The Other Serious
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The Other Serious

Christy Wampole

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eBook - ePub

The Other Serious

Christy Wampole

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About This Book

An original collection of incandescent cultural criticism, both experimental and personal, full of pragmatic advice for how to live a considered, joyful existence in our era of screen living and hipster irony, by a Gen-X Princeton professor and contributor to The New York Times

The essays in The Other Serious examine the signature phenomena of our moment: the way our lives contradict themselves, how exaggeration and excess seep into our collective subconscious, why gender is becoming more rather than less complicated, and how we interact with the material things that surround us. It is a book about the delicacy and bluntness of American life, about how pop culture sticks its finger deeply into the ethical dilemmas of our time, and how to negotiate between the old and the new, the high and the low, the global and the local, the sacred and the profane. At the heart of these reflections lies a central question: What should you do when you don't know what to do?

Taken together, these essays comprise a guide for the overhaul of "the administrativersity" of contemporary American life, a bureaucratic prison where the brain needn't work anymore. These pieces investigate the writer's own way of thinking—putting forth new ideas, questioning them, and urging the reader to adopt the same spirit of critical reexamination.

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Publisher
Harper
Year
2015
ISBN
9780062320377

The Great American Irony Binge

Remember [ . . . ] that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.
—JOSEPH CONRAD, Under Western Eyes
America is on its tiptoes, peeking around corners and through the slit in the blinds, skirting this uncomfortable encounter or that one. We have recourse to the diversion, the decoy, the sprint, or feigned ignorance. These refined, evasive techniques make it easier to elude those who might corner us with hard questions about what we really mean. Ours is a shifty population, apprehensive of the upfront. Everything is in disguise, masquerading as something other than itself.
From the ’90s onward, a specific kind of rhetoric has draped itself over American culture: irony, that beloved tool with the power to humble one’s opponents, to help discern between people who get it and those who don’t, to fight back when one is in the minority, to make life’s traumas and tribulations a little easier to handle. Some of the best writers in history share a finely tuned ironic sensibility: Diderot, Musil, Woolf, Malaparte, Svevo; they understood how to properly massage that discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. Our great satirists used it to tangle up their enemies; down became up, up became down, with gravity undone in their pages. Written in the eighteenth century, Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” still delights. His text had teeth. With a careful assemblage of fake pragmatism and sympathy, Swift was able to stage his reader’s shock to arrive at a very specific moment, this sentence: “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” I wonder how many jaws fell when they reached that line. Swift used irony—very conspicuously—to comment on his moment. When administered in the right doses and in the right context, irony is just about the most civically powerful mechanism available to the average person.
But what was powerful about irony was its status as exception: it was mastered by the quick-witted and deployed with discernment, not as an everyday, go-to response but as an anomaly with impact. The right word at the right time and place could come off like a bottle rocket. Something strange has happened to this venerated rhetorical device. The public space has become a kind of swampscape: irony, irony as far as the eye can see, stretching out before us like the bog in which Aqualung warms his feet. To make a gluttonous comparison, we’ve stuffed ourselves with irony the way we’ve stuffed ourselves with vaguely edible things slick with high-fructose drippage. In a dig at Emerson’s too-concentrated, too-perfect pages, Walt Whitman wrote: “How good [ . . . ] is good butter, good sugar. But to be eating nothing but sugar and butter all the time!”
That dynamic duo Stewart and Colbert come to mind as prime examples of public figures who’ve found a way to merge comedy and politics in their performances, using irony in a politically serviceable way. They back up their ironic maneuvers with substance. Comedy news is a perfectly reasonable place to find irony. My beef has nothing to do with these guys, who are simply doing what comedians have always done. What is agitating is the leakage of irony into everyday life: our clothes, politics, gestures, the evening news, and everywhere on the Web.
