hey old folks answer me was there a time where unironically wholesome or vaguely sexualizable shit didnt get "that just sounds WRONG!" treatment

seriously, in - i dunno - 1970, would normal adults working in an office together look at a magazine ad with a kid on grandpa's lap and be like "that's just not RIGHT lol" or is this a modern invention?

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongye taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

lol copied and pasted from a blog so no typo

I think it would have been pretty normal in 1970, kinda o_O by 1980. Not sure what it was about the 70s...let's blame C.J. Laing and John Holmes. But what do I know, I was 6 years old during most of 1970.

How was life on the lap?

I think the answer here is "no," depending on precisely how you mean it -- I mean, making sexual innuendo out of innocent statements is like ... there's plenty in Shakespeare, and I'm not sure there's anything else is Restoration comedy, and I'm sure drunk dudes kept it up strong all through the 20th century

Looking back I think you might mean something different here, though?

Those were days you could spank the hell out of a naked kid and nobody wanted to put it on the internet.

Drunk dudes NOTM.

i remember reading once, cant remember where, that david letterman really mainstreamed the whole lol-the-50s/lol-the-midwest school of cheap irony, like before letterman guys in an elevator would just talk normally but post-letterman guys in an elevator were likelier to be all riffing on the banality of elevator conversation and how keenly away they all were of participating in this... t/f??

yeah nabisco i know folks have been turning innocent shit into dirty shit (and pompous shit into ridiculous shit) since babylon, i guess i mean more as an all-encompassing communication mode... like, it isn't subversive or novel, it just flows unconsciously now

I think the increasing acceptance of homosexuality and the heightened awareness of things like incest/pedophilia/etc. combined with the popularity of shock humor and gross out jokes has just kind of opened up a can of worms for people both mentally and verbally in the past few decades, so that people are much quicker to jump to the dirtiest possible connotation of a phrase or action and/or to say something about it.

i guess this and the ironic guys in the elevator are two diff things but it feels like theyre all coming from this same shift in how people interact day to day

like before two guys could hug, or a kid could sit on their grandfather's lap etc. and everyone in the room wouldn't immediately take a mental inventory of all the boner jokes they know

xpost

i guess im kinda thinking of this too http://www.geocities.com/arlen_texas/shesaid.htm

another flavor of this is that any children's character or mascot or whatever thats in any way manacing or unusual gets the whole "that's gonna give me NIGHTMARES!"/"clowns are the scariest thing in the world!" treatment

i'm trying to get at exactly what i'm talking about here, still... there's this constant desire to show how far ahead in the game you are, that you're capable of interpreting junk culture in a way that the creators didn't intend?

If anything I'd think that SNL more than Letterman is responsible for what you're talking about here.

and what is david denby????

Oh, I see, you mean actively ironizing everyday stuff -- kind of attached to what somedude said, I think ... with an adult person in 1970, his/her experience of the world would still be mostly firsthand, whereas today, people's experience of the world is way more mediated, which is what allows you to be ironic and self-conscious about this stuff, having sort of external/mediated experiences of things that you can constantly compare to what's actually happening

That ties in with what somedude is saying because we're kind of constantly immersed in mediated information about certain things that lots of people really have no firsthand experience of and feel loads of discomfort about in exactly those terms

"keenly away"

btw i meant "keenly aware" obv

Hahaha maybe I don't see, and you mean something else -- if it's just about taking this kind of critical/ironic stance toward interpreting all the mediated info around you, I think most people would agree that took a huge upswing over the second half of the 20th century just because people were more immersed in such stuff and lots of us pretty naturally tried to become better / more powerful / more perceptive about dealing with it!

i used to be able to watch sports events, see a team mascot on the sidelines, and never think about furries.

thanks a lot, ilx.

I'm wondering how it's connected to the increased knowledge/acceptance of gay folks and a wider variety of people able to actually detect a gay subtext. I'm not expressing this very well, but it works like Rob Halford talking all this black leather fetish wear and setting the tone and style as a macho guy in heavy metal in 1978, only it took everybody else a decade or more to twig to the fact that the costume had different connotations.

and I get the sense that an increasing use of camp and, if nothing else, more people seeing John Waters movies(or insert whatever relevant pop artifact you'd like).

Again, I'm articulating all this none too well, but hopefully somebody gets the idea.

If anything I'd think that SNL more than Letterman is responsible for what you're talking about here.

I think I agree with this. Also: National Lampoon. (That shit was rude. I got in big trouble when my dad found a copy of that in my room, circa 1977.)

Mainly for the cartoon where a little St. Nick is crawling up a naked woman's leg and saying "Yes, Vagina, there is a Santa Claus."

yeah i mean i guess a lot of this goes back to notes on camp but at the time this was this gay minority response to mega-popular mainstream culture, whereas now the only unintentional camp left seems to be at the fringes of society (christian music videos, weird local ads put up on youtube) and foisted into the mainstream by internet camp appreciation - unlike the days of, i dunno, ben hur, there's a larger audience for laughing at camp than there is for shit that isnt trying to be appreciated as camp

Funny how Culture Club, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Duran Duran were almost post-gay top 40 bands in the early 80s, where now it would be hard to imagine them being accepted as more than a niche.

gargantua and pantagruel

does that make any sense? even in 1970, it feels like the majority of entertainment and advertising and whatever was unintentionally ridiculous shit, and there was a minority of folks who took pleasure in appreciating it on a different level, but now in 2009 theres only a few corners of unironic camp left, and usually i only hear about it from best week ever or some internet meme

not to say a lot of folks working on campy 60s/70s stuff didnt obviously know what they were doing, but i mean did the majority of viewing audiences for bewitched or even batman appreciate them the same way we would now?

i think youd have to argue that this kind of response is different than any other sort of socially-conditioned responses--i cant think of any other examples right now but im sure clowns (or whatever) provoked a certain kind of conditioned response in the 1950s; that they provoke a different reaction in a (certain) segment of the population now doesnt necessarily mean anything other than we live in a different time period with a different set of cultural lenses.

i mean when i hear a guy go "oh man clowns give me nightmares" or "hey thats just WRONG" i dont really imagine that hes thinking it all the way through in a "whats the most ahead-of-the-game/ironic/not-chumpy way to react," i think its more of a "thats just what people say" reaction...

i mean i get that the distinction im making is a fine one, but its the difference between dave letterman and the cast of snl operating in that ironic insecure mode vs. the whole country

or to put it another way--just because everyone loves camp now doesnt mean theyre operating at a sontag level of irony--just that they understand that theyre SUPPOSED to love camp, because letterman or dimitri martin or whoever does

yeah i guess this is sorta like every ilm thread 'oh man i cant believe modest mouse is popular now!!@ even tho it sounds like everything else on the soft rock station - just becase something has its origins in minority/opposition culture doesnt mean it could become part of the majority smoothly and painlessly? so distanced cultural one-upmanship became the default mode

(Just to clarify: at least as an eighth-grader, I looked at Culture Club and Frankie as gay the way we look at Obama now as black: it's there, but it's not distracting. Whereas now a top-40 Frankie or Queen, etc., would be easier to ridicule.)

