colonial nostalgia one finds both in Madison Ave campaigns for selling everything from deodorant to new cars, to much new left anti communism and appreciation of kitsch mass culture (meaning studio films, comic books, etc); where the colonial narrative is applauded as commodity cultural product. Neither colonialism nor commodification are being criticized. And where colonialism (or feudalism) becomes an expression of populism (The Lone Ranger movie, or Captain Phillips, or Syriana ).

Here is one more quote of Claire Colefield…

“One way to understand postmodernity is to see it as a radical rejection
or redefinition of irony. If irony demands some idea or point of view
above language, contexts or received voices, postmodernity
acknowledges that all we have are competing contexts and that any
implied ‘other’ position would itself be a context. Postmodernity would
be a society of simulation and immanence with no privileged point from
which competing voices could be judged. One would have to accept
one’s own position as one among others, and as thoroughly unoriginal.
One could be ironic, not by breaking with contexts but in recognising
any voice as an effect of context, and then allowing contexts to generate
as much conflict, collision and contradiction as possible, thereby
precluding any fixity or meta-position.”

The problem with this is to define what is meant by “context”. For this formula to make sense, ‘context’ would have to have a thing-like quality that could be clearly pinned down, would have to have a materiality. But it doesn’t, it is a concept. And a fluid one, and this is where reductive thinking becomes a problem, and a seemingly intractable one. In one way, post-modern theory was a corrective, and an important one. But it was also an expression, as Jameson has noted, of the expansion of global capital. The real resistance, aesthetically, to this massive global homogenization (and domination) is not going to take place within a discussion of message, but in the recoupteration of experience. In other words, the mimetic engagement with the artwork is the experience of it, and the artwork is either one that reproduces the reductive grammar and adumbrated message of the dominant system, or it is one that looks to carve out something that is NOT all of that. Resistance today in art means, firstly, the removal of corrupted techniques and images and language, and also the establishment of voices outside this system. There is a real argument to be made that this just isn’t possible. It is certainly not easy. And perhaps it’s not. But, my suspicion is that the outside has to be found by navigation through the inside. For if there is an outside, its a very very tiny place.

The reductive is the guiding principle of post modernism as it has evolved under advanced global capital. The world is represented, repeatedly, as very small. A global village. But in fact the world is as big as it has ever been. And such short hand myth making is part of the message of commodity Imperialist culture. This is why artists such as Peter Handke are so singular, I feel. For while his work is rarely overtly political, the context of his life, his defense of the former Yugoslavia, and his anti Imperialism is very clearly a refusal to accommodate himself to the status quo. But one has to begin to question why mass mainstream/corporate media makes the decisions it makes. Why does VOX ridicule True Detective, but not Girls, or Orange is the New Black? For there ‘are’ reasons. There are no accidents. Corporate media is not random. It is carefully directed toward the targets it picks, and for carefully researched and analysed reasons. That analysis and research may be wrong, but its not accidental. The increasing sense of alienation, the utter destruction of community, and of an ability to express communal feelings (which are another symptom of the eradication of sincerity) has left a populace with an ever less firm grasp of their own physical location. In both a literal sense and an existential one. A world lived off screen images has created a disoriented public. This is reflected, perhaps *ironically* in mass culture in which there is both a simplified reductive landscape, and simultaneously, depictions that erase location. In film, the steady-cam coupled to rapid edits mean that location is always subjective. In essence, then, the representational codes have significantly changed. They are always changing, of course, but I suspect they have changed a great deal over the last twenty five years. Maybe over the last ten to fifteen years. Things such as GPS have changed the idea of finding your way to your destination. The destination is on a screen. How does this affect those young enough to have never known a way of finding destinations without such technology? The narratives of a GPS world are changed, and the reading of the stories written earlier take on new meaning. I suspect people split, psychically, and live in a screen world part of the time, and in their mundane daily grind the rest, and both infect each other. And one is confused for the other rather often. And there is a latent violence in such confusions, a kind of mythic register reification.

One of Jameson’s index of post modern affects is ‘depthlessness’, just to take the first one. But it’s linked to the second which is the waning of affect. I don’t think any of this is wrong, but I think it’s hugely incomplete. In other words there is depth and there is depth. Same as there is context and there is context. But I do think Jameson is right that what is being labeled as post modernism is cultural dominant. It is a profound trend that affects everyone. But there is also another sort of map that would start with class, race, and gender. Just to look at class would mean an exhaustive re-think on an idea such as depthlessness. In terms of artworks, then, and lets say in terms of narrative, this idea becomes hugely complicated.