I have some ideas about why and how this happened, but first, I’d like to sort through the various meanings of irony to get to the one that has been buzzing around our heads of late. What does irony even mean? Tomes and tomes of scholarship have been produced on the subject, I think mostly by Germans. The word seems to have two ordinary uses. The first, à la Alanis Morissette, refers to a situation in which something happens contrary to the way it is expected to: “It’s ironic that he was hit by a car the day he won the lottery.” When I write of the contemporary irony binge, I mean the second kind of irony, which involves an intentional incongruity between what is said and what is meant. The word’s early Greek root eironeia means dissimulation, which shows that irony was conceived as a cloaking device. Sarcasm, a more specific, negatively connoted use of irony, has an etymology that points toward carnal violence: the Greek sarkazein, from which the word “sarcasm” derives, means to strip off the flesh. If sarcasm is a frontal attack, irony is a false flag.
Picture a T-shirt with the phrase I’M WEARING THIS T-SHIRT IRONICALLY printed across the chest. We have veered outside the boundaries of rhetoric. How can someone wear a T-shirt ironically? What is the opposite of this? Wearing the T-shirt sincerely? Authentically? Or even just neutrally? That one can wear something ironically seems at first either absurd or inconceivable. But it is possible, isn’t it? Anything can be worn ironically. A comparison: the way Magnum P.I. wore his mustache has nothing to do with the way a hipster—more or less extinct by the time these words reach you—wears his. Magnum, framed by the ’80s, was consciously doing what he could to make his sex appeal surge. He believed in the erotic potential of that lip hair. Most everyone did. America tacitly agreed that the mustache could make a man out of someone, that it held occult powers of arousal.
Fashion is a kind of collective complicity, a shared commitment to an aesthetic gambit. There were surely people in the 1970s and 1980s who found the mustache to be ridiculous. But testimony and material vestiges of the time show that for the mainstream, the ’stache was a legitimate strategy of attraction. And what of the hipster’s mustache? Isn’t he aiming for sexiness in his own way? Doesn’t he ultimately wish to attract rather than repulse? Of course he does. But in his case, the mustache is citational. He is quoting the fur-lipped hunks from the days of yore, their sylvan chests forested with hair, their shorts the size of ziplock sandwich bags. Since then, those hunks, even the most Adonis-like among them, have mutated into ludicrous caricatures. The hipster knows a mustache without an explanatory footnote is probably foolish to someone he might attempt to attract, so he builds a little preemptive, citational goofiness into his look to avoid the possibility that someone might think he actually wants to look like Magnum P.I. “Because that would be ridiculous,” he says to himself. The layer of irony allows him to toy with the look as a possible tool of attraction without committing wholeheartedly to it. At the first sign of criticism or repugnance from anyone inside his current or potential social circle, he can show his aesthetic superiority by pointing out his critic’s mistake: having taken him seriously. He admits in advance that he is masked so he can spare himself that humbling moment: “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!” From ugly-sweater parties to purposely silly-voiced indie bands, from TV news that prioritizes often ironic entertainment over information to middle-class students ironically hanging out at the local dive bar among blue-collar workers, irony is the white noise of our time.
Because this phenomenon has arrived in America at a relatively clearly defined moment—from the 1990s to the present—it could be described as a generational problem. So if the ironic reflex is indeed a generational issue, it might be helpful to think through what the word “generation” even means. This word is slick as an eel, slipping through the fingers of social scientists and everyone else. When it comes to describing the relationships between people and the moment in which they live, there is a shortage of words in everyday language. In English, the word “generation” can mean the division that separates me and the people born around the same time as me from my mother and people her age, and then from my grandmother and people her age. Sometimes the word “cohort” is used to describe this social, natally bound unit. “Generation” can also mean all of the people who are alive at any given moment. This use of the term would group me, my mother, and my grandmother into one unit, since we are all simultaneously accessing the same world. The three of us watched TV as the Challenger shuttle exploded. We read about Rwanda as it happened. We all remember what we were doing when 9/11 occurred. We witnessed together the election of the first black president of the United States. These shared experiences create a kind of generational intimacy even if we are of different ages. Another difficulty in forging a vocabulary of generations is the messiness and noncorrespondence of generational breaks, stemming from the fact that some people have kids very early, some very late, and the neatness of periodization rarely works anyway. For example, my own cousins are a mixture of Millennials and Gen-Xers (like myself ), but I know a Millennial whose cousin happens to be a Boomer. Furthermore, I’ve met Gen-Xers who behave a lot like Boomers, and other Gen-Xers who have all of the signature characteristics of Millennials, so “Gen-Xer” is hardly a stable category. Geography complicates matters more; within the vast geological spill that is the United States, some cultural phenomena take off more quickly in some regions, more slowly in others. Not to mention the way race, class, and other factors complicate the question. So people of the same cohort may have completely different experiences when faced with the culture of their moment.
