The standard sort of conversation that was discussed following the death of David Foster Wallace was that his project was an attempt to combat irony. In fact he often mentioned that post-modernism had ran its course and in a wonderful essay on television and US Fiction, he argues that irony is simply not good for the soul.
I say that to say this: Bikers are not ironic. There can be no hipster biker. I recently played two gigs for a set of bikers and we played, well, Biker Music. So I'm playing some tunes that I don't really care too much for - songs by people like Kid Rock, for example. However, while I was playing them - to quote a line from a piece of ironic fiction - I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity: the people listening to these songs, really like these songs. They are meaningful to them and they see nothing wrong with enjoying music that reflects and reinforces a world they understand.
I don't mean this to sound condescending - in fact I mean the finger to basically point back at me - "my people," liberal academics or whatever group I am also in. Basically, what struck me as both sad and illuminating is that none of my friends - myself included - can listen to a lot of music without a stance of irony - a subtle sneer. I have friends that love to point out that the song by Alanis Morissette misuses the word "ironic."
Where this gets complicated is that I have to admit I get a certain amount of joy out of sneering at a few things - Irony is almost a default position and I don't think it's always a bad thing. In fact, a lot of times I think it's a great thing, but I do ultimately agree with DFW that if everything becomes irony - if everything is always-already a parody, something is lost and that loss is hard to articulate but easy to feel.
Wonderful article! I personally haven’t read any of David Foster Wallace’s texts, and I am therefore ignorant to his famous ‘postmodern irony’ that he supposedly ridicules in many of his essays. Would you please summarize what that means? And how irony has so “permeated the [American] culture” that we fail to see our world from other perspectives?
ReplyDeleteI always thought irony, if anything, gifts one with the notion of movement in nature, and the idea that signs and symbols are reversible and not static, thus making room for more possibilities, interpretations, and understandings.
Yeah - that's hard to sum up. I guess basically the text to read by him is Television and US Fiction - from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
DeleteTo reduce complexity he's saying that irony that came out of the post-modern guys - Barth, Bartheleme and up to Leyner and so on, while being smart and in some ways needed, reaches a dead-end - a sort of soul-deadening nihilism. The idea is that irony is fine, needed, until it becomes the only mode of discourse, in which case all we are is a bunch of people that sneer at thinks, wink at each other, but lose the wonderful thing about modernism: the desire to be authentic.
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ReplyDeleteIndeed! Nothin' ironic about bikes. I'm not of the generation X, I am of the generation that is constantly called ironic. There seems to be so many meanings of irony, some of them varry deep and rich, others shallow and stupid.
ReplyDeleteI think for generation X irony was something liberating if not over played,(over-played was a BIG problem back in the 90s) it was a way of being more than people thought you were without giving up anything.
For me and I think a lot of people of my generation irony is not liberating at all. We are thought to be ironic and even believe it ourselves, but are not acutely ironic at all. We are pathetically sincere. That's probably what you see in those kid rock fans. Me, I would never listne to Kid Rock not even for shits and giggles. It's just not funny.
Nothings really over played in my generation; garage rock isn’t over played it's over looked. Everything in my generation is over looked. There is a pervasive misunderstanding. A gap. A "what was that". and that is still here and it’s still misunderstood.
I think to my generation irony is a profound limitation. It's a handy cap. Like in golf. Its something that usurps our power and saves us from the void. Just like you said If you see some one of my generation with an afro and a big caller shirt you can be as shore as hell that that guy is burning in his hart for something most of us will never understand. You know, it's kind of like we're a bunch of retards. Like a bunch of super-men retards.
In the nineties, and I'm old enough to remember them, irony was liberating and sincerity was stifling. The freest people I know could do anything because underneath it all they weren't really a cowboy, pirate, savige, forest wizard, lizard man, or whatever they were just different. Now we can be whatever the fuck we want to be, but no one believes it, they just think it's a joke.
(Oh I just realised that youre talking about harley bikes not bisicals. That funny how hipster is a bikecyle!?!)
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