I dunno, E, that seems like a case of not noticing the water you swim in -- this country's still full of a billion kinds of earnestness either way, isn't it? (We might also just have a more complex decentralized patchwork of one person's earnestness being ridiculous to someone else)

(I also worry about giving ourselves too much credit for being so much more penetrating about these things than people were in the past; surely we will get old and some hollowness will appear in our stuff that seems amusingly camp to our successors -- maybe it'll even be exactly what you're talking about, maybe that quality itself will begin to look quaint and laughable)

or to put it another way--just because everyone loves camp now doesnt mean theyre operating at a sontag level of irony--just that they understand that theyre SUPPOSED to love camp

yah but isnt the o.p. asking when this shift in perception occured and i guess implicity why/how?

uh, vietnam, and because we all read derrida

jk i dunno

well yeah n i know that but i think there's also maybe just MORE views in the mainstream now? like, in 1960 how many penetrating critiques of ike or jfk hero worship were floating around, vs endless unignorable obamessiah jokes now

um there is a terrific umberto eco quote about irony/innocence from his postscript to name of the rose that i think would offer some interesting insights to this conversation but i cannt find it

xp i know youre kidding with vietnam but in the prez analogy i just made, maybe nixon? is that just boomer mediapoly that makes me think this was a shift in how folks viewed "the president" as a thing

i dont know how to connect the whole kevin from the wonder years "we lost our innocence in the late 60s" b.s. to guys being self-conscious about an elevator conversation but some old fuck on ile must be able to

What if its just an acceleration of the cycle of production/consumption/time passes/fashion changes/rediscovery/mockery?

The clown thing has a lot more baggage behind it than "oh I want to be ahead of the game" and doesn't seem to fit in with the sexualization jokes; there's an entire set of iconography/art predicated on the idea that clowns are sinister and evil, the most obvious example being The Joker (who first appeared in 1940). The whole "clowns are scary" thing seems to be driven from two angles:

- standard horror-cliche subversion of a positive childhood memory to elicit a fright reaction
- a real-life childhood experience with a clown that was supposed to be fun but, for whatever reason, involved some level of trauma

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_clown where they link this as a manifestation of the Trickster archetype

sort of a tangent but i've always wondered how many cues 'our' behavior has taken from mass popular art since say 1900, like when any given two lovers are in an argument, how many of the poses and rhythms and sighs and pauses and speech is coming out of what people *think* a lover's quarrel should look like(and if this matters etc.). Sure all those cues presumably come from 'life' in the first place but i get the sense that certain modes of expressing oneself have gotten all but filtered out with each passing generation as mass cultural formulas have slowly taken hold and metastasized (sometimes into novel new/authentic directions sure but again i'm curious as to what's been lost)

i think this basically some zeitgeist-y superobv b_s but there has a been a concrete structural change in what most first world ppl do and it seems obv that having a job that involves thinking mostly symbolically or in abstracts lends itself to thinking about everything else as signs, signs, everywhere signs

I got to read some old (1967) issues of Justice League of America, and the letter columns had a running argument about how camp the fans wanted the comic to be.

I would imagine some of the ridiculous "sexual" situations would have been commented on if things like that could have been discussed in a letters column.

I also get the feeling that these were aging college students attempting to be a step ahead of the material they still loved.

xposts to lots of things

dan this is more about the shift from clowns-are-evil as serious mythology to insecure wahey!!@ joke

xp it was the late 60s when stan lee declared marvel comics would now be referred to as "marvel POP ART! productions" on the cover in response to lichtenstein

the whole kevin from the wonder years "we lost our innocence in the late 60s" b.s.

The scarier thing is that Lucas himself help start this in the early 70s, with American Graffiti and this nostalgia bit that was released & celebrated for depicting a far more innocent time & place only 12 years previous.

tremendoid, I think about that all the time too. Like, when I just watch two people talk, and their entire demeanor, I'll find myself thinking, "Did people even have that facial expression in common conversation in, like, 1740?"

there's this mental policeman that most of us carry around nowadays. it tells us how things might conceivably look to people who spend a LOT of time parsing the weird implications of how things might look to other people.

there's something meta about this internal monitor, in that it's always sticking everything in quotation marks and observing an imaginary model the observation process. it isn't a new thing, exactly, but its omnipresence and people's resulting timidity/awkwardness wr2 EVERYTHING at least seem kinda new.

i assume it's partly a response to the omnipresence and sophistication of commercial media (as nabisco suggested), and also to the mainstreaming of camp sensibilities (kingfish). there's also our social internalization of early 20th century psychology/psychiatry: freud, etc. plus the breakdown of old taboos & social conventions that kept certain "unpleasant" ideas & realities out of the public view, allowing things to assume more unitary surface meanings.

it's weird though, and things definitely seemed very different in my youth.

stan lee declared marvel comics would now be referred to as "marvel POP ART! productions" on the cover in response to lichtenstein

And it was awesome when Jim Steranko did just this, sorta:

http://i178.photobucket.com/albums/w243/5mudg3_photo/393px-SHIELD_04.jpg

sort of a tangent but i've always wondered how many cues 'our' behavior has taken from mass popular art since say 1900, like when any given two lovers are in an argument, how many of the poses and rhythms and sighs and pauses and speech is coming out of what people *think* a lover's quarrel should look like(and if this matters etc.). Sure all those cues presumably come from 'life' in the first place but i get the sense that certain modes of expressing oneself have gotten all but filtered out with each passing generation as mass cultural formulas have slowly taken hold and metastasized (sometimes into novel new/authentic directions sure but again i'm curious as to what's been lost)

― same as giving a shit (tremendoid), Friday, February 20, 2009 2:59 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

btw if u r a certain kind of anxiety-prone english major this is the kind of shit that keeps you up late at night

also makes you want to stop watching porn

dan this is more about the shift from clowns-are-evil as serious mythology to insecure wahey!!@ joke

gotcha, now that makes more sense

i tend to act unconsciously with other people or in group situations but whenever i'm mopey or feeling like a loner i always end up rifling through all the media depictions of a lonely guy riding the bus at night or whatever - i think on some level this helps explains the continued popularity of anti-social media archetypes like r crumb or whatever, in that they dont just depict a way that many people live & feel but also provide a model, they legitimize that stuff. 90s zine/mini-comics celebrity culture in general was very much based around this, and i'm sure a lot of famous personal blogs or livejournals today still are.

