The Ironic Generation
or, Why the Snark Must Be Hunted
Much, probably too much, has been made of Hipsterdom, probably the closest our generation has to a genuine countercultural movement. The Hipster, whose attributes I need not repeat here, is the object of almost unanimous hatred, especially from the now-aging hippies and punks, who criticize him for his vacuous obsession with image and surface. Their countercultures, they say, really meant something; his is just an empty fashion statement that borrows from earlier eras instead of creating anything new. As a young person who does not entirely escape the label of "hipster" himself, I find these criticisms obnoxious. They're just rehashing, in their own terms, the same tired "in my day" spiel their parents surely gave them when they came down to breakfast wearing safety pins. Still, the content of their objections contains some insight about us that deserves a listen.
I have no problem with the way we feed on cultural detritus like so many dung beetles—nowadays, newness emerges precisely from the imaginative recombination of found objects, and moreover there are some genuine treasures to be dredged up from the sediments of 80s sitcom purgatory or what have you. My problem with the whole subculture is the ironic attitude that we all accept so uncritically. I don't care about the ways we don't measure up to some grown-up's idea of what a youth movement should be; if they don't like us, that's their problem. But, for our own sake, we must be aware of what may really be going on behind the snarky way in which we interact with the world.
God help us, we are the Ironic Generation. Since the day Odysseus introduced himself to the Cyclops as "nobody," irony has had a long and illustrious career. It has always been a reliable weapon of the weaklings of history, the way they used their intellect to best those of greater physical strength. Irony is exploiting the wiggle space between what is said and what is understood in order to cheat fate. Irony is winning the game by kicking over the chessboard, cutting the Gordian Knot with your sword and proclaiming yourself king, stealing your older brother's birthright. It is the method of using your superior powers of discernment to your advantage when the material odds are stacked against you.
But for a while now, as Nietzsche tells us in On the Genealogy of Morality, the weaklings have been the ones in charge, and they haven't stopped using irony. What are we but weaklings in charge—skinny, unathletic kids unconcernedly studying in Ivy League schools, getting ready to become unconcerned world leaders. Among us privileged weaklings of the late aughts, irony has become the metaphysic. While some plebes still throw up air quotes or say "Just kidding!" we've even gotten beyond the need acknowledge irony. Odysseus couldn't resist telling the Cyclops his real name eventually, but we never break the spell, because the spell is the heart of our assumed identities. Our very existence seems bracketed by quotation marks. Even our remark that we enjoy Gossip Girl (or whatever) "ironically" has an unmistakable whiff of irony to it, the moment when hipsterdom itself becomes the object of its own ironic distancing ("I'm a hipster—get it?") and the whole culture starts shooting off into infinite regress.
It seems the problem here is not insincerity, which has always been present in bourgeois society anyway. Rather, irony has suffered the fate of all tools of self-preservation once the possessor's livelihood is no longer in question—it has become a tool of self-gratification. "Enjoying something ironically" amounts to nothing more than taking pleasure in your own superiority to those poor losers who enjoy it sincerely, in the distance between your discerning intellect and their benighted walnut-brains. PBR, before becoming the a priori beer of choice it is today, was appropriated by upper-middle-class kids who knew it was the stereotypical working class beer. The very act of appropriation implies a comical incongruity between the beer and the people drinking it while nudging each other in the ribs.
The problem with this distancing is that we forget how to actually live in the world. If irony is our way of engaging with our perceptions, all we see in objects is our own intoxicatingly pleasing reflection. All the creative potential of found art dissolves in this internal masturbation. We only drop the show to sincerely dismiss something as garbage. Once the borrowed cultural meme has been sucked dry, the novelty gone and any droll incongruity grown familiar, we have the brutal pleasure of consigning it, with the decisive sweep of an executioner's axe, back to the morass of pop culture mediocrity from whence it came. Irony has mutated into an insatiable predator, constantly eyeing the present and the past for new prey to tacitly chuckle over. And as irony diffuses from the counterculture into the mainstream and becomes a cultural norm, the pleasure of distancing is replaced by the fear of being seen as not in on the joke. Whereas before it was a weapon of liberation, irony now begins to enslave us.
Admirable display of solidarity though it may have been, Princeton Prop 8 was a good example of how far the culture of ironic distance has penetrated into our generational zeitgeist. Ostensibly, it was a satire—that is, irony used as a weapon against the oppressive status quo. But instead of stimulating any sort of dialogue, as that infamous Prince article called for, it instead merely sought to demonstrate, via clever analogy, how utterly absurd and patently indefensible Proposition 8 was. That the protest did nothing to question why so many people have such wrongheaded ideas is beside the point; my problem with it is that, underneath its sheen of social activism, Princeton Prop 8 was ultimately another case of irony as self-pleasuring.
PP8 was founded on one of those squirts of smug self-satisfaction that we liberals (our parents' generation as well as ours) sometimes get—one of the main things conservatives hate about us—from the certainty that ours is the right opinion, that anyone who disagrees with us is ignorant, and that history will fully vindicate us in the coming age of universal civility and cultural sensitivity. Proposition 8, at least on the surface, was purely a human rights issue, not tainted by the inevitable ambiguities of economic policy, so it was the perfect trigger for a bout of self-righteous narcissism. Forgoing any mention of the actual content of Prop 8, PP8 served only magnify that self-satisfaction into a circle jerk, a celebration of the subtlety and superiority of our rational Ivy League minds. I should be clear that I'm not trying to insult the good people who organized the protest, but just to use it as an example of a problem that is endemic to our generational consciousness. It goes to show that, even with the best of intentions, we are still drawn back into the black hole of self-congratulation.
I should reiterate that we late-aughts college students are not "bad people"—we've just somehow gotten ourselves caught in a self-perpetuating cognitive cycle that, by seeing all things only as new opportunities for ego-stroking, denies us the experience of genuine happiness. To try and sort out how we got into this prison is way beyond the scope of this article, but I'll say this much: it looks to me as though the glacial wall of hipsterdom is starting to melt in the spring sun—indeed, I suspect this piece may already be behind the times. Those who say that the cynicism of our age was caused by 9/11 and the nightmare of the Bush years may have a point. In those eight years we young liberals felt so powerless; to continually assure ourselves of our intellectual rightness was our coping mechanism. The utterly unironic burst of joy that resounded on Election Night signaled a shift in the collective consciousness: it's okay to care again.
Our own “indie” cultural superstructure, which we see with such ironic eyes, has itself been trumpeting this message for years. Bands like Arcade Fire, and most recently Animal Collective, have had the courage to risk looking like they cared too much in order to keep alive the nearly-lost art of caring at all. Even Daft Punk's Discovery, now the surprise classic of the decade, expresses that quintessentially human love-ache that it sometimes seems only robots are capable of these days. Discovery is the archetypal text of the dance music that has most recently fallen under hipsterdom's icy gaze, but it nonetheless resounds with the promise of the human (albeit robotic) warmth that is bringing in the thaw. I hope the whiff of spring I've caught really is a sign of things to come, and I'm excited to find out what new shapes our generation will take in the coming years.
See Also: This book by New Yorker film critic David Denby, which was published around the same time as this article and deals with similar issues.