causticity, irony, insincerity, nihilism

is it me or are large swathes of people, often educated and often young but perhaps not exclusively, heading inexorably this way. also how can one avoid/convert them

i haven't got a relevant link to a thinkpiece here but if you do then please share :)

(obviously irony and causticity can be used for good, in the correct doses)

I'm only sliding toward two or three of these.

there's nothing i love more than people who are sincere

didn't david foster wallace write the relevant thinkpiece ~20 years ago?

we had sincerity thing before ppl raved about it I find it painful even when its not dull and self serving which ime it almost always is

dmac yer a p sincere & moral man & i adore you for it

the rest is all vernacular twinkle

there are no good ilx threads beginning 'is it me or'

irony gets boring causticity is ugly nihilism is vanity idk is this rly a thing tho I mean most of these ppl you worry about as representative of a generation are most likely exactly the same as previous iterations of minor zeitgests, shallow and preening and aiming for anything markedly different enough from the previous two iterations that they might claim originality as some defence for the desperation of it all

irony that gets boring is just not being ironic enough tbh

"If something is not ironic after two minutes, try it for four. If still not ironic, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is ironic after all." -- Bob Marley

one of these is the fundamental patterning quality of experience and the other three are just defense mechanisms against advertising

i think they are bad for u long term too but they are not partic flummoxing as popular attitudes in a civilization designed around the mass distribution of blithely transparent untruths

If someone comes around your neighborhood calling for an end of irony, stock up on weapons

Roll on molly erry day imo

this is something i think people grow out of as they get older

If someone comes around your neighborhood calling for an end of irony, stock up on weapons

yeah i kno being pedantic abt the definition of irony is way boring with or without alanis but it is v nearly a straight-up truth-sense imo, profound+vital, and should not be confused with "snark" no matter how many people use it to describe their noid shirts

To be sure, I feel less need to shroud my thoughts and opinions in indistinct irony as I get older, which is why I can be direct about the weapons

hard to satirize a guy in shiny boots

i have such mixed feelings about all of this.

hey socrates was no spring chicken at his trial

Dictatorships are deeply sincere places. It's no accident that the last call for an "end to irony" in the US coincided with the birth of the war on terror.

I guess what imago is getting at is more that sort of pervasive inability to trust or be sincere about anything, maybe out of fear of ridicule for sounding too earnest

an end to irony would be preshishely the longed-for end of history

anyway yeah that other thing is different. toxic fear of being a sucker. treat the cause not the symptoms tho u kno

Who cares? We're all gonna die anyway.

irony has been conflated w/ sarcasm for too long, ppl really don't know it

i'm 4 for 4, what do I win?

you get to start the next thread

sincerity is one of the minor virtues, but clearly it is a virtue, whereas insincerity is a minor sin, but seldom a redeemable one

causticity is only justified when vilifying the villainous, otherwise it is just terrible manners and a form of self-harm

irony is fairly neutral when it occurs naturally in the wild, but an occlusion of judgment when it is imposed by force

nihilism tries to make a virtue of despair and fails horribly

irony has been conflated w/ sarcasm for too long, ppl really don't know it

― this horrible, rotten slog to rigor mortis (Dr Morbius), Sunday, October 19, 2014 3:14 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM

I value sincerity but I fucking hate Sincerity

dlh otmx10000000000000

another product of sat night ilx.

ilx

Wait are we talking irl people or people on the Web or people on ilx here imago?

web mostly, ilx gets the balance right I think

Can anyone suggest recent articles about irony and its uses/misuses (aside from DFW)?

ILX is garbage at the moment ime.

Which is my problem no doubt but I'm not getting very much out of it at the moment but, hey ho, swing and roundabouts.

thread title keeps reminding me of Hüsker Dü - causticity, irony, insincerity, nihilism, prudence and hope

hey imago you missed out laboured facetiousness

oh snap

Oh bravo, what an achievement

I don't know why you included causticity in yer list because some of the posters you seem to admire the most trade in little else.

nah there's a mere dose of causticity among the content

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Op%2BP%2Bb7IL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

imago, have you read this book?

(1) [The ironist] has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself.

Too much for me, anyway. Plus these people are entirely humourless. (xp)

relentless flippancy is the mirror of relentless causticity

But that's just an aside, that doesn't normally bother me.

(xp) Very probably

I was pretty caustic too when I first fetched up here but, after a while, fuck it, who needs it?

I think I can be accused of the last of these (the depressive kind of nihilism) more than the others.

that extract makes sense treeship and there is a value in locating potential delocations of language, but there is also value in claiming one's language with some level of sincerity. I'd have to read it tho yh

I'd take "irony" in this context less in the Wayne Booth/Richard Rorty sense than a kind of soft ever-present sarcasm.

my view of this issue is close to rorty's. irony marks the gap between appearance and expression so it is really hopeful and not nihilistic at all. at its best it implies that there might be more here than we are seeing. the new sincerity - or "post irony" as i call it - is nihilistic because it affirms the limitations of its own discursive tools but decides to remain satisfied with them anyway. a book like taipei seeks to describe contemporary life without either irony or melodrama and the reality it ends up describing is fundamentally unlivable.

the new sincerity - or "post irony" as i call it - is nihilistic because it affirms the limitations of its own discursive tools but decides to remain satisfied with them anyway.

One could argue that this is the role of "solidarity" in Rorty's thought, as a sort of retreat from irony as he defines it.

In other words, a kind of affirmation of finitude against the recursive infinity of irony.

I won't hold with any kind of non-infinitarianism.

xp yeah, and in rorty's case that finitude is ultimately american liberalism

^^^

that part of the book was unsatisfying to me too. the "finitude" he selects -- an "opposition to cruelty" -- seems random, like it wasn't related at all to the ironic consciousness that he believes is essential to liberalism. but he needs to do something because he himself admits that some of the most brilliant ironists had very illiberal views.

Caucasity

people who handwring about sincerity shd be forced to work the mines, thats how we find our miners going forward

dfw wld prob be alive today tbh

This was a 1990s problem, you young people have to come up with some fresh problems of your own

srsly get off the dikk

maybe you have to learn to love irony

it's a pose that is worn to mimic an air of sophistication and worldliness

Throw one more vote in the "irony has a bad rep but is misunderstood" camp. In fact I don't think irony opposes sincerity at all; on the contrary it seems to me a necessary element of a sincere and humane worldview. This could just be a silly bias that is the product of my own experience. But I will say that expressions of "sincerity" (see how I can't avoid putting it in scare quotes in this context) without guile or irony put me on guard--I will doubt your sincerity the more sincere you are trying to convince me you are. This is why I can't stomach e.g., Mumford & Sons.

A good example of an artist I like who uses irony in a good way would be Andrew WK. His shtick seems so one-dimensional and trite on the surface, but when you listen to his music or see him live or consider his weird career trajectory, it becomes pretty clear that he is aware of the fact that he deploys a ridiculous shtick, and *the awareness of how ridiculous it all is* is what makes it so much fun. Not unlike a Quentin Tarantino movie, definitely a product of the "ironic" 90s. (I don't tend to associate the 90s with irony much because it was the decade of my childhood, and my perception of it all as it was going on was almost irony-free)

AWK's advice column is my favorite discovery of 2014 (meant sincerely)