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September 05, 2002

Savage Postirony

"...Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it's beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they're shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they chooose to ignore....Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution."

from The Savage Girl, Alex Shakar.

just a little peek into what I'm reading today. Another first novel that makes me CRAVE another by the same author. So, c'mon Alex, get crackin' on book number two!

for some reason, I feel like reading Kavelier and Klay will segue to this through The Cheese Monkeys. it'd be a good tryp-read, anyway.

Posted by Heather at September 5, 2002 12:00 AM

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