I feel I qualify as an old person (I'm 54), but the hell if I am going to read this whole thread.

My only comment is that, sure, some people snigger at everything that has the slightest sexual overtones and they always have. I suspect it has spread to a wider segment of the population now than in, say, 1970, but it isn't a cut-and-dried yes-or-no kind of thing.

does what i just said make any sense? if im out drinking or at a party or whatever, i feel like im taking most of my cues from instinct and past experiences out drinking or at a party, but if i just got dumped or i'm feeling like i just pissed everybody off and wanna go for a walk to think about stuff i end up embellishing my real world emotions with the drama of a movie i saw or a book i read where the protagonist does the same

When was the last moment that a guy named Dick was just a guy named Dick?

i think there are easy parallels w/r/t the rise in postmodern lit in, say, the 70s...see excerpted dfw interview below. nabisco is otm that irony as a cultural/conversational device is obvs tied to the amt of mediated content ppl absorb.

DFW: The biggest thing for me about -- that was interesting about post-modernism is that it was the first text that was highly self-conscious, self-conscious of itself as text, self-conscious of the writer as persona, self-conscious about the effects that narrative had on readers and the fact that the readers probably knew that. It was the first generation of writers who'd actually read a lot of criticism --

ROSE: Yeah.

DFW: -- and there was a certain schizophrenia about it. It was very useful, it seems to me, because the culture -- this was a real beaker of acid in the face of the culture, the culture at the time that this came out. This was before, you know, the youth rebellion in the '60s. It was very staid and very conservative and very Alfred Kazin-ish.

And the problem, though, is that a lot of the schticks of post-modernism -- irony, cynicism, irreverence -- are now part of whatever it is that's enervating in the culture itself, right? Burger King now sells hamburgers with "You gotta break the rules," right? So I'm -- I don't really consider myself a post-modernist. I don't consider myself much of anything, but I know that that's the tradition that excited me when I was starting to write.

when any given two lovers are in an argument, how many of the poses and rhythms and sighs and pauses and speech is coming out of what people *think* a lover's quarrel should look like(and if this matters etc.).

^^ oh god, I could go on forever about this -- yes, and this is one of the best examples of it because the tenor of this kind of argument is something you don't learn from many places but media, really -- you and any lovers you have will have been steeped in mediated versions of it before stepping into firsthand experience

(interestingly enough, in this particular instance, that actually seems like it's generally a positive thing; I mean, we learn how to do most everything through some form of observation/mediation, and having a relatively responsible shared mass-media vision of how certain things work can be helpful)

(the thing that gets me, though, in other situations, is that people's entire expectations of life can become mediated in this way that's very visible, to the point where they become self-dramatizing and weird and seem like television characters, and that's . . . that's a whole other thing)

xpost - umm the DFW piece "E Unibus Plurum" is pretty U & K here

Madame Bovary! xp

anybody ever read the harold bloom joint where he theorizes that shakespeare's plays actually invented what we now identify as universal human emotions

this is what happens when u kill god, guys

i just got dumped or i'm feeling like i just pissed everybody off and wanna go for a walk to think about stuff i end up embellishing my real world emotions with the drama of a movie i saw or a book i read where the protagonist does the same

You just reminded me of going to the woods when I was a kid -- early teens? -- v v upset about something, in that teenaged way, and thinking that people in books were always finding comfort/clarity in natural settings, that the outdoors was supposed to be somehow calming to me, and yet it I was still just as upset about the same things...and not being sure how I was supposed to feel about that.

I eventually decided that when you have it all around you 94/7, the outdoors holds no special appeal.

i've flipped through that bloom book, i think the chapters are divided into each of the plays, pretty sure i've read the hamlet chapter, pretty great stuff, but i do not read a lot of lit crit

heres a bit of the eco i was talking about:

http://alittlefish.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/umberto-ecos-definition-of-postmodernism/

also here (start on 530):

http://books.google.com/books?id=Uk8G-y2iIKMC&pg=RA1-PA531&lpg=RA1-PA531&dq=umberto+eco+irony+innocence+name+of+the+rose&source=web&ots=XVa3ejgnqn&sig=ciH0UUmEK5fThJ5Ys01TvdJiFfk&hl=en&ei=tg-fSZXfEdeitgepiZiIDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PRA1-PA530,M1

When was the last moment that a guy named Dick was just a guy named Dick?

That's a great question. Youngest one I could find on NNDB is Dick Swett (yes, really), former US congressman and ambassador. He's 51. The vast majority, however, are 60+.

also applicable: dfw story "my appearance" (sincerity vs. irony made concrete via david letterman)

i love the eco bit because i think hes otm abt irony's opposite/counterpart being innocence, rather than earnestness--also because by making "postmodernism" a category rather than a discrete historical period it diminishes the danger of "postmodernism-as-the-end-of-culture" talk.