I’m certain someone has already created a sophisticated vocabulary for talking about these relationships, but these words have yet to enter the realm of everyday speech. For the sake of convenience, let’s call all of us who are alive in the now a “generation” (this includes me, my mother, and my grandmother) and let’s call each age group (Boomers, Gen-Xers, Millennials) a “cohort.” So is the ironic reflex a generation problem or a cohort problem? I would say some of both, but the cohort has been more affected, particularly younger Gen-Xers and all Millennials. Even within this age demographic, I would guess that one could find the most evidence of ironic living among middle-class, educated, white people in urban and suburban areas and in college towns. However, because this is the class that often has the most input in the mediatized world (TV, advertising, Internet, print publications), its irony becomes an omnipresent haze that hovers wherever the human meets media. That is to say: everywhere.
The mother tongue of basically everyone born in the U.S. from the mid-1960s to the present is “Ironese.” Our fluency makes us comprehensible to one another but incomprehensible to everyone else. So, despite an inner craving for sincerity or forthrightness, we have no language in which to express this desire. The good news is: foreign languages can be learned.
If the preferred rhetorical figure of Gen-X was litotes, for Gen-Y it is hyperbole. And the most hyperbolic representative of a certain kind of aesthetic excess is the hipster. The hipster movement has more or less expired, having exhausted itself through the mainstream, but it is one of the most revelatory phenomena of first-world life. Rarely admitting its own existence, since few wear the hipster label proudly, this strange elitism operates moodily and relies upon the virtual for most of its energy. The hipster is a kind of self-aware jester or, better yet, a harlequin. Harlequin, or Arlecchino in Italian, is a stock character from the sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte theater tradition who is quick, light, resplendent, and survives with his street smarts. He dresses in gaudy, loud colors, is slender and acrobatic, and is always in need of money. He is clownish, anarchic in behavior, and dependent on the flashes of wit that get him out of tight situations. He somersaults recklessly from adventure to adventure. Always slipping through the fingers, he can never quite be caught. As a specialist of the cosmetic, he represents all that is surface. Today’s deep ironist is a modernized Harlequin. The latest model of this figure, the hipster, has access to a whole world of underground culture you’ve never heard of. He strives to be an entire avant-garde movement packaged in a single body. Pop culturally, he is always one step ahead of you. As a beau parleur, or smooth talker, he finds ways to round off the rough edges of conversation, conveying a kind of cultural competency that leaves you feeling in a perpetual state of lack. He scoffs at your paltry knowledge of bands and fashionable drugs, changes his tastes once he sees others have begun to catch on, rolls his eyes when you try to understand him. He abhors naĂŻvetĂ©. By making himself preemptively into a joke, he has shielded himself from all potential critiques.
Like the hippie in the 1960s, the hipster is the human crystallization of a distinct cultural juncture. No other figure better captures the specificity of the now. In all his or her silliness, the hipster conveys an absolute lack of faith in systems. No longer does this group—composed largely of middle- to upper-middle-class, white, educated people—believe in the fixity of categories or in authoritative voices. Everything has failed too many times. Because they have nothing to which they can pin their convictions, they instead make a mockery of everything. No one is exempt from this ridicule: not corporations, institutions of state and church, or even themselves. Few could blame them for this maneuver, given the perpetual moral bankruptcy of most institutions against which they lodge their implicit critiques. It is tempting to stick one’s tongue out at the politicians who sabotage, at the companies that manipulate, at the establishments that lie. This gesture is nothing new. What is maybe new is the lumping together of most aspects of culture into one mockable whole. Civilization has become one big punch line.
At first, turning everything into a circus of the absurd could be read as a noble move, something akin to what the Surrealists and other major constituents of the avant-garde were doing at the beginning of the twentieth century when Duchamp called a urinal “art” and critiqued the arbitrariness of institutionalized taste. But what exactly is the message of the hipster? What is the hipster resisting? Tradition? No, the hipster celebrates old-fashioned living as much as novelty. Conformity? No, there is much too much sameness in the aesthetic for it to be about the celebration of uniqueness. Capitalism? No: as the apex of our cynicism, hipsterism participates actively in capitalism even while deriding it. In fact, our total crypto-bourgeois-ification is embodied in this tableau: the hipster getting his handlebar waxed at the Art of Shaving.
