Hipsters, Existentialism, and the Uses of Intellectual History

Spy Magazine, March 1989

Yesterday morning, my Facebook feed was full of approving links to a New York Times op-ed by Christy Wampole, Assistant Professor of French at Princeton University, entitled "How to Live Without Irony." I was disappointed to discover that it didn't deserve the praise it received. Wampole blames "the hipster" and "ironic living" for a host of cultural woes and urges us to cultivate "sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demot[e] the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values."  Others elsewhere on the interwebs have done a fine job pointing out some of the many ways in which Wampole's argument is incoherent.  In an effort to keep things short (and more or less relevant to this blog), I wanted to quickly emphasize a problem with Wampole's op-ed that particularly irritated me: its utter lack of historical awareness, either about its subject or its argument.

Actually, accusing Wampole of a lack of historical awareness lets her off too easily. Among other things, "How to Live Without Irony" tells an historical story. It's just not a terribly accurate one.  According to Wampole, the hipster and ironic living are products of our new millenium:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover. 

But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.

The notion that popular culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s was irony-free (or even "relatively irony-free") is, to put it mildly, laughable.  For those of you who don't remember the early 1990s (or just need a refresher course), here's the single most iconic cultural product of "the grunge movement," the video for Nirvana's 1991 smash hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit":

This is not an example of "relatively irony-free" culture.*

Moreover, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was already a lot of concern among public intellectuals about the inability of young people to take anything seriously.  College students' unwillingness to even entertain the "serious life" was one of the central themes of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.  The March 1989 issue of Spy Magazine featured a cover story by Paul Rudnick and Kurt Anderson on "The Irony Epidemic".**  And, a few years later, David Foster Wallace published a long essay on tv and the American novel the self-proclaimed thesis of which was that "irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture."***

Of course, even in the 1980s, none of this was really new.  And some of the folks writing about it at the time went out of their way to note this.  The Spy story, for example, is built on an extended comparison between the (relatively admirable) Camp that Susan Sontag described in the mid-1960s and the empty "Camp Lite," Rudnick and Anderson's characterization of much of late 1980s culture.

But if you really wanted to trace this line of cultural critique back, you'd need to look at the Beats (and their supporters and discontents) in the '50s, the counterculture (and its supporters and discontents) in the 1960s, and all the various reactions to the Sixties counterculture (and their supporters and discontents) that bubbled up in the 1970s.  You'd need to read not only Sontag, but also Mailer and Goodman and, perhaps, Debord.  You'd need to take both punk and disco seriously (even if--or perhaps especially since--neither tended to take itself seriously).


And there really are two histories that need attending to here: the history of "the hipster" (real or imaginary...as well as his/her real or imaginary cultural antecedents) and the history of the critiques of these (real or imaginary) figures.  And somewhere in the heart of these absent histories lies existentialism and the idea of authenticity, which has an important and complicated relationship both to the role-playing of the hipster and the childlike sincerity advocated by Wampole.  Of the critics of "irony" from the eighties and beyond whom I've mentioned above, the one who deals at any length with existentialism is Bloom, who essentially sees existentialism as the nihilistic serpent in the modern American garden.  But one needn't see existentialism as evil to understand its centrality to the issues that Wampole fails to discuss.  And unlike Bloom, who argued (quite incorrectly, in my experience) that the only novel that students in the 1980s cared for was Camus's The Stranger, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of the continuing influence of existentialism in America is that, even in the 1980s, let alone today, existentialism itself had largely faded from memory (as Wampole's piece itself instantiates).
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*  It is, however, a pretty damn good song, a fact that was partially obscured through extreme overexposure two decades ago.

** Google Books hosts a free archive of the entire back catalog of Spy Magazine. "The Irony Epidemic" begins on p. 93.  While the digital archive of Spy is a treasure (seriously), it is also a powerful reminder of how healthy the magazine industry was in the late 1980s.  You have to flip through an awful lot of glossy advertising to get to the content!

*** David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993: Summer), p. 171.

The Beautiful Soul of Steve Almond, or, Why The Baffler Will Never Be Funny

by James Livingston*

I  Indictment

I’ve seen a lot of Steve Almond online since The Baffler published his deconstruction of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.  This is where he solemnly explained why their comedy is “almost entirely therapeutic”—how it has abandoned the “radical virtues” that animated the comic impulse once upon a time, when Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain satirized bourgeois propriety in print, and then, much later, when Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Bill Hicks took the stage to attack the moral idiocies of their time, always speaking truth to power.