I don't know that irony needs a sole counterpart, because you could easily put those things in a series, in the way that DFW and a lot of other people seemed to feel they would fall, back in the 90s or so:

innocence --> irony --> earnestness

haha and I don't want to call that a dialectic, necessarily; the feeling (which I think a lot of people still have but nobody's really figured out how to use properly, at least fiction-wise) is that the response to any enervating effect of irony is to make a firm stance of sincerity, one that's not based on innocence but on ... well, bravery

^^ I'm partly not thinking of that in a dialectical way because I think there's something that comes between innocence and irony, some sort of aggressive rupture or demoltion

ha, yeah, "modernism"

(the thing that gets me, though, in other situations, is that people's entire expectations of life can become mediated in this way that's very visible, to the point where they become self-dramatizing and weird and seem like television characters, and that's . . . that's a whole other thing)

there's a built in off-putting quality to self-mythology (at some level they really don't want you to relate, or keep up obv.)
but i find this type interesting if they have a modicum of self-awareness but are too modest/playful to show it. doing it convincingly takes a lot of social acumen either way, just something to marvel at, usu. from a distance.

the response to any enervating effect of irony is to make a firm stance of sincerity, one that's not based on innocence but on ... well, bravery

btw im an on-the-record nietzsche stan but one of the reasons for it is that i think he has one of the most sensible responses to the terrifying possibility of complete and total ironic nihilism, or nihilistic irony, or whatever, which is, sort of, in the absence of values, take a stand for values, make those values, and cowboy up abt it--hes a terrible macho asshole about it but i think its the same impulse.

I don't know that irony needs a sole counterpart, because you could easily put those things in a series, in the way that DFW and a lot of other people seemed to feel they would fall, back in the 90s or so:

innocence --> irony --> earnestness

anyway the reason i brought earnestness up at all isnt because i dont think it interacts in interesting ways w/ irony but because in most conversations it comes up as irony's opposite--i.e., that which isnt ironic is earnest (making irony sneaky, lying, devious, etc., none of which things i think it is). i guess that may be a byproduct of thinking about irony as equal to sarcasm, which is also sort of limiting... in any event anything that can divorce irony from a "sarcastic/earnest" dichotomy is a good thing imo

but i find this type interesting if they have a modicum of self-awareness but are too modest/playful to show it. doing it convincingly takes a lot of social acumen either way, just something to marvel at, usu. from a distance.

― same as giving a shit (tremendoid), Friday, February 20, 2009 3:27 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^this^^

Also, I think that folks were making sexualized puns and whatnot for quite some time, or at least knowledgable about a sexualized subtext. I mean, check the pre-Hayes Code W.C. Fields or the history of early-20Cent rhythm & blues

yeah and watching old showbiz dudes put on a roast (.jpg) gives you a glimpse of what parallel dirty culture might have looked like. shakespeare too, forgot about shakes

anyone know which harold bloom book?

wasnt it more of a behind-closed-doors, almost elitist thing?

anyone know which harold bloom book?

http://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Invention-Human-Harold-Bloom/dp/157322751X

like "the Aristocrats"?

wasnt it more of a behind-closed-doors, almost elitist thing?

i think, at least in terms of dirty jokes, metajokes or w/e that its more about the parameters of what's polite or just permissible to say openly now i don't think it was every really an "elite" thing

1) Isn't the postmodern sensibility supposedly unironic (because irony is, in its own way, corny) without being earnest? Isn't that what you kids think you think?

2) To approximate an answer to the titular question, ask yourself this: What is the age of the youngest person you can plausibly imagine ironically saying, "You just have a dirty mind"?

3) Did you laugh when you read "titular question"?

The clown thing has a lot more baggage behind it than "oh I want to be ahead of the game" and doesn't seem to fit in with the sexualization jokes; there's an entire set of iconography/art predicated on the idea that clowns are sinister and evil, the most obvious example being The Joker (who first appeared in 1940). The whole "clowns are scary" thing seems to be driven from two angles:

- standard horror-cliche subversion of a positive childhood memory to elicit a fright reaction
- a real-life childhood experience with a clown that was supposed to be fun but, for whatever reason, involved some level of trauma

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_clown where they link this as a manifestation of the Trickster archetype

my disappointment at your not quoting ICP here is total

"...unironically saying..."

lol I deleted ICP from the first draft

since Derrida teaches us that erasure isn't wholly possible, let me just say welcome to the wizards kingdom

I was saying up top, if it's just about innuendo, Restoration comedy consists of like 90% guys saying stuff about when cocks crow and other guys going "yeah well your wife is crowing for my cock" -- I don't know that there's any big mystery about the history of the acceptability of dirtiness, that just kinda comes and goes

(Although admittedly there is this kind of fascinatingly modern feel about reading some of that stuff, this mindbending sense of reading centuries-old jokes that'd show up in a completely idiotic movie today)

I'm not sure if this is what Max was saying, but I feel like earnestness is often the default attitude in Eco's sense of postmodernism -- I think you get that sense very strongly in guys like David Foster Wallace or Dave Eggers, both of whom use postmodern strategies not to be playful or cynical but as part of this enormous self-awareness they have. They are ironic because they know that irony is inescapable, but they are also constantly seeking genuine emotion and truth, and if they can just say "look, I'm aware of what I'm doing here" then that truth can be more direct and/or transcendent. And the earnestness maybe derives from having to compensate for the inevitably mediated nature of the form.

dfw and eggers are both pretty bad writers imo

^^^very informative post

vip

yeah jay i agree with that

@ nabisco i dont know if this is true but my sense of what and what is talking about is less innuendo itself than the cultural expectation of innuendo. like if your co-worker was talking about a slide in a powerpoint presentation and he was like "i just can't get this to fit" and you repsonded with "that's what she said" is the joke here the innuendo or the ironic repetition of a tired joke?? or both???

yeah thats it

i mean when we as 2009ians see dick jokes on the walls a pompeii our amusement at that as a concept doesnt seem to be the same force that moved pompeiians to write dick jokes on the walls at pompeii

haha the ironic deployment of jokes is a whole other matter, yeah

honestly, though, there is a level of engagement with certain old things where it becomes hard for me to imagine that people's amusement in the past wasn't always necessarily so much less knowing than ours (though this would seem very difficult to really investigate)

surely there was no era in which this cover was not 'dude wtf!!!'

http://www.bizarrerecords.com/galleries/country/BultJulie16.jpg

i'm sure you're right but what's an example of this? i remember reading about how victorians were obsessed with terrariums and these tiny fake recreations of natural world, created & sold in response to their increasingly brick-and-mortar society, and how even little old ladies had a very ironic view towards these baubles and essentially viewed them as a form of kitsch

xp to kitschsuh

When I imagine the audience at things like Wycherley plays laughing endlessly at variations of someone screwing someone else's wife just offstage (and the guy innocently saying "Wife! my Lady Fidget! wife! he is coming in to you the back way," meaning something else), there is just a part of me that ... there is a level of repetition of this stuff where you'd think a certain modern-looking attitude would have to crop up, right? I mean given the "rakish" attitude of the court at the time I don't know how sure we can be that people weren't making the equivalent of "that's what she said" jokes ironically ... the literature's certainly stocked with characters speaking with the sort of irony, not just being used ironically

