The problem with plowing through a book like “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity” is it’s no fun. The book is all theory all the time and while I enjoy bringing theory into the things I’m writing about, it’s a dry subject on its own.
The rest of the chapter about irony and politics seems like a restatement of chapter 3 and to me is a waste of time. In fact, I think you could make a good case for its irrelevance because irony may have seemed triumphant as Gen X worked its way through academia. Today it’s nearly dead.
The amount of irony in the culture of the late 80s, early 90s was nearly suffocating. Most movies of the era featured characters wisecracking their way through insane situations. The “Die Hard” movies are a great example, but even the early Tarantino movies played out that way. The lyrics of NIrvana records are impossible to take at face value. Kurt Cobain wrote a song called Lithium which, on the surface, is about the good feelings of finding religious faith. But the title holds the listener at ironic distance—does he mean it’s just a drug holding the madness at bay? For Gen Xers of the era, it wasn’t cool to reveal anything clearly, there always had to be a layer of doubt about the things we said. Everything had to, on some level, be possible to take as a joke.
The Millennials, by contrast, are an extremely earnest generation. They tend to mean exactly what they say, to the point that many of them don’t get irony at all. And Gen Z has taken it even farther and seem to speak entirely in polemics. There’s very little middle ground on anything with that generation.
I’d like to be able to have a discussion of matters like this in the context of something more interesting—a book, movie, tv show, whatever literary criticism might work to illustrate it. And perhaps that’s how this project will evolve once I get through the main text and can then apply concepts elsewhere.
For now, I’m getting a little bored with the academic text and can’t imagine any theoretical readers I might have enjoying it either. Well, actually, that brings up an interesting point—just how many readers do I have out there? I’ve learned that it’s nearly impossible to measure them the old fashioned away anymore, people don’t tend to show up in analytics data very often, although a handful still slip through each week.
A lot of them look like traffic from AWS installations around the world, which could mean they are bots or some really paranoid folks taking extreme steps to hide their identities. It seems like a really expensive way to turbocharge what a VPN could do. There are also some people who use Facebook proxy servers, which I find completely fascinating. Who would think that Meta might be a tool for protecting user privacy?
And then there are the people who use plain vanilla RSS servers or VPNs. You’re all unimaginatively safe. You really need to up your paranoia game.
Finally, there are the people who actually believe me when I say that everything I post on my Authory page cannot be tracked. And it’s true, there’s no analytics built in, I have no idea if anyone goes there. I will say, however, that if you read my Montaigne essays on Authory, you aren’t getting the up-to-date versions I’ve been working through this summer, just the really old school stuff. Your loss.
However you paranoid freaks access my writing, I appreciate every blip of interest I come across. Wish me luck in finding something new that re-energizes me to keep this up. I don’t think I can take many more six paragraph Habermas vs. Foucault examinations by Rorty.
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