Almond means to wake you from your lazy consumer complacency by demonstrating that there is only guilt in the affordable pleasure of Stewart and Colbert.  The joke’s on you, see, because you just don’t understand that your laughter sustains the “corporate plantation” that is Comedy Central, which is also Viacom—you might as well be laughing at a minstrel show off Broadway in 1854, thus validating the racism that sustained slavery.  Then as now, you’re “an audience gone to lard morally,” a mental condition, if I read the metaphor right, that matches up with your physical tendency toward obesity.

Almond accuses Stewart, particularly, of diffusing citizen activism by making it “more fun to experience the [Iraq] war as a passive form of entertainment than as a source of moral distress.”  But he also takes Colbert to task for mockingrather than rebutting Bill O’Reilly, for poking fun at the powerful rather than confronting them—the exception to this rule, of course, being the night of the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, when Colbert was the featured speaker.  Except that he didn’t actually confront anybody on that occasion, either.  Oh well.  How can you care about the intricacies of metaphor when the death of “political humor” is upon us?

II  Authenticity

This is a hilarious case of mistaken identity, or would be if Almond weren’t so fucking earnest.  He wants comedians, stand-up and otherwise, to renounce their vocations and be politicians—actually, he wants them to be activists, preferably starving artists removed from any “profit source,” like those loveable guys at The Onion used to be, back in the good old days before their commercial success.  If comedians make a good living from their brand of humor, they can’t possibly be on the side of “some poor schnook who works the assembly line at a factory then goes home to mow his lawn” (so much for the once-heroic working class, now demoted to rural idiocy).  No, they’ve become media celebrities who can “score easy points by playing the humble populist.”  They’re as comfortable as O’Reilly down on Maggie’s Farm, which NewsCorp secretly leveraged decades ago.

So, either Almond doesn’t understand comedy or he doesn’t understand the world we inhabit, the world of our common experience—and by “we,” Steve, I mean the people who, by circumstance or choice, mean to change the world, not denounce it, escape it, or destroy it.  That would be most of us.

In the world most of us inhabit, for example, Bruce Springsteen is not a millionaire who sells out stadiums—he is that, to be sure—he’s the guy with that strong work ethic, that musical talent, and that acoustic genius.  Like Bob Dylan, another millionaire, he hears things the rest of us don’t, and he puts these things into songs that always acknowledge the atrocities and absurdities of everyday life, but he won’t let us abstain from living it.  That’s why we often admire him, sometimes adore him, and always sing along.  He represents working-class America not in spite but because of his commercial success as an artist.  He also represents something more, the kind of American Dream that used to go by the name of the Commonwealth, the place where we strive to be our brother’s keeper. 

Nobody except maybe Steve Almond would accuse Springsteen (or Dylan) of being a corporate shill whose music somehow “diffuses” citizen activism.  But notice what such an indictment would presuppose, and notice, too, how Almond’s complaint against Stewart and Colbert requires these same presuppositions.

First, because Springsteen has made a fortune portraying the lives, the hopes, the dreams, and the furies of subaltern existence, he can’t be an authentic purveyor of such existence.  He has long since left the sociological category of the working class, so he can’t depict its ideological condition with any sincerity or accuracy.  By this perversely reductionist logic of identity politics, yeah, that kind, Stephen Greenblatt can’t properly interpret Shakespeare’s characters except for Shylock, and Mark Naison can’t accurately depict Communist Party activists in the 1930s unless they’re white.

Second, the only artists—comedians, musicians, critics, whatever—who can authentically express the real grievances of those who endure a subaltern existence are those who live it involuntarily, or those who have chosen exemption from the demands of that existence by becoming outlaws, hipsters, or, more quaintly, bohemians.  Those who have earned (or lucked into) release from that exemption by becoming commercially successful are automatically disqualified.  So the only voices Almond will accredit are the ones the rest of us can’t hear on the radio.  In effect, he insists that you can’t speak truth to power if you’ve got any.

Thus authenticity, which either requires or simply is abstention from the world as it actually exists—a thoroughly reified or commodified place—becomes the only aesthetic criterion left standing in Almond’s political complaint against Stewart and Colbert.  The joke’s on him, then, because the authenticity he wants from both entertainers and their audiences is unaffordable.  It is literally priceless, and therefore unavailable.

III  Hegelian Interlude

Almond makes an exception to his rule of authenticity by praising the wildly successful South Park, of course, and I’ll soon ridicule him for that—I mean, c’mon, this shit is subversive, political, even funny?—but for the time being I have to say that he doesn’t understand comedy because his consciousness is so unhappy.

Hegel invented the category of the “unhappy consciousness” in trying to explain the passage beyond the integrated character of the ancient citizen, who was somehow at home in his world.  (For all their differences with Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche followed his lead, and so did Wahl, Kojeve, Lukacs, Horkheimer, and Adorno.)  Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity served as both metaphors and historical instances of this passage—the secular chapters in the same story were Skepticism and Stoicism.  What they all shared, according to Hegel, was an inability, or rather an unwillingness, to read or inscribe their truths in the world as it existed. 

