The End of Irony
[this is a work in progress, and I beg your feedback, or back-feeding]
1.
true violence is ahistorical, it happens every day, and it leaves an unsightly stain upon the carpet. Not a rupture in time, but a continuity. Houses shield thousands of battered and bruised families, molested and beaten, from public view. Prisons have drains on the floor to absorb the blood.
“One good thing could come from this horror: It could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years--roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright--the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.”—Roger Rosenblatt in Time after September 11
Nothing will ever be the same. The millennium has begun with fire raining from the sky. Was that what they were saying in Africa that day, too?
These people want me to rely on extreme violence to segment my reality. This, presumably, being said now, at least relative. He said that before September 11, nobody believed in death. I, for one, am glad that irony is dead.
“For once, let's have no fatuous rhetoric about ‘healing.’ Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous…What's needed is a unified, unifying, purple American fury--a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J.... Elian... Chandra...) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism”—Lance Marrow, the same edition of Time.
I have seen the face of fascism, drawn in by its angular lasciviousness, stoked rage with rage and licked black leather boots. I have been engorged in fear, have let the television shepherd me through this age of strife, beset on all sides by the inequities of men sedated by relativism. But I climax easily, and in my postcoital malaise I return to the tenderness of the permissive amoral America that the liberal media has built for me. Did the terrorists use irony to kill irony? Am I a terrorist?
Perhaps my words seethe because I have healed, and so I am inappropriate, and dangerous. I sit in silence, letting my mind vibrate with the oldest syllables. My kitchen provides me the purest sustenance, I am nearly free from the tyranny of instant food.
2.
Daily violence left a stain on the cement, also, thousands of times, both before and after this Age of Terror. Perhaps the police got to the scene first and forced the bodies to lie there, on the pavement where they had landed, for hours and hours while they analyzed. stroked the soft skin with chemicals to recapture the past. Or maybe they don’t care enough. And then, who cleans up the mess? I’ve never seen that picture before, the man with a mop, with bleach, rubber gloves, scrubbing away the stain. Or perhaps the rain does it.
They said he was trying to escape. They said he was killed in a fight, in the yard. Two bullets landed in his back. The world is constantly on fire, eaten into by decay, by desire.
The sewers know this, creeks of fire run under our streets burble into themselves, leave smelly streaks on the inside of our houses, out of sight, bleached sterile by overuse of Drano.
To stain earth would be easier to clean; scuffle around for a few days, let the dust return to dust. But asphalt relies only on storm drains, which subsume themselves, and cigarette butts too. and all that is immortal in food consumed. And I would like to see where those tubes of rot meet the sea, and to see if there is any filter, any condom, there.
I have good taste for all forms of consumption; purity enters my eyes and ears from the magnificent producers of my culture, you who have produced me. You, who may judge this text, fruit of my leisurely labor, must know this.
Perhaps the police stained the asphalt, stained the asphalt with real black blood, I saw it one night, I saw him, hog-tied face down in the middle of the intersection. Shame. I turned my back. I saw his head held down, his tongue lick the wet asphalt. I turned my back. I consented on behalf of all of us who remain, for the time being, unhandcuffed. Shame. That I could not face my shame; I turned my back.
3.
Those words were brought here by a machine. That same one that makes unreality on the screen, it made me here, completely without special effects. That which manufactured me; nurtured me, caressed my young ears. In the iron belly of that war machine lurked irony, and now it has burned away as men in suits leaped to their death. Unimagined, each step always-already unimagined. born on the top, the unshakeable beneficiary of every false revolution ever fought. I had no agency, I am a subject, routinely stripped of subjectivity by the screen. I will become a producer as they were, a producer of control and resistance, I will find fuel to replace the irony that burned away, to replace the fossil fuels that are irreplaceable.
“Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.”—Sans Soliel
In Old German, Gamen meant joy. Before that, when the Goths said Gaman, they meant communion. The pre-Germanic root of the prefix ga- is a collective, and the suffix –mann is a person. The collective person. Video is very simple; it comes from the Latin for “I see.” So, somewhere, deep in our cultural consciousness, Videogame means “I see through the collective person.” It’s all right there in the dictionary.
Are we to embrace collective joy? What's in it for me?
1.
true violence is ahistorical, it happens every day, and it leaves an unsightly stain upon the carpet. Not a rupture in time, but a continuity. Houses shield thousands of battered and bruised families, molested and beaten, from public view. Prisons have drains on the floor to absorb the blood.
“One good thing could come from this horror: It could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years--roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright--the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.”—Roger Rosenblatt in Time after September 11
Nothing will ever be the same. The millennium has begun with fire raining from the sky. Was that what they were saying in Africa that day, too?
These people want me to rely on extreme violence to segment my reality. This, presumably, being said now, at least relative. He said that before September 11, nobody believed in death. I, for one, am glad that irony is dead.
“For once, let's have no fatuous rhetoric about ‘healing.’ Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous…What's needed is a unified, unifying, purple American fury--a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J.... Elian... Chandra...) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism”—Lance Marrow, the same edition of Time.
