![\"David_Foster_Wallace_headshot_2006\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/David_Foster_Wallace_headshot_2006.jpg\")
<\/a>a new pathology. How new is it? \u00a0Aristophanes formalized it. Socrates used it, even at his own trial. Cervantes made a parable of it. Swift broadened it into a human meta-condition. Societies gripped in rigid social and political hierarchies made it obligatory, as with Moliere, La Rouchefoucauld, Shaw, Wilde and Gogol. If not hierarchies, then conditions. \u00a0Joseph Heller made \u201cCatch-22\u201d a universal reference for rational lunacy. So did, unwittingly, Donald Rumsfeld (and the Bush II administration\u2019s proclamation of its own reality).<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s the difference between contemporary irony and the O.E.D definition: \u201cA figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expression used by the words, usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule\u2026\u201d and \u201dA contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things\u201d?<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t always just snark. Irony is mutable. It\u2019s a base for comedy\u2019s conjunction of the irreconcilable. It\u2019s a philosophical posture toward intractable hypocrisy, as in Camus\u2019 line, \u201cThe tragedy of America is that the appearance of justice conceals the reality of injustice.\u201d It\u2019s a nimble form of self-reparation, of psychic release from the inescapable.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where postmodern irony comes in. Pop culture is the inescapable condition, culminating in the 1990s, when low culture and high culture went to war in a horrible mismatch in which the high was seized and condemned, not to death, but scorned irrelevance. And not just culture, incidentally. In \u201cAmusing Ourselves to Death,\u201d Neil Postman warned that the way things are going, mere derision and not force of arms will be enough to overthrow governments.<\/p>\n
If irony is the new quotidian, it\u2019s been building for a long time. Pound, Auden, Mumford, Dada and the Absurdists. George Trow of \u201cThe Context of No Context.\u201d Warhol, the idiot savant, whose Delphic utterances seem somehow fitting in an era when cultural authority crumbles before the fatuous sneer, and there\u2019s no one to explicate what\u2019s phony and what\u2019s real. In what other age have we had something as absurd as the reality show, whose mere category is an oxymoron?<\/p>\n
All roads on the topic lead to David Foster Wallace\u2019s summary 1993 essay, \u201cE Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMake no mistake,\u201d Wallace writes. \u201cIrony tyrannizes us.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIrony\u2019s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism\u2019s become an end in itself. \u201c<\/p>\n
Wallace\u2019s hope was for the rise of an anti-rebel who would risk the dismissive ennui of the ironist in speaking for (one assumes) conviction, sane belief, ethical reality, hope, community, God, meaning; not as a sap or square, but as someone who understands what was once called the forces of darkness and might now be called the forces of negation, breakdown. One who joins in, conscious of the struggle. There are those people. Why don\u2019t they count? In \u201cWaiting for Godot,\u201d Vladimir says to Estragon (or maybe it\u2019s the other way around), \u201cWe kept out appointment. How many can say that?\u201d The answer? \u201cBillions.\u201d<\/p>\n
People have complained about means of communications before, beginning when epics and legends were written down instead of \u00a0memorized. But nothing has gone farther than commercial television to cheapen and exploit every basic human value out there while bleeding into the general category of Media, which has colonized the consciousness of generations. Now we have TV\u2019s extension, ubiquitous screens, to mirror the phenomenon. \u00a0\u201cAmerica is great\u2026it\u2019s the individual that\u2019s dead,\u201d said Paddy Chayefsky in 1976\u2019s \u201cNetwork.\u201d That may still be a premature post-mortem, but the relentlessness of a monetized, celebrity-driven, factionalized, out-of control, in-your-face, warp-speed world has given us no place to go except in the shifting crawl space of irony.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take it for what it is, no longer a development, but a chronic symptom. What does it say about art and the people who make it, aka the creative class?<\/p>\n
Irony is detachment. Art is engagement. \u00a0Right now they\u2019re in a toxic mix.<\/p>\n
Lawrence Christon, Guest Columnist<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”8qHfyQW4oDysZVU6d4MJpCUZbSLYZHgf”] DOES irony leads us anywhere valuable? How does cultural postmodernism fit in? These are questions guest columnist Lawrence Christon gets into today, extending a much-discussed essay by David Foster Wallace (pictured). Despite being a child of Letterman, novelists like Pynchon, and the indie-rock’90s, I’m increasingly agreeing with opponents of irony like Lewis Hyde, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[233,607,615,77],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-david-foster-wallace","7":"category-lawrence-christon-guest-column","8":"category-postmodernism","9":"category-television","10":"entry","11":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}