Release or abstention from the corruptions of this world was, then, the path to salvation or enlightenment, because the world had become the impediment to—never the condition of—truth as such.  So the unhappy consciousness typically produced a “beautiful soul,” the man who would be in but not of this world, the man who couldn’t recognize his own implication in its corruptions.

Comedy, defined either as the happy stupidity of humor—can you believe this shit?—or more broadly, as the narrative form that refuses to let things end at the stage of tragedy, is the place where we decide to get ugly and acknowledge that no one is exempt from the corruptions of this world: no more beautiful souls, comedians say, whether they’re writing plays and novels, or doing stand-up, or making fun of FOX News.  You can’t abstain from sin, evil, or power, they insist, so you might as well know that there’s no sanctuary.  Comedians always have to produceironic detachment from shitty circumstances because they begin there, in the world, in the same place the audience comes from. 

Now Hegel knew that a strictly tragic sense of life could issue from this disturbing idea that “the world is ruled by the Devil,” as Martin Luther, his chosen antecedent, explained the situation.  After all, once you acknowledge the universal reification and corruption of your time, intellectual resignation from it, and thus practical acquiescence to it, become perfectly rational: skepticism, stoicism, even cynicism and nihilism, then become the obvious retort to what we call faith, hope, or optimism.  In this sense, the “beautiful soul” isn’t a merely romantic conceit—every generation or so, it becomes a left-wing political imperative.  Ask Kalle Lasn and Chris Hedges over at Adbusters.  Ask Steve Almond over at The Baffler.

But in Hegelian perspective, comedy contains tragedy, and by doing so it gives us good reasons to have faith in each other and hope for our futures.  As Hayden White puts it in Metahistory: “Comedy is the form which reflection takes after it has assimilated the truths of Tragedy to itself.”  Hegel himself was more circumspect in The Phenomenology, and, I would suggest, more devious. 

The “unhappy consciousness”—skepticism, stoicism, early Christianity, etc.—was the form of self-certainty that could appear, in history and in philosophy, when the slave understood that the master was a dimension of his own personality rather than an external figure with absolute power over him, and, accordingly, when the master understood that he had already bought the slave’s knowledge of the world.  At that historical and philosophical moment, however, each was able to realize only an “inner freedom,” an emptysubjectivity that lacked material validation: “Self-consciousness which reaches its fulfillment in the figure of unhappy consciousness is only the torment of the spirit struggling to rise again to an objective state but failing to reach it.”  Or again: “It lives in dread of staining the radiance of its inner being by action and existence.”  As both Jean Wahl and Jacques Lacan suggested, this moment marks the birth of metaphysics.

But comedy as a narrative form works exactly this way, by taking the outward oppositions of tragedy—over here the hero (good), over there the villain (bad), these shall meet ere long and die appropriate deaths, probably at each other’s hands—and making them inward, by making them discordant dimensions of every character in sight.  Where once we witnessed master and slave, we now experience and recognize ourselves.  No more beautiful souls, because no one can rise above or stand apart from the administered inferno that is “the modern time” (Hegel from The Philosophy of History).  Everyone is always already beyond good and evil, because everyone just isgood and evil.

Hegel explained in the Aestheticsthat, like History itself, all dramatic action expresses the “one-sided aspect” of each character, actor, people or nation: “And this is so whether as in tragedy, they are opposed to such in hostility, or, as in comedy, they are displayed within these characters themselves, without further mediation, as a condition of resolution” (my italics).  Because the comprehension of the totality is unavailable to any character—and this is especially true of the great tragic heroes—passion, error, irony, and conflict are the regulative principles of both dramatic action and History itself.  But comedy gets beyond tragedy by treating these as matters of folly, evidence of our common experience, rather than evidence of concerted evil imposed on us from elsewhere by Fate, by the Gods, or by the corporate powers that be.

Toward the end of The Phenomenology, the Bildungsromanof self-consciousness, Hegel got pretty excited about the prospects of his comedic rendition of the human condition, even unto “the modern time,” which he dated from the 18^th century.  Hereafter, he thought, we didn’t have to be the disport of the Gods, the willing victims of Fate, the mute objects of History made by great men.  The “comic spectacle” on offer here was “the return of everything universal into certainty of self,” he announced, “a certainty which, in consequence, is [the] complete loss of fear of everything strange and alien, and [the] complete loss of substantial reality on the part of what is alien and external.”  He concluded:  “Such certainty is a state of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on the part of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of comedy, is not to be found elsewhere.”