I believe that the hipster class is composed mostly of well-meaning people who are smart, attentive, and informed about many of the world’s injustices. But because they cannot reconcile their own relatively lucky circumstances and the suffering of others and because they have no faith in the institutions that claim to want to fix these injustices, they use the defense mechanism of total negation in order to cope. Even if you are twenty-three years old, living under a mountain of student debt, unable to find a job, and aware that yours is the first social cohort in a while that will likely be worse off than the preceding one, you still must admit that your circumstances are preferable to those of many people of your same age across the globe. You can vote, you can eat, you can go see shows. And even if you’re tempted to lash out at the forces who’ve left you with this debt or who’ve made you jittery when attending large-scale public events for fear of a terrorist attack, you’re pretty certain that these are unsolvable problems. What do you do with this helplessness? The family-making frenzy and shopping fever of the Boomers didn’t work. The nihilism and slacker posture of the Gen-Xers didn’t work. What about a little levity, like that old song Peggy Lee made famous, where she sings, “Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.” When things are broken and there’s no way to fix them, the endless adult-child’s party with its intoxicating antilogic and colored lights blinking to the beat pushes the dark night away outside the steamed-up windows.
If the present is unbearable, there are a couple of options on where to turn for comfort: either to the past (vintage material culture, outmoded hobbies and fashions, photo filters that make the new look old) or the future (All Tomorrow’s Parties, digital futures, what’s going to happen next season). And to deal with the present when it’s in your face, there are countless handy devices and substances to numb and distract beyond worry.
As far as aesthetics go, the hipster finds relief in surrounding herself with kitsch objects. The Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote, “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit.” A possible reading of this declaration is that kitsch refuses the scale of values that labels one thing as superior to another. Hipsterism, through its purposeful cultivation of ugliness, seems to try to dismantle what historical inertia and semiofficial institutions of taste (fashion blogs, advertising agencies, celebrity opinions, etc.) have promoted as ideal, such as the buxom blonde with a tan or the muscleman. The buxom blonde is replaced by the nerd girl with messy hair and quirky ill-fitting clothes, and the muscleman is replaced by the angular-bodied boy wearing a conspicuous mustache and some random accessory in neon orange. One must at least pretend to be comfortable with ugliness. A skit from Portlandia beautifully summarizes this problem: a public service announcement, sponsored by the Portland Nerd Council, shows a cute hipster woman in a bar describing herself as a “big nerd,” while an authentically nerdy guy named Brian explains awkwardly the difference between someone who is actually a nerd and someone who feigns nerdhood. Brian tells the viewer that he wears his glasses to see, not as fashion accessories. He is too heavy to fit into skinny jeans. He concludes his critique with this statement, “A real nerd is ashamed to be called a nerd. So please. Get real. If you’re not a nerd, don’t call yourself one.” The kind of false posturing that Brian denounces represents fashion’s attempt to appropriate ugliness. Hoping to colonize and thus neutralize all that is unappealing, this appropriation of the ugly makes the faux nerd feel as if she belongs to a community of undesirables, that she is a freakishly delicious social exile. Does she really want to share the nerd’s destiny? Alas, she is but a nerd tourist. . . . It is implausible that she will ever need to spend an evening alone.
But hipsters do not have a monopoly on irony. This decade has witnessed the slow corporatization of irony as companies have found more and more clever ways to turn marketing campaigns into snide, self-referential instruments of persuasion. Some examples: Take a flight on Virgin America and you will see a safety video with a blah-voiced narrator who is too cool for school. “For the point zero zero zero one percent of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this,” he says, in a bored, condescending tone. Like many commercials these days, the safety video pokes fun at its own format with a kind of world-weary savvy, attempting to distinguish itself as more self-aware than its competitors. Regardless, Virgin America is still a hulking corporate entity. Its ironic posture does not change this. Even though the safety video is not technically a commercial, this genre functions as an advertisement, as it perpetuates a particular brand image and the attitude of a company. Virgin grunts really hard, trying to be hip. It is the only airline I know of that plays electronic lounge music at the check-in desk. Its planes glow inside with soft pinkish-purple lighting, a phony simulation of ...

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