I mean, I just honestly don't know

i drive past two billboards every day for some kind of employment agency (or maybe it's an actual company, i don't know, people have been advertising similar shit like this where i live so you always wonder if it's some kind of pyramid scheme). they're just the name of some company and the main text is "a job with MORE COWBELL" and i forget the other one but i think it's a seinfeld ref. the thought of someone looking up the company based on the billboard and then maybe applying for the job (admittedly for poss. different reasons than MORE COWBELL) is a little depressing, and i know edgy things are "appropriated" and eventually become a comfortable everything-is-all-right-really mantra and we're supposed to be ok with that, but there's something about it happening on a billboard advertising a company that is very probably going to disappear in a year because no one knew what it did (+ it was all v. pro-capitalist-to-the-point-of-screwing-everyone-else-over Mormon Republican). but then what do i know about this company and these people; once you break it all down, nothing's really that sinister i guess. just the overall effect of a zany quote and the edge of quoting it becoming something really comforting/prozac-like to people so they're not "scared" of applying for what is probably a really shitty job.

"more cowbell" is edgy?

haha no, that's part of why it's sad i guess.

it's just referring to a ephemeral pop culture mini-phenom like "not!"

yeah it's drifting away from the thread topic, but i kind of hear "woha clowns are so scary" or *look at happy jr. sitting on grandpa's lap* as the hot topic to MORE COWBELL's american eagle but more or less the same thing. anyway, i don't have anything insightful to add about this phenomenon other than agreeing w/ other people

copping my own joke but there was a story that back in his Silver Spoons days, rick schroeder used to bounce little gary coleman on his lap. Years later he found out that gary was like 10 years older then him when he was doing that.

to get back to kitsch and nabisco's upthread comments about media saturation, i don't think the victorian experience of the loveable silliness of fairies or clutter or goofball sex jokes was at all the same as our contemporary ironic default state. a big part of the modern conception started up in the 60s & 70s, when "underground" culture started to explicitly present itself as aware of the absurdity and even the outright stupidity of mainstream popular culture. i.e. when culture began to define itself as a thing that exposed the secret kitsch subtext behind culture.

at first, this was a subcultural, countercultural thing. hippie mockery of straight culture, grotesque inversions of 50s suburban stereotypes in underground comics, revisionist westerns, SNL, films like the groove tube & kentucky fried movie, etc.

prior to that, american popular culture seems simply to have presented narratives that represented "the human experience". in other words, people looked at culture, while culture looked at people. this model did not encourage neurotic self-awareness. the people on TV did not seem to be aware they were under observation. they did not often comment on their status as cultural objects. the new pop of the 60s & 70s subverted this. the people on TV & movies began to comment on the medium and its cultural position. they were self-aware, and more importantly, self-critical. they weren't just "people", they were "TV people". movies began to be "movie movies".

i think this did encourage a sort of neurotic self-awareness in people. the cultural observation model changed. when you looked at things, you weren't just seeing them, you were seeing what they seemed to be saying about themselves and the culture at large. you saw the critical stance things were adopting, even unconsciously.

this tendency ramped up massively in the 80s & 90s, and so did its effect on human society and psychology. people began to adopt attitudes of kitsch distancing with regard to themselves -- much as ironic pop culture did. when culture presented ironic self-awareness as a model for the human experience, people turned their own ironic self-awareness into a sort of personal pop culture. in a sense, people began to see themselves as cultural products, much like TV shows, celebrites, and cereal boxes.

kitsch was no longer something a few people might see in the gauche nadir of pop culture, it was part of fundamental human experience. you weren't what you felt like or what you imagined yourself to be, you were instead the act of watching yourself do things on the public stage, things that were weird and potentially funny/suspect. things that other people might view as representative of some other narrative, like on TV.

^ longer than i thought

and to extend that, we're now totally conditioned to view ourselves our communication and our culture not as what it seems on the surface, but as an ever-shifting series of comments on other things. this isn't new, but it's endless, multilayered pervasiveness is.

that's why the clown business IS new. clowns aren't clowns anymore. they're a comment on wierd shit people used to like and the hidden perversity of seemingly normal things. they're even a comment on the fact that everyone likes to talk about how scare clowns are. in my mind, they're a perfect crystallization of the fact that everyone is a hipster nowadays. no one views clowns as what they're supposed to be (just clowns, kids like em, good at parties & circuses). everybody wants to see through to the "secret truth" behind clowns.

Where I disagree with that is that I don't think clowns have been just clowns for a good 60-70 years.

(iow for the intents and purposes of this discussion, this is not a new phenomenon)

I don't know that irony needs a sole counterpart, because you could easily put those things in a series, in the way that DFW and a lot of other people seemed to feel they would fall, back in the 90s or so:

innocence --> irony --> earnestness

haha and I don't want to call that a dialectic, necessarily; the feeling (which I think a lot of people still have but nobody's really figured out how to use properly, at least fiction-wise) is that the response to any enervating effect of irony is to make a firm stance of sincerity, one that's not based on innocence but on ... well, bravery

― nabisco, Friday, February 20, 2009 3:24 PM (2 hours ago)

I'd express the series more along these lines:

earnest innocence --> irony --> earnest enlightenment

...in which innocence is defined as 'unconsciousness of irony' and enlightenment is defined as 'skepticism of irony & awareness of its enervating effect.'

It's simple, of course, to take a stance against irony's ill effects from the position of enlightenment. Lame example of ironic homophobia: let's say a liberal, tolerant college kid shouts out to his buds, "Are any of you fags going to the Nikki Giovanni lecture?" None of them are sincerely homophobic, but they get a kick out of appropriating bigoted language for laffs. An enlightened onlooker might approach the kid, let him know that he's in on the joke ("Hey, you're a smart guy, and I know you're not really a bigot, but..."), and let the kid know that regardless of his intent, his language is every bit as hurtful as dyed-in-the-wool bigotry. In this case, the brave, enlightened party engages with the irony directly but acknowledges that ironic ill will should be governed by the same social standards as any other (sincere/unironic) form of abuse. This can be a very difficult stance to rebut, since the challenger inevitably comes across as more noble and at least as bright & witty as the speaker.

