causticity, irony, insincerity, nihilism

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)