now i am thinking a lot about this paragraph

[zond7]

From Momus:I spent a lot of the 80s being a satirist; setting out to refute the ideology of the day in songs. I'm now much more wary of being that kind of artist, or even that kind of blogger, because it just seems to me that it tangles us up in the puppet strings of narratives which are there to trip us up and waste our time. These narratives have

Comments

[vito_excalibur]

You ever read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again? This reminds me a lot of one of the things Wallace talks about in that book, which is the poisonous effect of irony as the dominant tone of discourse.
Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive - a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.

So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis Hyde] puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to

[zond7]

I think people often mistake where satire aims. The target of satire is never the apparent target; indeed, the best satire I think works when the target has *no idea* of what the message holds. It is supposed to pass through them untouched, because either they are too dangerous to wake, or because the message must be smuggled for other reasons, or because it is funny to exert some superiority that way.

There's always point of complicity in that, because you aim at the great, but never touch them, but it's not necessarily harmful.
I think that irony and satire have absolute, but local uses: you can do a lot with them when you're cajoling people to join the right side, or invoke the fight. The point is to have a battery of weapons.

You're right about Adbusters, which I think is an artifact of some weird Stockholm Syndrome among people held hostage by the prettiness of the media.