On the other hand, an innocent onlooker might approach the kid and take him to task for spouting homophobic language, not realizing that the language is being used ironically. The kid, of course, has a ready defense up his sleeve. He'll say something like, "I didn't really mean it -- I'm a GLBT ally, ffs!" to justify his behavior. If the onlooker remains innocent and can't wrap his head around the idea of the word "fag" being used in an arch, unbigoted context, then he'll simply repeat his accusations of bigotry and, well, hold the kid up to the social standards that govern abuse. The kid will probably go on thinking (rightfully?) that he's being misunderstood and wrongfully admonished. But that doesn't make him immune to punishment. It just protects him from feelings of guilt-- unless, of course, he becomes enlightened and sees the error of his ways.

Sure, the innocent party engages only with the antisocial behavior (in this case, foul language) in which the irony is framed, whereas the enlightened party engages with both the irony and the associated behavior. The former takes an accidental stand against irony; the latter, a deliberate one. But their purpose is essentially the same: to take the ironic party to task for behaving inappropriately. 99 times out of 100, earnest enlightenment is a more ironclad defense against irony than earnest innocence, but I'm still convinced that there's more than one position, however shaky, from which one can counter an ironic act.

clearly john wayne gacy ruined clowns

xp

i dunno. i'm 40, so maybe my perspective is limited. but i distinctly remember the blossoming of the "clowns are scary" (subtext: perverts) mere in the early 80s. poltergeist was probably part of that, at least from a kid's eye view. gacy, yeah, maybe the instigating point.

but i just can't think of any examples of "WTF clowns?" type humor from prior to the 80s. clowns were everywhere in pop culture in the 50s/60s/70s, and they seem rarely to have been looked at as representatives of some secret yuckiness. i mean, it doesn't seem as though there was some kind of default ironic weirdness built in.

Restoration comedy, not Victorian -- Victorianism is, superficially speaking, kind of a high-water mark for earnestness and (the prizing of) innocence

xpost - hahah was about to say something about Gacy; clowns seem like a bad example here cause I'm not sure the culture shift around them is that unusual. And the idea that "everyone" sees them as something other than just clowns would appear to be undermined by the continued existence of clowns. (We just happen to be steeped in a lot of media that sets up dramatic ironies about clowns being evil or scary)

when any given two lovers are in an argument, how many of the poses and rhythms and sighs and pauses and speech is coming out of what people *think* a lover's quarrel should look like

right, and now imagine being an actor in 2009 on a television show, or in a play or a movie, and you've got a big argument scene to do. your character is probably going to be indulging in a bunch of stock huffiness that he or she got from the movies or tv! playing it "realistic" is meaningless

Just to try this on: the archetypes of earlier in the 20th century were the Bank Robber with the bandit mask, the Prisoner with stripes, the Town Drunk, the Sleeping Mexican. Now we think of alcoholism not as a moral choice but as a disease, and the robber not just as a morally bad guy but as a victim of society or mental illness; and so in the same way we look at occupations (clowns, etc.) as a reflection of mental states instead of as a lifestyle.

I don't know how huge of a distinction you can make, though! There's no part of "realistic" action that isn't culturally defined and modeled on examples and mediation, whether it's watching your parents fight or watching people on TV fight or watching your parents model their fighting on your grandparents' modeling their fighting on people in movies -- in the end all this comes down to is having a shared cultural notion of what a fight looks like (and we have that for everything)

I remember when my older brother, when he was probably 10 and I was seven, cribbed both lines and body language from Eight is Enough in one particular argument with my parents.

This can be a very difficult stance to rebut

actually it's very easy, you say "ok, whatever faggot" since the enlightened onlooker has waded into an ironic conversation with deadening earnestness thereby setting him or herself up for target practice

it's as if eco's lover said "why are you quoting barbara cartland?" - the intimacy of talking together in the same mode is broken

i think a lot of this is about wanting to feel that you belong. shared popcult tropes can provide that kind of tribal sense of security

clowns were everywhere in pop culture in the 50s/60s/70s, and they seem rarely to have been looked at as representatives of some secret yuckiness.

Straying away from the humor aspect of this, clowns have been used as objects of terror for a while. I cited the Joker upthread, which was 1940, but there are also Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon and Berlin Express, both of which feature sinister clowns and are from the 40s/50s, plus Lon Chaney's "There is nothing laughable about a clown in the moonlight," quote (all sourced here http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7191721.stm)

If there's a change, it's that people are now comfortable with openly laughing at people afraid of clowns.

there may be a lot of conscious and subconscious hatred involved with making comments about sitting on grandparent's laps and having clowns act like dicks in your face. Not "I was molested by my circus uncle" hatred, but "Life sucks and people are bad and none of this niceness is real, and I make jokes so it can't touch me."

I piss on all that is normal and decent because I'm not very happy. (that's what she said)

also, For all the people that must still attend circuses, more people just stay home and comment on how clowns suck and the animals are being abused, so whatever joy there was in the art of clownery, Krusty and Stephen King have a bigger audience.

Just to try this on: the archetypes of earlier in the 20th century were the Bank Robber with the bandit mask, the Prisoner with stripes, the Town Drunk, the Sleeping Mexican. Now we think of alcoholism not as a moral choice but as a disease, and the robber not just as a morally bad guy but as a victim of society or mental illness; and so in the same way we look at occupations (clowns, etc.) as a reflection of mental states instead of as a lifestyle.

― Eazy

that's true and a good observation. but i get the impression that when people in the early century used these shorthands (evil villian in a tophat stroking his cruelly curled moustache while cackling), they weren't mockning such representations, but rather using them as a sort of shorthand. knowingly, yes, with an understanding that the audience would receive them in an equally knowing manner, but not as a form of self-critical metacommentary on modes of representation and cultural foolishness.

the thing about clowns isn't that they're now seen as scary, but rather that they're now seen primarily as a form of commentary. not as things in themselves, but as vehicles for a critique.

yeah the transformation with clowns is not that some people see them as scary, but that a hell of a lot of people think it's somehow hilarious and indicative of some unspoken truth to find them scary

it's actually pretty amazing how durable the image of a bank robber with a bandit mask, the prisoner with the stripey shirt, the shape of an old mortice key - so many things from that particular era (late 1800s, early 1900s) which a lot of people have never seen with their own eyes at all - are; they still show up in cartoons like clockwork

Straying away from the humor aspect of this, clowns have been used as objects of terror for a while. I cited the Joker upthread, which was 1940, but there are also Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon and Berlin Express... If there's a change, it's that people are now comfortable with openly laughing at people afraid of clowns.