I have seen the face of fascism, drawn in by its angular lasciviousness, stoked rage with rage and licked black leather boots. I have been engorged in fear, have let the television shepherd me through this age of strife, beset on all sides by the inequities of men sedated by relativism. But I climax easily, and in my postcoital malaise I return to the tenderness of the permissive amoral America that the liberal media has built for me. Did the terrorists use irony to kill irony? Am I a terrorist?
Perhaps my words seethe because I have healed, and so I am inappropriate, and dangerous. I sit in silence, letting my mind vibrate with the oldest syllables. My kitchen provides me the purest sustenance, I am nearly free from the tyranny of instant food.
2.
Daily violence left a stain on the cement, also, thousands of times, both before and after this Age of Terror. Perhaps the police got to the scene first and forced the bodies to lie there, on the pavement where they had landed, for hours and hours while they analyzed. stroked the soft skin with chemicals to recapture the past. Or maybe they don’t care enough. And then, who cleans up the mess? I’ve never seen that picture before, the man with a mop, with bleach, rubber gloves, scrubbing away the stain. Or perhaps the rain does it.
They said he was trying to escape. They said he was killed in a fight, in the yard. Two bullets landed in his back. The world is constantly on fire, eaten into by decay, by desire.
The sewers know this, creeks of fire run under our streets burble into themselves, leave smelly streaks on the inside of our houses, out of sight, bleached sterile by overuse of Drano.
To stain earth would be easier to clean; scuffle around for a few days, let the dust return to dust. But asphalt relies only on storm drains, which subsume themselves, and cigarette butts too. and all that is immortal in food consumed. And I would like to see where those tubes of rot meet the sea, and to see if there is any filter, any condom, there.
I have good taste for all forms of consumption; purity enters my eyes and ears from the magnificent producers of my culture, you who have produced me. You, who may judge this text, fruit of my leisurely labor, must know this.
Perhaps the police stained the asphalt, stained the asphalt with real black blood, I saw it one night, I saw him, hog-tied face down in the middle of the intersection. Shame. I turned my back. I saw his head held down, his tongue lick the wet asphalt. I turned my back. I consented on behalf of all of us who remain, for the time being, unhandcuffed. Shame. That I could not face my shame; I turned my back.
3.
Those words were brought here by a machine. That same one that makes unreality on the screen, it made me here, completely without special effects. That which manufactured me; nurtured me, caressed my young ears. In the iron belly of that war machine lurked irony, and now it has burned away as men in suits leaped to their death. Unimagined, each step always-already unimagined. born on the top, the unshakeable beneficiary of every false revolution ever fought. I had no agency, I am a subject, routinely stripped of subjectivity by the screen. I will become a producer as they were, a producer of control and resistance, I will find fuel to replace the irony that burned away, to replace the fossil fuels that are irreplaceable.
“Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence.”—Sans Soliel
In Old German, Gamen meant joy. Before that, when the Goths said Gaman, they meant communion. The pre-Germanic root of the prefix ga- is a collective, and the suffix –mann is a person. The collective person. Video is very simple; it comes from the Latin for “I see.” So, somewhere, deep in our cultural consciousness, Videogame means “I see through the collective person.” It’s all right there in the dictionary.
Are we to embrace collective joy? What's in it for me?
posted by Jed at 3:56 PM
9 Comments:
i like what's here. I'd say you could do without any phrase like 'the truth of it is.' Never narrate. Just talk. That's what you do best. Narration is just elaboration anyway. E-laboration (out of labor). And I have a question: how does all of this dwell in a man who has meditated through many an hour, who has shaven his brow and gone to sit along the shores of a shit-filled river? I do not ask how as if to say 'how it is possible. I ask: How do you continue, seeing as far as you have seen, knowing anger to be only a button in the mind, and for all that, having only greater revulsion than you knew was possible when you were that much more deluded?
It's a good question and well articulated; it's asked by most who know me and then read my writing--where does this anger come from? what do I have to be angry about? the truth is, there is no anger at all here. It all comes from love. But I can't stop myself from choosing the most powerful words I can choose. Your comment made me think of different ways of addressing this issue in this one--I think I should make this peice a bit more meta, and try to set up a contrast between my life and the place I am at when I write, and the words that come out of that.
My life is going so well right now, and I am more at peace than I ever have been--I say my mantra daily, fill all my body functions to satisfaction, etc. Perhaps I feel that although I am in a good place spiritually, I have little to say about spirituality, or I fear sounding like one of these neohippies we are surrounded by at brown talking about "youknow, I've just been feeling the universal nature of my conciousness, and stuff." My parents taught me to loathe that kind of talk. This kind of talk feels more genuine.
What I'm gonna do, is I'm just going to continually edit this post as I change the piece--not make a new post. So, the next person who reads it, see how alex's comment applies, I guess.