IV  Fair and Balanced Bathroom Humor

Steve Almond wouldn’t understand a word of the previous nine paragraphs, and not because Hegel is either difficult or irrelevant to the content of comedy.  No, Steve wouldn’t understand because the radiance of his inner being will never be stained by the corruptions of worldly success, nor, I hope, by the indignities of work on any corporate plantation.  He is a beautiful soul.   

But Almond does love South Park, a show whose audience on the Viacom-owned Comedy Central is demographically more lucrative than either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.  That makes it a better “profit source” than what Stewart and Colbert have created.  So why does it get praise rather than derision from our beautiful soul? 

Because it confronts you, the moral lard in the audience—not, mind you, the powers that be—and because, like certain cable news networks, it’s fair and balanced in allocating blame to both Left and Right.  In other words, Almond praises South Park for performing in cartoons precisely what he excoriates Stewart and Colbert for speaking in person—granting legitimacy to every side of the political debate by debunking all sides, thus creating the aura of journalistic objectivity.  How can that be?  Read on.

South Parkindulges in a good deal of bathroom [sic] humor—perhaps inevitably, given that its protagonists are ten-year-olds.  But the show is far more radical than its polished stablemates [Stewart and Colbert] for the simple reason that it is willing to confront its viewers.  Parker and Stone savage both the defensive bigotry of conservatives and the self-righteous entitlement of the left.  They accomplish this not by riffing on the corruption of our media and political cultures, but by creating original dramas that expose the lazy assumptions and shallow gratifications of the viewing audience.

So the Left and the Right do deserve equal measures of doubt and of debunking, just like Stewart said in that interview with Rachel Maddow, from which Almond distilled the morally decrepit credo of The Daily Show (“civility at any cost, even in the face of moral atrocity”).  Notice how this sudden reallocation of culpability makes you, the audience, the problem.  When reference to the “corporate plantation” explains nothing, because Parker and Stone as well as Stewart and Colbert work on the same farm, the moral myopia of the viewing audience must fill the explanatory gap.  Get it?  Your lazy assumptions and shallow gratifications are the proximate cause of the death of political humor.

What could be more reassuring?  It’s all about you.  Nothing is true, nothing is real, no matter who said it or created it, so you must doubt and debunk everything, every minute, no exceptions allowed.  That way, any promise or commitment is contingent on what happens next.  That way, you don’t get fooled by belief in anything.  The urge to objectivity—the desperate need to rise above these sordid times—creates a skepticism so radical that it becomes satire, and (surprise!) undermines itself.  The unhappy consciousness sounds almost funny because he bares his beautiful soul.

V  Almost Funny

Like I said, almost funny, as in the sentimentalities attending patriotic ceremonies, where universal agreement rather than universal discord is presupposed.  As I have written elsewhere, the conscious abstention from the new possibilities of visual representation in comics and film animation makes South Park a kind of radio show, almost all sound—every character is a little round cutout distinguishable mainly by voice.  It’s a television show for the blind.

But there’s something happening here that is worth remarking, and its name is shit.  This show is the most amazing study in anality since Jonathan Swift, or maybe Martin Luther, and it marks a moment in what we have come to know as globalization.  The world elsewhere intrudes on this benighted suburb as anal probes from outer space and as Father Christmas from the sewer (“Mr. Hankey”), the piece of shit that heals ethnic and ideological divisions with large doses of excrement.  Santa and Satan become interchangeable parts.

We could of course sanitize these large scatological investments by calling them “bathroom humor,” as Steve Almond does, or dismiss them as functions of the backward, frat-boy humor of the creators—we could say that the indefatigable anality of South Parkhas nothing to do with contemporary culture.  But that’s an evasion of what makes the show almost funny. 

Why does shit always represent the comedic principle of reconciliation and universality in South Park, for both the audience and the creators, if not for beautiful souls like Steve Almond?  What if Parker and Stone are onto something?  What if you, the audience, gets the running joke?

In the 16^th century, Luther explained that “money is the word of the Devil”—this Evil One was the modern Protestant version of the ancient and medieval Trickster, and he ruled the world—so that bondage to the new world of capitalism meant surrender to the Demonic.  The Devil and commodity fetishism always go together, as Norman O. Brown an Michael T. Taussig have more recently explained.  Like Luther, they have also explained that since money was more or less excrement—in dreams and in archaic cultures, money always appears as some kind of shit—this surrender to the Demonic was a way of dredging human beings in their own feces.  If the world is ruled by the Devil, everyone is at least unclean.

The unconscious Protestantism of South Park reanimates this recognition and acceptance of the demonic forces of globalized capitalism.  We’re all awash in our feces, it tells us—suburban Americans are no less subject to the financial forces driving globalization than Chinese or Mexican peasants—and in this sense the cartoon series is a primitive, ant-realist rendition of Karen Finley’s equally excremental vision of a world turned inside out.