― HI DERE

i don't think i was clear. i wasn't trying to argue that clowns had never been used as terrifying things (punch and judy, c'mon), but rather that the clowns weren't ever used in the modern, ironic sense. modern use of clowns: clown exists, supposedly as "just a clown", but the clown's real narrative function is to allow a shared experience of the culturally critical "clowns are scary" meme. like the basic narrative function of the clown now is to be a critique of clowns.

same thing i said before, i guess

They marched a bunch of stripey prisoners through downtown Phoenix last week. (unrelated to the point of the thread, maybe Joe Arpaio is actually taking us back to a better time before ironic distance)

The basic narrative function of clowns isn't to be a critique of clowns; it's to wallow in a storytelling cliche that has gotten less due to overuse/misuse.

Some of the black humor you're seeing is driven from a completely direction, to go off on a tangent; I can't think of a single famous clown who didn't have a pretty fucked-up, harrowing bio, and I think that default assumption is now a cultural norm.

also wtf why I am arguing about clowns on the internet, it's Friday

I'm really not understanding this allegedly widespread transformation of clowns to some knowing scary-clown meme, or how this is distinct from any number of other things that just, for whatever reason, pass out of style --

I also still find it a little hard to just take for absolute granted that the tenor of previous eras necessarily didn't encompass some level of knowingness about things that had passed out of popular imagination in their own time

when cowboys making light of tinhorns and greenhorns, they knew they wearing out cliches about city slickers from back east, but they couldn't stop themselves.

clearly john wayne gacy ruined clowns

"Gacy, a beloved local figure known for killing neighborhood children and burying them under his floorboards, was arrested Friday and charged with dressing up as a clown."

great discussion here.

not much to add other than I think the mentions of Derrida and Nietzsche and Freud above are pertinent because what strikes me as the key problem for the modern individual is a kind of paradox of self-reference. In other words, how do you become an secure individual (thus stable, independent, and safe from the Other, or Community) without borrowing some sense of "individualism" from the culture at large. kind of the "conformity of rebellion" problem. There is a sense, then, in which this hyper-irony is a kind of immunity response to that kind of threat...

things pass out of style and become funny, weird, sure. but that's not quite the same as what happened to clowns. i think that one of the reason's that "welcome to the funhouse" came as such a shock was that it was identifying something emergent, something new, a new way of conceptualizing the self in relation to the world. the self is the thing that is aware of the self, and aware of the awareness of the self, and aware of the awareness of others, and so on.

published in 67, at the height of the dismantling of the surface narrative of the world, in favor of "hidden truths", at the onset of a new, self-critical pop culture. prior to this sort of universal hipsterism, a clown could just be a funny guy. and if that funny-guy model got old, it would become just another goofily dated stereotype, like the dastardly landlord, or the high-collared nebbish, or the criminal in a striped suit.

but that's not what happened to the clown. he got deconstructed. he became not just old-fashioned, but symbolic of other things. the way the hairdresser became symbolic of homosexuality. and the uptight judge or cardinal symbolic of repressed perversity. we trot these stereotypes out now not to laugh at the delightful old-fashionedness, but to laugh at the hidden truth. in doing this, we perceive ourselves as seeing through the a conventional understanding (which basically amounts to a lie) to the hidden truth.

Whoah, by the way, in the interest of tying up two thread in this conversation:

What's funny about the lovers'-argument thing is that it's one arena in which we usually don't do the thing Eco is talking about, being hyper-aware of the lack of innocence in our actions -- we act out emotional states the way we've seen others do it on, say, TV. And one advantage of that is that what we're acting out is immediately recognizable to a huge number of other people, because they've been exposed to the same media. So we can communicate effectively almost by quoting mediated stuff, and we're surprisingly not self-conscious or ironic about this, I don't think, in a ton of the way we dramatize ourselves, whether it's arguing or acting "sexy" or any number of really mediated things.

^^ Now that makes it sound really artificial, but really this is what humans are hard-wired to do, isn't it? A lot of our capacity as babies and children involves watching people around us do things and being acculturated to things like "this is how a person expresses this emotional state." So there's at least one upside to that being so heavily mediated, which is that we get that acculturation in a way that communicates to millions and can't just be confined to the people immediately around us.

(Haha additional note: I think that's a lot of what gives people the freedom to act in a lot of different ways now; go back enough decades and I think there was enough strangeness already involved in people's regionalism that a really strong code of conduct and social control had to exist to bridge everyone)

xpost - what's "Welcome to the Funhouse?" (I thought you meant "Lost in the Funhouse" but that's clownless, I thought)

meant lost in the funhouse. dunno what welcome to the funhouse is. interpolation of G&R, i guess.

some of my last post was bs. hairdresser - teh gay is way old. i'm not sure how to nail my point down. basically it's that pop culture became terribly, painfully self-aware at a certain point, became aware of it's own ridiculousness and stupidity, and began distancing itself from itself in response.

and that this, in turn, did something to the people enmeshed in pop culture, and vice-versa, and back and forth, etc. basically that in the 20th century we broke the relationship between what things seemed like and what they really were, and that is still reverberating through human psychology and culure. present default state for human consciousness is essentially paranoid. everything is a coded (and more importantly a critical) message about something else. to like something is to be "the sort of person who likes things like that". to say something is to be "the sort of person who says things like that".

i do think that the pervasiveness of this kind of paranoid awareness is new (late 20th century vintage new).

painfully self-aware at a certain point, became aware of it's own ridiculousness and stupidity, and began distancing itself from itself in response

i'd be inclined to reverse this and suggest that becoming aware of ridiculous and stupidity was a result/strategy of increasing autonomy.

eco idea about modeling behavior on media is interesting, but nabisco OTM. humans always learn their behaviors from models. in the absense of media representations, the model = the actual behavior of others.