But here I think, in light of this idea of how representational codes have changed, it is useful to return to Lacan for a second. For Lacan, the mirror stage, which is sometime around 6 months, the infant recognizes its own reflected image. This exteriority is then the primal mis-representation. This marks the start of a relationship between the organism, the infant, and reality. The relationship changes to one of rivalry when the infant comes to grasp that this image is one among many, and comes to see itself in competition with originary self, this primal *I*. In the world of electronic media and image bombardment, the role of lack is constituent to how the subject organizes his or her sense of self vis a vis social configuations. In other words, the contemporary world that privileges the optical reading of reality is increasingly mediated by screen images, ones that are organized into narratives, and then re-organized. Over and over and over. And which reflect a basic sense of lack in the individual, and of aggressive rivalry.

One aspect of mass media plays on the contradiction Lacan posited. Samuel Weber again (from his excellent book Theatricality as Medium):

“In the images of catastrophe that dominate broadcast media ‘news’, disunity is projected into the image itself, while the desired unity is reserved for the spectator off-scene (and for the media itself as a global network).”

The images projected by media onto screens plea for a unity, for something that provides localizable identification. At the same time, mass culture is also, always, erasing location and context. Erasing history. Wars take place in remote ashistorical locations, and their representation is their sole reality. For an audience less and less educated by history, the staging of these news items then demands nothing more than the viewing of them. The viewer consumes and ratifies. As Weber puts it; “The spectator thus can sustain the illusion of occupying a stable and enduring position, which allows one to ‘stay the same’ indefinitely. This is the moral of the story, whether it is called ‘Enduring Freedom’ or ‘Infinite Justice’.” But there are even additional layers of contradiction or tension. The audience at home is ever less secure about the idea of where home is, or what it is. The indefinite but endless wars of the U.S. are stabilizing only by virtue of never ending. To end raises issues of what *ending* means, and of what comes next, and to think about what comes next means to think, god forbid, about what came before. The message of global corporate control is that it is a sort of deity, an eternal natural reality. And yet, it is an eternity stripped of difference, of depth, of dreams. It is an eternity of the same. The pseudo mythology of colonial ideology created the Tora Bora caves in the same way it creates the dangerous black ghetto. Both are staples of Hollywood product. That they are imaginary places, no more real than the kingdoms on Game of Thrones hardly matters, because the codes for these *news* narratives imbue them with *realism*. And the constant stream of meme’s featuring both real political figures (Putin or Merkel, mixed with Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons) reinforces the fungible quality of manufactured narrative.

Roland Barthes said a great thing, and said it fifty years ago almost: “The historical subject, like the cinema spectator I am imagining, is also glued to ideological discourse…the Ideological would actually be the image-repertoire of a period of history, the Cinema of a society.” Today are people are even more attached to the ideology of the screen. The complexity though resides in the fact that ideology is not identification. The experience of processing screen image and language (in narratives) is never formed into a whole, or even into several wholes. And here it is worth pointing out the difference between theatre and film/TV. Samuel Weber writes that “the relation between theatre and politics has a long and vexed history …{} Theatre acknowledges artificiality and artifice, whereas political communities are often construed in terms of a certain naturalness, an association underscored by the etymology of the world *nation* — deriving from the Latin *nasci* to be born.” Today the political theatre of the electoral system if treated as both a movie, and as realistic. It is, in fact, ‘thee’ baseline for realism. And here the notion of sincerity becomes very interesting. The politician is both sincere and yet cynically regarded as insincere. The actor on stage is performing a narrative. It is of limited duration. Hence the ‘reading’ of that narrative by the audience (an ever smaller audience) is one in which the mimetic is given a ritual space for its process. The political almost by default emphasizes its open ended quality. This is mere illusion, of course, but that is the representational code at work. Both Nietzsche and Benjamin saw in Greek drama an event of revealing, one (to quote Nietzsche) surrounded by souls (spirits). The chorus, the dramatist, and, I would add, the off-stage. The off-stage repository of unresolved conflicts, the unconscious. But that will lead into another entire separate posting; for the purposes here, the screen may induce a dream state (though digitalization may have compromised this to some extent) but it does not possess the power of Dionysian excitement. The Chorus, (Weber quoting Nietzsche) is always looking at God. Or *this* God, Dionysus. The dis-enchantment of contemporary society takes places on screens, firstly. And increasingly, the few efforts to make visionary that which appears on screens, is derided. The theatre has always the power to re-enchant.