But if everything has a price, no matter where you are on earth, then everything has turned to shit.  No brand of authenticity is any longer available.  The question South Park makes us ask, is, so what, or, now what?  The answer Parker and Stone have so far offered goes like this.  Darkness falls on our brightly painted suburbs—the excremental Other invades, “the blues moved in our town,” as The Sopranos’ theme song puts it—but we’re going to laugh about it anyway, because faith in the future of the American Dream isn’t any more rational than belief in the Devil.  This tragedy may well look like comedy before we’re through: keep watching.

South Parkcontains an unhappy consciousness, then, but it excludes beautiful souls.  The laughter it allows is the nervous kind you stifle at funerals, weddings, and in confrontations with people you can despise or dismiss.  It’s almost funny.  Steve Almond thinks it’s important old-school political humor because the people it lets him despise or dismiss are you, the viewing audience.

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*James Livingston, Professor of History at Rutgers University, is a frequent guest blogger here.  He blogs at Politics and Letters. 
--LDB

Irony and Sin

The remains of the Twin Towers were still smoldering when Roger Rosenblatt's essay in Time appeared.  The aftermath of America's "worst" day since Pearl Harbor revealed the dawning of a new, profound era to Rosenblatt and other conservative observers.  "One good thing could come from this horror," he wrote, "it could spell the end of the age of irony."

Right...irony disappeared into a haze of violence and robo-patriotism.  More than a decade after the event that made our world "real" again, it seems pretty clear that without irony we are stuck wondering what the hell just happened.  I had a problem not merely with the impulse of many conservatives had to declare an end to irony--which meant to them an end to the culture wars--but with the reflexive way many conservatives and many liberals used Reinhold Niebuhr as their go-to guy for rationalizing the age that would follow the end of irony.

Niebuhr's famous essay, "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist," was reworked into a clarion call for defeating evil in the age of terror.  The cold war caricature of Niebuhr was resurrected as the dark, brooding theologian of war.  His sense of irony reimagined as a the worse kind of engagement--America would be given a pass on evil acts as long as it claimed to defend (and spread) civilization.

Yet missing from this discourse was the foundation on which Niebuhr built his sense of irony--his understanding and acceptance of sin.  I write that word knowing that it might conjure images of Puritans, the devil...and the Church Lady.  I accept the slippage because the aspect that enraged me as the U.S. plowed across two countries was the willful lack of reflection.  I wrote about Susan Sontag's rage in this respect earlier, and reading the perceptive discussions on irony over the last week here made me think further about the link, as James Levy writes so evocatively about, between irony and engagement.

Niebuhr considered himself nothing if not an engaged religious intellectual.  He was a preacher more than a theologian, according to his autobiography, and had view of sin that differed markedly from versions of original sin in that he believed the fallen nature of man did not condemn humanity to existence of perpetual paralysis.  Rather he understood sin as essential to seeing or recognizing without qualifications the work that needed to be done.  In other words, humanity was in a collective of hope because it was in a collective of despair.  Irony described the state of affairs but not the state of humanity.

I admire the different discussions of irony we've had here.  And it seems to me that there are two broad ways to understand and perhaps use the term from those discussions.  Jim Livingston gives us the paring of William Appleman Williams with practicioners of irony in the first half of the cold war--Niebuhr, Burke, White.  Accordingly we are caught in a play on truth--recognition of that existence does not clarify our state but moves us from understanding our plight as tragedy to irony. And we have James Levy's philosophical discussion of irony as processed through the culture of audience.  In Levy's understanding, irony makes evident the culture of reproduction--its technocracy from top to bottom--and thus using the methods of play to create not a reproduction but a fractured mirror and therefore a critique of the culture we often can't see clearly enough to critique.

Both versions are products of modernity and as such, I think, suggest the existence of third, foundational understanding of irony. Chris Shannon in his review of cold war social science and in particular in his comments following the post, argues for a way beyond our modern use of irony--as a reminder of what the object of irony might be and therefore the point of engagement.  Shannon points out at the heart of the struggle to make sense of the world either violated or imagined by social science is the human person. Irony makes sense only if one accepted that the person was rooted in a perpetual, not a sociological, community.  By this I mean a community that was not waiting to be discovered or perfected or more fully realized by the advancements in science, technology or, even, theology.  It was a community that people lived within but had no real ability to fully understand.  And the distance between living and understanding allowed for two responses, a humility borne out of awe of ignorance and a confidence (and hubris) borne of out awe of accumulation.

Niebuhr practiced a theology of irony because he believed both positions were joined by the human condition of sin. Neither could recognize the their truths were not normative; and neither would allow that those of the other position were involved in the same struggle to preserve this perpetual community.  But accepting sin meant accepting something modernity was suppose to make obsolete--the irrational belief that, as Niebuhr wrote in 1925 as a young preacher in Detriot, the "cross is a symbol of ultimate reality."  But this ultimate reality was not to be theorized, measured, and cataloged.   Nor was it to be understood as exceptional, as a metaphysical club that gave members a pass on dealing with non-members.

