Finding the meaning in cynicism
Last semester, a poem I submitted to the University of Guelph’s undergraduate literary and visual art magazine, Kaleidoscope, was accepted for publication. As part of the submission process, I was asked to write a little blurb about myself, so I wrote something really serious and introspective about my art and its inspirations. I took it as my little window to explain why my poetry reads the way it does, and why I wrote the poem as such.
But something bizarre happened. Out of all the submissions, my little blurb was (if my memory serves correctly) the only one that really took itself seriously. Like, the entries were pretty funny, given that I know most of the poets and artists published in the magazine then and in previous issues, and their work is generally excellent. But I felt undeniably self-conscious about my super-serious, (probably) super-pretentious blurb about my perceived creativity, sticking out like a beacon of self-importance among an apparent “who cares” mentality.
Internet culture and collective memory works in strange, silly, and sometimes provoking ways. This editorial examines the search for “meaning” in a culture defined by cynicism (which isn’t always the worst thing).
I understand that it’s an undergraduate arts journal and not The Boston Review or something. I get that a part of university culture maintains a sort of light-heartedness that we don’t often get in our studies. The more I think about it, however, this little moment of self-awareness – and the discomfort and self-consciousness that came with it at that launch party at the Brass Taps – is indicative of something larger I’ve grappled with for most of my short artistic career. At what point do I take myself seriously, or not seriously enough?
I’m probably not alone in this, but having come of age in a sort of global cult of digital representation, I’ve perceived a trend in ironic, cynical self-representation that fascinates the hell out of me. Be it through a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym on social media platform, downplaying significant achievements, over-analyzing our personalities by way of Buzzfeed quiz, there appears a vague cynicism in how we represent ourselves that, I think, warrants engaging with critically, and can perhaps explain a lot about how we posit ourselves in the “post-ironic” age, to put a term to it.
All this isn’t intended to give off some sentiment that longs for the socio-historically imagined “old days,” either. That’s an, at best, useless and, at worst, detrimental, mentality. Thought currents change, as they must.
As an example, the influential postmodern thoughts of Theodor Adorno, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Hannah Arendt, to name a few, essentially emerged from a Western world collapsing onto itself with the devastation of the Second World War – a conflict of a scale so massive that it forced thinkers, artists, and writers to really revisit the history of ideas in a sense that all but eliminates the structural straight-ahead-ness of philosophical discourse that seemed to define thought currents from the Enlightenment to the modernist period. History and culture became less obvious in its perceived flow, and interdisciplinary, intercultural thought became not only a suggestion, but a necessity.
If this change was marked by the devastation of the Second World War, where do we delineate this “turning point,” so to speak, in the idea-sphere of contemporary global capitalism? What is the ultimate artifact of post-irony, if there is one? Whatever it is, it’s not one essentialist or monolithic thing. It cannot be. I feel that’s the whole point – this irony and cynicism permeates aesthetics, politics, and culture to the point where I, at least, can’t tell if something is meant to be ironic or not most of the time.
(I’ll elaborate on this further, but cynicism in the case of this piece is meant to indicate a collective sense of dread for the future that our culture seems to at once resist and is also complacent to.)
For the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a paper for a literary theory class about the cultural value of irony and self-parody in 21st Century mass culture. My paper is focusing largely on Adult Swim’s incredibly funny and slyly thought-provoking short film Too Many Cooks, which premiered late last year. The 11-minute short film, if you haven’t seen it, is pretty much a long-winded credit sequence to a non-existent late 80s sitcom (in the manner of Full House, Family Matters, or Cheers). In its runtime, it maintains this core concept as it morphs into a horror film, into a parody of Night Rider, into a parody of Star Trek, and so forth. The whole thing wraps itself up by actually trying to start the imaginary sitcom episode, before it’s cut off by the actual end credits before a character can even get a single word in.
I think I feel comfortable saying, without sarcasm or jadedness, that Too Many Cooks is a benchmark of post-satirical, post-ironic culture. It’s a seriously thought-provoking meditation on mass culture and how collective memory works in a framework of Western post-capitalism. Somehow, it means both everything and nothing at all. The way it plays around with cultural memory, narrative formalism, and uncomfortable humour, is nothing short of astounding. It means something, even if that meaning is obscured by itself.
In terms of looking for meaning in a culture of post-irony, this is obviously on the extreme end of the spectrum. For more obvious, clear-cut examples, perhaps take a look at this year’s Superbowl halftime show – in which the world sees Katy Perry, in a sweetness that borders on aggression, strutting her stuff among swaths of googly-eyed beach props. Does this sort of “kiddie culture” and its ironic appropriations have a real, tangible cultural “value?” In terms of visual codifying, I feel like it does, though it may not be to my particular tastes. Something like this, I think, comes from that longing for some vague, imagined past, both personal and collective, which I mentioned earlier.
From the whole “90s kid” aesthetic finding its way into the art galleries and fashion shows of the Western world, or the consistent onslaught of gritty re-vamps of old TV shows and movies, or someone like Kanye transcending more into a parody of himself instead of the deity he may or may not actually long to be, Western mass culture seems to be taking a deconstructive approach to itself that is informed and defined by a barely-tangible sense of tongue-in-cheek irony and cynicism. But this irony, I find, has some truly compelling implications in its anxious positing between the recent past and the not-too-distant future.
So, to return to the question that stoked this whole long-winded Diet Coke of Cultural Studies editorial – do I take myself too seriously as an artist? Or does taking oneself seriously just mean something different at this juncture? Either way, examining the relationship of exchange between cultural consumption and cultural production might shed some light on how we represent ourselves and where we posit our thought currents. And it’s becoming increasingly important to do this to find meaning in anything. If the cultural-industrial complex demands it, do we supply it? Can we actively resist?
In the case of my little blurb about my poetry, maybe the others got it right. Maybe those humourous, self-aware, self-directed jokes were more honest and accurate than my pretentious artist statement “proper.” When facets of the culture we breed seems to spill over into one another in such a significant way, maybe we just need to laugh at the whole damn thing.