Some notes on irony

“In five ways the supersaturation of an age in history seems to me hostile and dangerous. Through such an excess, first, that hitherto mentioned contrast between inner and outer is produced; second, the personality is weakened; an age is caught up in the fantasy that it possesses the rarest virtue, righteousness, in a higher degree than any other time; third, the instincts of a people are disrupted, and the individual no less than the totality is hindered from developing maturely; fourth, through this excess the always dangerous belief in the old age of humanity takes root, the belief that we are late arrivals and epigones; fifth, an age attains the dangerous mood of irony about itself and, beyond that, an even more dangerous cynicism. In this, however, it increasingly ripens towards a cleverly egotistical practice, through which the forces of life are crippled and finally destroyed.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

This passage has never been more pertinent. Regardless of our philosophical convictions, it should be an uncontroversial remark that one of the disadvantages of post-modern deconstructionism, when it becomes an instinct rather than a tool, is the skeptical scrutiny of every single human reality until nothing but a void is left. Under these lenses, the theater of life appears as a demiurgic, circus-like spectacle where everyone is aware of the futility of their role and identity, yet keeps performing it anyway. No emperor has clothes, as everyone can see, but they keep parading on with an enthusiastic entourage and crowd, all aware of the surrounding comedy. When facing such a vision, laughter is a natural and indeed understandable reaction, although we believe this laughter to conceal a certain discomfort, in some cases even despair. Perhaps laughter and irony are the only things left to the last man as brilliantly described by Nietzsche, who situates him at the latter phase of a civilizational cycle where historical consciousness achieves its peak and coincides with a sense of weariness and pessimism that the greatest writers of our time have dealt with. The modern West looks at all that came before it like a Supreme Archivist, organizing all of world history as data in a cybernetic bank, yet seemingly unable to formulate its own philosophical project or identity. It should be noted that this is not a personal observation of ours, but a common sentiment among scholars, most famously expressed by Fukuyama with his “end of history”. It’s as if history can only be made by those who are unaware of it, or, at least, don’t give it that much importance, this leading us to a curious and crucial observation about museums: the precious artifacts from tribal societies stored in our museums are only valuable to the onlookers, for it’s only them who have a conception of “historical significance” (or of history at all); for the tribesmen themselves, as with all societies that we now call “archaic” or “cosmological”, these objects only have an existential value – they are to be used in daily life and, once they’ve fulfilled their practical purpose, can perfectly be discarded just as we discard our tools.

We can look at all of history, study it and comment on it, but from a perspective seemingly external to history itself, as if all that’s left of the “historical” process now is merely a technical reckoning that actually seems more automatic than actively driven by mankind – and indeed, this does correspond to the experience of most people today; they don’t feel like they’re part of an integral project, but simply perform a function in the societal complex in order to survive or obey some ideological or humanistic imperative (“make the world a better place”, etc) they probably don’t believe in. Besides that, they’re allowed to consume, sit back to observe and formulate their own opinions if they deem that important enough. The lack of an immediate meaning inherent in the social structure or even external reality at large leads to that condition that sociologists and psychologists have collectively diagnosed us in our times (with one of the latter coming up with the catchy term of “modern man in search of a soul”).

This being a general feature of our current civilization, it inevitably affects the artistic process as well, since it is no less than self-expression at the most immediate and primary level. Contemporary art, which is frequently conceptual, usually takes on a self-aware and sometimes self-deprecating form, from consumeristic pop-art triumphantly accepting its quality of a product to satirical versions of past works or something aptly titled “artist’s shit“. It’s as if any artistic gesture innocently resembling older forms, like a simple landscape painting or a still-life is instantly derided as “naive”.

The apparent absence of this vital, spontaneous impulse of artistic creation is certainly one of the reasons why our times haven’t managed to produce their own organic aesthetic. This problem has been noted and explored by scholars of post-modernism such as Frederic Jameson or Mark Fisher. The former points to the instability of late capitalist/neoliberal economy and its rapid flux of shifting trends and images as the root of our incapacity of aestheticizing present experience. This leads to the phenomenon that Fisher terms hauntology (one of his most interesting concepts), which could be described as the persistence of the past, as well as the very act of looking back, in current works (including their conceptions of alternate futures based on the past). This is particularly clear, for instance, in modern music full of longing and nostalgia that explicitly presents itself as a fuzzy memory, time-worn recording or artifact of some alternate timeline (Fisher analyzes many appropriate examples, of which we believe William Basinski’s “Desintegration Tapes” to be the most representative). We can easily observe this impulse in our culture’s fetishistic attachment to all sorts of “futurisms of the past” such as cyberpunk, or really any sort of aesthetic that refers to the past, like noir or “the ‘80s” (I’m surprised by how this one hasn’t died out yet. You’d think we’d be on ‘90s revivalism by now…)

Jameson’s hypothesis regarding the origin of this state of affairs certainly has its validity, but we feel the need to point as well to the thick, all-encompassing atmosphere of cynicism as another crucial factor behind the artistic drought of today and the resulting excavation of the past. After all, if everything is meaningless (and any flash of meaning can be easily deconstructed away), what’s the point of expressing it and immortalizing it? And if we happen to do so, isn’t the most obvious form either a scream of anguish or an attempt at shrugging it all off through irony?

We do not believe that the employment of irony can’t be interesting or even constructive. Slovenian band Laibach offer us an iconic example by satirizing the post-modern condition itself: before the clutter of cultural, political and ideological signs deprived of their original meaning and reduced to phantasmatic impressions in the collective (un)consciousness, the band indiscriminately mixes them together, thus frustrating our usual process of identifying, through our ideological filters, a “message” in popular media, as well as drawing us to the futility of this process. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a countryman of the band, has thus described their appeal (in his habitual psychoanalytic terminology) as a deconstruction of the transference process:

“The ultimate expedient of Laibach is their deft manipulation of transference [transfert]: their public (especially intellectuals) is obsessed with the “desire of the Other” [désir de l’Autre] – what is Laibach‘s actual position, are they truly totalitarians or not? – i.e., they address Laibach with a question and expect from them an answer, failing to notice that Laibach itself does not function as an answer but a question. By means of the elusive character of their desire, of the indecidability as to “where they actually stand”, Laibach compels us to take up our position and decide upon our desire.”

It’s very clear, however, that this Is not the common usage of irony in most popular media and its underground currents today. On the contrary, we see entire genres lazily lapsing into self-parody out of cynicism regarding their worth and the possibility of originality and innovation, the goal being making music as a meme to be posted on social media to see how many laugh reacts or upvotes it can get. Seth Putnam’s parody black metal project provides us an early (“before it was cool”) example; it can be funny once in a while as an instance of a genre becoming self-aware and commenting on the vulgarization of its tropes, but it gets tiresome if it becomes the default mentality. Mostly because the predominance of such mentality is precisely the symptom of a dearth of ideas, energy and enthusiasm; the last resort for those who have nothing else to say.

Any musician who takes his craft seriously will tell you that music creation is a demanding labour that engages the depths of their being. What we’re asking here is: should all of this be channeled into what amounts to an easy joke (and, more often than not, not even a funny one)? We feel this is an important question for aspiring musicians today, before all music becomes an intentional version of Spinal Tap. Remember: no matter how ridiculous those guys seemed to us, they definitely had passion. They knew they were taking rock up to eleven!