This is why for Niebuhr the Christian church could not be pacifist.  Faced with the crimes of fascism and communism, Niebuhr went to war because he saw abominations against the perpetual community.  Both movements abandoned civilization in an attempt to produce a materialist definition of the person--that was tragic (and horrific).  What Niebuhr saw as ironic was the terrible prospect of responding to these abominations because whatever means would be used to counter fascism and communism would violate civilization as well.  But Niebuhr's use of sin could make him sound "churchy" and alienating.    

Yet, Niebuhr's irony, grounded as it was in sin, presaged a reality that allowed him to argue for a type of engagement that went beyond the tautology of truth that Jim Livingston points to and a world of engagement that James Levy's ironic brigades imagine for us.  As Chris Shannon notes, to make a perpetual community viable requires recognizing that there are limits on a society, and that this society also accepts a notion of perpetual community.  For Niebuhr, there was no other way to understand those two ideas than to recognize the relationship between our perpetual community and a kingdom of God.  That was the Christian life for Niebuhr and it was the source of his irony.  When many other post-9/11 conservatives rallied to return the United States to a pre-culture wars reality, claiming a return literally to God, they often used Niebuhr as a crutch.  What they utterly overlooked (or more likely willfully dismissed) was Niebuhr's radical notion of irony in calling any society back to God.  It's not that Niebuhr shared more in common with the critics of the war on terror than it's promoters acknowledged, but that his view of civilization shared little in common with a materialist notion often associated with civilization.  We often forget that Niebuhr shared Marx's visceral repulsion to the degradation of modern industrial society.  But Marx never went far enough for Niebuhr. (a view Zizek seems to share as well, correct?  Perhaps that is where Zizek is headed when he praises the Chinese cultural revolution for its ideological boldness in attempting to make community an ideology)  For Neibuhr irony described the contemporary situation, sin grounded that situation in history, and community existed as the reality that made the human person something more than a sociological study.

On Irony: A Response to Hartman (et al)

Attached Irony?

Guest post by James Levy, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

I want to go all the way back to Andrew’s original post and to insert a defense of – or at least call to take seriously – the question that Andrew is trying to ask us – that is, to consider the politics of employing irony and, in particular, the problem of “ironic detachment.” 

But it is impossible to do this coherently with what seems to me to be a confusion or at least very loose merging together of ideas about what even constitutes “irony” in the first place. 

Andrew offered a helpful starting point in the Encyclopedia Britannica definition of irony:  a written or performed act whose “real meaning” is “concealed or contradicted” by the literal meanings of words used;  or, a “situation in which there is an incongruity between what is expected and what occurs.”

But this definition seems inadequate to me because so many things can apply to it.  A good joke would work for this definition.  So would sarcasm.  So would paradox.  As Aristotle would have it, so would tragedy.  If the “what occurs” in the above definition is structural reality in a Marxist sense, then so would the operations of “false consciousness.”

And that seems too broad.  I don’t think Andrew’s question was intended to provoke a general contemplation of humor, of contradiction, or of the rejection of totalizing narratives in favor of uncertainty.    I admire L.D. Burnett’s claim that she embraces irony because it is “not only salutary but downright liberating to practice and nurture a habit of thought that invites me to be a little less certain of my self-righteous certainties.”   But is that enough?  And does her idea require that it be labeled “irony”?

As I see it, there are at least three distinct modes of irony we could be talking about as historians.   First, the simple act by historians of highlighting irony in the pasts we observe and interpret (as Andrew and Tim Lacy propose).   Second, the employment of the ironic mode by historians themselves as a structure of narrative (as distinct from the “comic” or “tragic” or “Romantic” mode).  Only Jim Livingston (and through his postalso Burke, Hadyen White and others) addressed this mode of irony in any substantial way in this discussion so far.   Third, the ironic mode as an attitude, tone or presentational stance as employed politically by the historical actors we observe (as by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart).

I find the first mode least helpful in this discussion – or perhaps I should say, least relevant to Andrew’s question about “ironic detachment.”  When Andrew “highlights” irony in his 1960s/70s feminism example he is not playing the role of ironist, of course, only calling attention to irony.  But neither, for that matter, are the feminists he describes acting in the ironic mode because they do not know about the contradiction they enact in advance and so can’t possibly be deliberately exploiting that contradiction.   They can’t possibly be calling attention to the gap between rhetoric and meaning.  Therefore, I think what Andrew highlights is more paradox than irony.   I’m not suggesting that Andrew misuses the term “irony” – only that the politics of naming something “irony” seem hard to define and, further, that the political effect of calling such moments “ironic” is probably not all that different than calling them “contradiction,” “paradox,” or “false consciousness.” 