I'm about to post a new version
peace
Oh, and also, I wanted to mention: the end here isn't really the end, it's just where I stopped writing for now.
This comment has been removed by the author.
New version posted 2/12/07
someone read it?
I don't think we regularly do this on pinkos, but I just wanted to comment on some of the language. The words you use in this piece do a lot, because it's short and because you say a lot - I just want to point out some places where I think you might look over the verbiage.
'angular lasciviousness' - maybe lascivious angularity? I don't know what that word means, and I always feel alienated from a piece when a word I don't know is used in such a way that I am struck by the fact that I don't know it. And somehow any word with a 'ness' sounds better when it's just an adjective
'beset on all sides by the inequities of men...' - sounds a little like that bible passage samuel l jackson repeats in pulp fiction. I like 'sedated by relativism' but you gotta be careful with a word like 'relativism'- it gets thrown around a lot, and I think it's becoming a term like 'democracy,' which has almost no denotation any more.
I like the questions you open up at the end, but there's a few things I'd like to point out. Where do you get the 'through' in your transliteration of videogame? And where does the 'joy' of your final line come from? You mention desire earlier in the piece, and it's equally enigmatic and disconcerting there -- I think that's your focus, really, the joy and desire caught up in all of this. As a premature high school theorist, I remember thinking that humanity had three stages. First, it had to take care of its needs. It built homes, secured communities, raised enough crops to keep everyone alive. Then, there is a turn where most everyone has these needs taken care of, and the generality of society moves on to its wants - those luxuries that were always restricted to the highest classes, those conveniences (washing machines, ready humor and entertainment [tv], decent gourmet food [restaurants], all appliances and forms of pastime) which can be made massively available and indulgible. So we get the needs, and then the wants. But what's after that? What comes when people have their sanitation and frozen chicken, and then gladitorial games in their living room -- what's next? The midlife crisis is a signal... I doubt those were common in the sixteenth century. What you're getting at is this overflow of desire, those inputs of gaiety which have been over-socketed, over-stimulated, over-informed to the point of burning out. I think that's what you're writing about, you're actually writing its voice deadpan, with no added affect, no circlambulatory over-navigation, no elaboration. You're being deliberate: and I think if you can capture this desire thing a little more concretely, refer to it a little more recurrently, then your piece will be screaming, whispering in gales the 'inequities' you want to uncover.
That's the kind of thoughtful critique that writers lust after. I think we should be thinking about language on this blog, especially when dealing with a piece like this (whatever that category might be)
I just posted a new version again, but this one's just differently organized. Your comment prompted more fresh writing, but it's not integrated into the piece yet, so soon there'll be another version. These things come out of me so slowly.
But I think that you're right that the piece centers around desire, or at least I LOVE (or lust after?) that reading of it. It's probably because I've been centered around desire recently in my life. It's definatly where the piece is going next, at least now. Perhaps Freud and Marx were getting at the same thing: they described nearly the same structures--a mass and a repression.
I sort of agree with your comment about 'angular laciviousness' that it's wordy, but I want someone else to comment on that, too. Because I also like the snake-like quality of the phrase, the s's and v's sounds like sex to me, and that's where I'm going in that part. The facist aeshetic is all about latex-style sexiness to me. Maybe I can dich the word "angular." The initial intent in adding that modifier was to bring the more abstract concept of laciviousness into physical space, to call to mind a lean, lithe body. But maybe that doesn't work?
I was excited by your comment on the word "relativism" because I was trying to mock the language of the quote that preceeded it--but I realized that for the version you read, I had edited out the part of the quote where he uses the word "relativism" in a demeaning way, so I put that back in. Look at it again real quick now.
You were right about the inequities of men like in pulp fiction. I wanted something that sounded biblical, in order to mock it or make it sound rediculous, but that's the only passage from the bible that I'm familiar with. I almost like the fact that it's been through another pop culture manifestation between me and the bible, because the essay is written for a 'cinematic essay' class and I want movies to be a motif.
I'll post another one soon. Thanks again for your comment. It made me much more confident in the piece, because it felt like I was communicating.
Ok, I see now with 'relativism' and 'angular lasciviousness.' I'll respond again with the next post - and you're right, let's get some more peoples on the comment train
Hey dude this is getting real good. One point: I'd get rid of adverbs (constantly, presumably). There is no time in your piece for predication; you're involved in a passing and remembering which is thrusting itself forward with no opportunity to characterize itself.
I really like what's happening organizationally. Strangely, you're writing a piece much like what I'm writing right now. I like how you keep returning to that guy in the street, the death witnessed: an unspeakable event haunts all of us today. And you're so right to play off 9/11. For most of us, that day had little permanent affect. But we are haunted all the same, walking around ghouls of narratives we tell no one. And that again brings us back to desire. What will be the outlet for all of this? For those of us who are incommunicably untortured by some inkling that we've done something wrong, remembering five times a day some event that may never have even happened, remembering it and circumambulating it endlessly and to no avail -- it is for those of us that you are writing.
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