AudioShocker

It appears to be the case that I’m not quite done talking about this whole ironic enjoyment issue just yet, as much as it’s something of a digression from what I’d rather be doing with this column (though, as mentioned last week, I’ve been rather heavily steeped in high art recently, so not engaging much with notions of pop art or pop culture in the past couple of weeks now, so in a way, the digression is welcome, and clarity is important to me, so…), so here’s a final (hopefully) accumulation of thoughts on the matter, this time focusing a bit more about whether or not a hypothetical “sincere” art is really the opposite of ironically enjoyed art.

1) Well, first of all, I need to address Kirsten’s comment to Culturology 10.5: In paraphrase, she makes two main points: a) This argument, in general, is an old one, and that the “side” of the argument that I’ve been advocating is that of the generator-of-artifacts, and b) Ironic enjoyment is crucial to the ongoing health of art/culture, because it is essentially an act of critique, and without critique art/culture would lack the drive for refinement or critique. Actually, I’m going to leave point “a” pretty much alone; I think it’s a bit off base, in that the position from which I’m writing, if we are going to agree that ironicizers are critics, is really a meta-critique more than a rebuttal from an artist’s point of view. That is, and I’ll get back to this more a bit later in this post, I am not concerned with defending the artifact, but rather trying to determine what it is that ironic enjoyers are doing and why it is that I don’t trust them, and don’t in fact see their activity as being useful to the world of pop culture.

Which leads me to point “b.” To place the kind of ironic enjoyment that we’ve been discussing (and the examples that you yourself give) on the same level as cultural criticism at large is a vast overstatement of what’s actually happening when people laugh at the shittiness of shitty pop culture. First of all, for criticism to play an active role in the ongoing evolution of a segment of cultural production, that sector must first of all recognize the importance of the criticism. At least in American popular culture, the whole notion of critique has been absorbed into the structures of entertainment themselves - it is not actual criticism which is welcomed, but rather a certain appearance of such a thing, with a mind towards the market that the quasi-criticism might attract. The primary drives for adjustments of cultural products are demographics and revenue, both of which depend not on criticism but rather focus-groups and market projections. For exceptions that prove the rule, consider the actually good TV shows that were “critically lauded” but “unpopular” (say, for instance, Arrested Development).

To put it another way, there is criticism-from-without and also criticism-from-within; to have the kind of dynamic relationship between artist and critic that Kirsten was talking about, it requires a criticism from within (which, again, can be as simple as the artist recognizing that his/her work is prone to criticism in the first place). This is the sort of principal that lies behind the distinction between movies and film that I was making back in Culturology 006; that we simply can’t watch all cultural artifacts from the same point of view when they demand wildly different things from their viewers. Where I think Kirsten goes wrong is in seeing ironic enjoyment as criticism-from-within. This kind of ironic laughing at bad pop culture, while certainly correct in noticing that something is bad, is not productive–is not in dialogue with that artifact. In fact, I argue that it absolutely hinges on the fact that other people don’t get the joke. If the people you’re criticizing don’t get the joke, than how can you expect them to refine their craft based on your laughter?

Which is not to say that criticism from without is not a vital process in its own right (it’s mostly what I do, as a critic, as a matter of fact). But again, part of that criticism is an appraisal of the object-of-criticism on its own terms. In this way, we can see criticism as being essentially sincere. The Marxist critic of the capitalist culture industry may well be heavily ironic or cynical in her or his appraisal of pop culture, but it is a critique which comes from a context of sincere belief in alternative structures of cultural existence. The ironic enjoyers have no such stance–they are implicitly arguing for the status quo (yet another season of shitty TV shows to laugh at) while copping an attitude of elitism. Hipsters ironically enjoying House are no more critics than kids that listen to Nu-Metal are rebels.

This brings me to the last point (or set of points) that I want to make on the topic: the kind of popular culture that can be ironically enjoyed is not necessarily “sincere.” Pop-cultural artifacts are for the most part products. They can be analyzed and critiqued as such (like picking which brand of canned tangerines to eat). At the same time that I’m not a particular fan of across-the-board ironic enjoyment, I also don’t think that critiquing pop culture, necessarily is at all useful–I do enjoy it and find it enjoyable to read about–if we are going to actually be critics, than we should be criticising the system and not the individual bits of output. The kind of sincerity which underpins systematic criticism is the kind which should be embraced, just as the kind of irony that recognizes its own limitations can also be embraced.

At any rate, hopefully this third post now brings things closer to a satisfactory sense of completion (if not closure). I do feel like, if nothing else, it pretty well explicates the stance from which I’m reading culture (which was the intention in the first place–it should be pretty easy now to see how I love Total Recall but hate Donnie Darko). And I should be crawling may way out of all this abstract muck for next week, with more direct and contemporarily-exampled discussions of all things media.