The second mode pertains not so much to the everyday use of “irony” which is dependent on tone, but more to a structure of narrative.  This is the stuff of poetics. (For an example of a historian employing the ironic mode, see Hayden White Metahistory, p. 55, on Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)   I won’t rehash what Jim Livingston has done much better here or what theorists such as Hayden White and Richard Rorty (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) have written whole books about.  But I will only point out that what I think Hayden White and others remind us is that struggles and hand-wringing over the politics of irony far, far proceeded post-modernism or the “linguistic turn.” According to White, it was the Scylla of Irony and the Charybdis of Romanticism that late 19^th century philosophers and historians, especially Nietzsche, were trying to navigate. Indeed, if Nietzsche is the father of postmodernism and if we agree with Hayden White’s reading of Nietzsche and his followers, we might argue post-structuralist thought aims for just the opposite:  The transcendence of irony.   

I think it is curious that we blame post-structuralism for the ironic mode we’re in.  Being uncertain about certainty does not constitute irony.  Andrew seems to be especially rankled by the detachment part of “ironic detachment.”  I am too.  But the entire project of post-structuralists was aimed in the opposite direction:   They wanted to find ways to deeply engage politically in a world where certainties had become unmoored (and where, following the Frankfurt school, totalizing narratives had become the basis of abject terror and genocide).   And if this work of debunking these totalizing narratives can be described as the work of the ironist, I think we’d have examples of activist commitment, not detachment.  In other words, can we really claim that irony necessitates detachment?

We might be able to grapple with this question by considering the third example of the ironic mode: the use of irony in political speech, performance and action (ala Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart).   I should point out regarding Jon Stewart, by the way, that, aside from the fact that he does “fake news” which is itself an ironic (or perhaps oxymoronic) phrase, I don’t think his show constitutes essential irony in the same way that Colbert’s does, even if many of the characters on his show do.  And though I myself am making the slippage in this post, I still think it important to remind ourselves of the differences between comedy and satire, on the one hand, and irony, on the other.  Still, regarding political humor more generally, I don’t think we can say that the use or lack of use of comedy and satire have a direct correlation to political commitment.  The excellent guest post by Campbell Scribner contrasts the humor of the 1930s run of the New Yorker magazine to the politically more serious content of the New Masses.  Yet how can one read Michael Gold’s plays or writings - or those of Clifford Odetts or so many of the Lefty writers and workers’ theatre playwrights - without accounting for the methods of Agit-Prop – their Big Bosses and Big Cigars – without seeing satire, humor and irony put to very serious political use?

But if I’m arguing that there’s something unique regarding irony and its politics, what it is about irony that makes it unique?   Here’s what I think:   There’s something about irony in which audience and author intention are crucial to giving it sense and, while similar things can be said about humor more generally, with irony there is also projected a second imaginary audience, one that is unknowing.   In other words, there is an “insider voice” that irony always points to.  One of the essences of irony is to establish who is and who isn’t an insider simply through hermeneutics - by the interpretation of the tone which, read correctly, points to a clear distinction between literal and “actual” meaning.  If you get the irony, you are an insider.

If I may venture a guess about what annoys Andrew and so many of us about ironic detachment (as opposed to other kinds of detachment such as say, of the off-the-grid, back-to-the-earth variety) is that ironic detatchment is something along the lines of deliberate detachment with an entitled air:  I’m detatching myself because I know that attachment itself is impossible and therefore misguided and naïve.   Perhaps the difference in the ironic variant is that the practitioner claims to be political?  And here we can see how it’s about audience:  the ironist is speaking to politicized individuals who share the discourse.   They knowthey are the audience and are up to the same project (politics).  So the ironist non-committers offer an in-your-face sort of detachment.   And we feel condescended to.

Ironically, this form might be what bothers us the most:  since we’re made uncomfortable by the uncertainty of our position in relation to the joke or to the ironist herself, we become resentful.  There is an air of superiority of the ironist – their self-satisfied tone which suggests that they’ve figured it out and we haven’t, and, worse, that they don’t have to pay for it.  They can stand apart.  They can claim humor (“It was just a joke…”) or that it’s “not their job” (as with Stewart and his often-repeated justification that he’s on Comedy Central and in a slot that is preceded by “puppets making crank phone calls.”)

But these claims are exactly the point.   Those are the indicators of detachment, not the irony itself.  It may be true that Colbert and Jon Stewart dismiss politics and are politically non-comittal (and make a lot of money in the process).  But they are not are only available sources of political irony.  In fact, there is a whole body of theory, history and practice by politically committed ironists that have not entered this discussion.  