Benjamin, in his essay on Brecht, notes that the orchestra pit is an abyss that separates the actors from the audience, like the living from the dead. The stage is no longer an island amid the oceanic bottomless waters of the underworld — it is (per Benjamin) now merely a podium (and this is no more clear than in the one person monologue). Eradicate the mythic, the sacred, the sublime, and the sincere. In it’s place is the compulsive repetition of the ironic and one dimensional. Tragedy for Benjamin was ‘revealing the present’. Today, media is a hyper consolidated realm of global capital. And it is, under that control, always in the process of covering up. It does not reveal anything. It hides things.

There is in the master narrative written by the system itself which paints a picture of the chaotic free market, when in fact there is a highly coordinated manufacturing of the same. Mass cultural product reduces meaning to its simplified content. A content that always means the same thing. And that meaning is ‘mystify the present’. To make absent the present. That is the *message*. The insistence on a manufactured dead *now* which isn’t there. The now is absent. Post modernist thinking collaborated in this by emphasizing the surface, and postulating the lack of difference between fiction and history. It’s all the same. Ironically. It reproduces the status quo, repeatedly. It delivers the hierarchies of white privilege, of class and gender biases, and it stamps everything with a seal that reads authority is its own justification. Serious topics are treated unseriously (ironically) and unserious subjects are treated seriously (the new Royal baby, celebrity break ups, sports events, etc). Racism is bad, but I’m only being ironic. The normalizing of the values of the privileged. The rise of endless stand-up comedy, and its offspring (from Saturday Night Live, to Amy Shurmer to Jon Stewart) are there, as comedy shows, but ones that increasingly talk of serious matters, and their popularity was filling a need. The need for permission not to change. The talk is a sort of faux-serious. But it’s not really, its still comedy, still framed as comedy. The serious news shows, on the other hand increasingly address trivial issues with a high ritualized pomposity. The Jon Stewart/Cobert phenomenon, and include Maher and others, are there because they deliver the ironic reading of social criticism. Even when they are absolutely correct in what they say, who they criticize, they are delivering the alibi by remaining ironic comedy shows. The alibi for the ownership class, with whom they almost always share zip codes.

There are other threads or influences at work in the contemporary spectacle. One of them is interruption, and its relationship to disappointment. Major *events*, such as the Super Bowl, or World Cup, or Eurovision song contest, or even the Academy Awards, are always exercises in disappointment. The outcome is irrelevant in each, but no matter because the climax is missing. There is no real conclusion, no real completion. There is only an appearance of conclusion and resolution. For nothing can deliver that which would match the selling and build up of these events. There is an exhaustion associated with these events, too. This is what Adorno called “the unremitting repetition of the unrepeatable”. The “gespenstisch”, or ghostly, spectacle — and here there is an inversion of those spirits that surrounded the Tragic stage, or the ghosts of Shakespeare, because this ghostly figure is just the ghost-image, the phantom that may not have ever been there in the first place. The idea of interruption is related to repetition, and it is related to the disappointment of *events*, those events arranged by the capital. That disappointment is carried away without comment. Nobody shares, not really, their disappointment. It is perhaps a mark of insufficiency to be disappointed. Best to clap and make judgments about something that is identical to itself. It is also expected, by this point. But it travels from the theatre, or arena or stadium, and returns to the home. To the family, and/or it is carried to the workplace. The individual must prepare for the next round of excitement, the next cycle of pseudo communal spectacle. The disappointment must express itself, it is inflicted on spouses, on children, or colleagues. A entry level supervisor can sadistically scold an underling. A certain bureaucratic’s pleasure in the suffering of those he or she rejects is bound up with a life infused with repetitive disappointment.

Benjamin’s work on German Mourning plays was partly an excavation of material that he saw (partly anyway) as the source for modern malaise. This is also linked to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ideas of the broken promise. The mourning plays were sort of kitsch versions of real Tragic drama, and as such they expressed a certain pessimism and self loathing in that culture; and one that could be seen in the light as having lost touch with the Dionysian. But also, that self loathing cast a shadow forward over the German Romantics, and hence over the idea of irony. The irony of self loathing, which is seen (in the Sass quote last post) in schizophrenics, too. A protective dislocation or distancing from the real. Irony is that distance, and it is in that abyss that allegory gets lost. But more than just allegory goes missing. A certain respect or dignity is jettisoned because it cannot withstand the compulsive trivializing of contemporary cultural output. There are several stages that Irony has passed through, and I’m only sketching a few thoughts in an effort to outline influences and to make sense of a society of snark. The hyper violent titillation of corporate produced TV and film is the trivializing of death, the disrespect for those who have died — an obsessive new fascination with forensics and corpses. But it is all in an atmosphere of humiliation. Humiliating the dead. And through such humiliation, we protect our own delusions of happiness, and in this the post modern aesthetic is wholly congruent.