In addition to the examples Andrew presents – Colbert, Jon Stewart, Thomas Frank and The Baffler  - we should add Kalle Lassen (Ad Busters) and a lot of recent street-theatre protest – from Billionaires for Bush to Axis of Eve, the young female activist group who sold women’s underwear with such slogans on the crotch as “Expose Bush” and “Weapon of Mass Seduction.” 

We can say these groups trade in irony.   And they have been inspired by a long line of activist ironists – from Guy Debord’s Situationists through the pranksterism of Abby Hoffman (levitating the Pentagon) on up to the more recent “culture jamming” of Reclaim the Streets, Ad Busters and others (see Naomi Klein’s No Logo and the recently published multi-authored “toolbox for revolution,” Beautiful Trouble). 

Those ironists tend to employ Debord’s concept of “detournement.”  Practitioners describe detournement (literally meaning “overturning” or “derailment”) as “semiotic juijitsu.”    They include bold acts of irony such as projecting the words “Koch Brothers” in coopted Coca-Cola red script font on the wall of the new Koch wing of Lincoln Center during its premier gala.  Here’s how one culture jammer justifies detournement in Beautiful Trouble: 

Rational arguments and earnest appeals to morality may prove less effective than a carefully planned detournement that bypasses the audience’s mental filters by mimicking familiar cultural symbols, then disrupting them. . . Detournement can be used to disrupt the flow of the media spectacle and, ultimately, to rob it of its power.  Advertisements start to feel less like battering rams of comsumerism and more like the raw materials for art and crucial reflection.

  

The effect of irony via this theory of detournement operates in a two-step fashion, from confusion to understanding:  The Billionairesappear to be Bush supporters until you realize they intend to criticize Republican policies by exposing exaggerated versions of their absurdity.  A cigarette ad “jammed” by Ad Busters appears to be selling cigarettes until you realize the ad features a skull with a butt in its teeth  and intends to link lung disease and death to the cigarettes. 

The shift from appearance to intention or “true message” depends on what these ironist activists call cognitive dissonance.  The moment of cognitive dissonance occurs when the incongruity is exposed: That Bush supporter is chanting “Four More Wars!” or “Free the Forbes 400” and . . . wait a minute!   That can’t be right. . . Or, What’s up with that billboard?  Why would a cigarette company include a skeleton in its ad? 

The theory is that one’s easy assumptions about the way the world works – systems of advertising, structures of party politics, paradigm of female objectification – will be upset by such cognitive dissonance and therein will lie true revelation. 

To critique this theory you could say that in many of these cases, such cognitive dissonance is too damn pleasurable since it is nearly always resolved (see Freud Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious).  So our worldviews aren’t actually challenged or threatened.  The ironic twists are respite or release, breaks from the real work.  But, on the other hand, that is exactly how many culture-jamming activists will defend their work:  We’re giving the Left something to feel good about, they say.  We’re making the Revolution fun - an Emma Goldman danceable moment - and, look!, we’ve just recruited 150 college students to the protest because it’s a blast.

What’s tricky is that it’s so slippery.  The trickster never stays still.  So this might match more an anarchist sensibility than a movement building one.  On the other hand, while it may be tempting to say that a post-Revolution world can’t be built on jokes or run well when the seats of power are inhabited by jesters, still we should consider the maxim:  Live the world you want to be in.  Or, Another world is possible.  In other words, start doing what you imagine. 

In that case, play is pretty powerful.  The masquerade balls that pop-up flash-mobby in city squares where everyone dances and wears a mask, top hat or tiara might seem goofy but they might also offer the possibility of a world that is much more compassionate and more communitarian than the more rigid, fear-based one we live in. 

Contrasting the joyful street play and humor of Situationists to the fascist use of spectacle during Nazi Germany, Stephen Duncombe offers a defense of irony (and political humor more generally):

Jokes are active, social things.  More than any other form of communication they demand participation from their audience.  Meaning in a joke is incomplete;  not all information is given, and the remaining part must be provided by the recipient.  This is why it is possible to not ‘get’ a joke.  When the humor is satire or irony . . . the sense of shared meaning is even more intense.  Given clues to what the author or performer doesn’t think, the spectator deciphering an ironic text has to use his or her imagination to figure out what the creator does believe.  The spectator helps create the message by providing its incomplete negation.  As such, jokes create a sort of interdependency. . . it is . . . what is so magical about comedy when it works, for the audience and the comic create something together.  Good humor confers an instant intimacy between the comic and the audience, both of whom share in the meaning-making.  This narrative independency works against hierarchy.”  (Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, p. 131-32)

Whatever your take on irony, I don’t think it fair to equate it with complacency.  Complacency is the problem of the complacent, whether they tell you to get lost sincerely or ironically.