what's interesting about media as a model is that it's inherently inaccurate. when i model my fights on the way my peers or parents or tribal elders fight, i'm at least modeling my fights on actual fights. when i model my fights on movies, i'm not doing that at all. i'm modeling my fights on something wildly distorted by its very nature. and i'll grow up to make movies in which people fight inaccurately, in part based on the movies i saw, but also based on the movie-inspired fights i've had myself. so the model changes very quickly, because it's never quite satisfactory. it's always coming up short when measured against experiential reality. and because the model is subject to rapid change, the next generation's fight model will be radically different than mine.

absent this intermediary media modeling (and the need to constantly correct and update it), behavior would change more slowly, because there would be less distorition in the feedback loop. the fights my parents "performed" would largely reflect the fights their parents performed, as would my own, as would my children's, etc.

be careful tho--ecos idea isnt really about modeling behavior on media; its abt self-awareness & a certain idea of 'innocence' w/r/t expression. in eco its not that we model ourselves on cartland, its that were unable to say anything that hasnt already been said by cartland. its a subtle difference maybe but its an important one--i think eco just doesnt want to open that particular can of worms.

agin im a certified french poststructuralist stan but im surprised that baudrillard hasnt come up yet! hed seem to be the most relevant thinker w/r/t these concerns. the simulacrum and all that.

the really depressing concept here (imo) is sex and the ultimate & unfortunate realization that we dont and probably never have had 'authentic' or 'real' sex--that the sex we have, modeled as it is on pornography & schoolyard ideas of what sex is or should be, is in certain disappointing ways less real than the sex we see on screen

yeah, max, I definitely see that difference -- what I'm noticing is more that there are certain things we take from media where we don't develop that awareness, don't feel pressed for originality or more "authentic" experience, etc., and I'm trying to think of what differentiates those things

my guess is that they are mostly among (a) the really low-level stuff like body language and tone that we're hard-wired to absorb from others, and (b) really fundamental view-of-the-wide-world stuff that's equally inacessible to us in any conscious logical way; everything in between that we can wrap our heads around is more exposed to that consciousness

"first we look at pornography to simulate sex, then we have sex to simulate pornography"

-- albee

hokay, read the eco. dunno that it applies to the postmodern position, re: comedy and self-awareness. his reduction of the postmodern quandry is too simple. we are framed by history yes, and this often makes our actions and emotions seem like parodies of something else, bits stolen from inferior source material.

but what's at issue here isn't the mere awareness of history, but how that awareness forces one into a position of paranoid defensiveness. when we say, "as barbara cartland would say, i love you," we're not just identifying and attempting to transcend mere precedent. our discomfort is largely based on the supposed shoddiness of the precedent. put another way, the postmodern awareness carries within it a projection regarding the other's values, and how we must position ourselves relative to them. the self-awareness arising from imagined resemblance to specifically shoddy historical precedent is only relevant due to the paranoid assumption that it is shared by others, and that in order to remain in the world's good graces, one must constantly identify one's position relative to ALL possible precedents.

so yes, eco's lover gets himself off the hook by announcing the resemblance, but what he's doing is not simply admitting history. rather he's identifying and criticizing the foolishness of precedent in order to demonstrate superiority and avoid parallel diminishment.

same with the "clowns are scary" thing. packed into that is an announcement that one is not one of those simple fools who fails to see the complexity and sinister humor of the figure. the clowns are scary meme is a cultural critiqe, an announcement that one stands outside the quotidian and evaluates it for hidden deviancy.

Sexual innuendo has been a feature of writing as long as there's been writing but the public hands-up-look-how-clever-i-am-i-spotted-the-cheeky-word-and-called-it fake prudery is new-ish and predicated on being able to spell that shit out without being arrested.

in answer to the original question (if I understand it) - no. lolita aside, childhood - and images of childhood - weren't as sexualized then. and awareness or wariness about child abuse was unspoken. (i was 12 in 1970 FWIW). tho when i was in like third or fourth grade, in the 60s, the nuns handed out these brochures about not accepting rides or candy from strangers and i really didn't know what to make of the warning. started watching for weird guys cruising around in old buicks but never saw any.

i've got a wild story about intercepting a pervey dude trolling near my kids school a couple weeks ago but I'm saving it for my memoir.

OK. I just read a fairish bit of this thread. First observation: you guys are waaaay overthinking this shit. Second observation: every generation thinks it invented itself comepletely anew and is egregiously misinformed about what went on before it came on the scene.

Now I will go back to chewing on my toes.

i got freaked out at the thrift store a couple of weeks back cuz they had a copy of SHOW ME! which is a 70's kinda hippie kidz book about changing bodies and it's basically just a picture book of little kids lying around naked touching their genitals and somebody's parents had a copy when i was a kid and it freaked me out then too! i hadn't seen it since then. kinda like a proust and his fucking cookie moment if proust's cookie had been a photo of some little naked kid tugging on his naked mom's boob.

(i'd LOVE to know who bought it at the thrift store. only selling it for a dollar. and it was gone a few days later. meanwhile, i really want that art ensemble of chicago coffee table book they are selling, but they want 20 bucks for it! damn you abebooksebayetc!)

um, anyway, my point was gonna be, no WAY they put a book like that out now.

I was going to say "It's Perfectly Normal", but it is all cartoons, it looks like Show Me! is a photo book. People who bought this book also bought. Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, etc.

That Just Sounds WRONG!!!

the people who bought that book in the 70s were probably all about "let's make sure our kids feel good about their bodies nudity is natural etc" and not really thinking about childporn/kiddie-rape etc.

OTOH my mom would've banned from the library and though "those dirty hippies!"

not much to add, except that this thread has been interesting to (mostly) read

fwiw, i was at a party last weekend where 50% of those in attendance were pals from clown school. they were all drunk, and there was lots of juggling.

i'll grow up to make movies in which people fight inaccurately, in part based on the movies i saw, but also based on the movie-inspired fights i've had myself. so the model changes very quickly, because it's never quite satisfactory. it's always coming up short when measured against experiential reality.

wtf bro i mean (a) there is no platonic ideal of how to fight with your lover (b) i think you're misusing "model" here (c) these types of fights are often v. satisfactory for the very reasons you and nabisco have outlined (d) what is experiential reality made of if not the things we experience?

also your charge that this "paranoia" is new or newly pervasive seems pretty suspect. i mean who really knows but reading meditations aurelius is tryna mediate similar anxieties. i think "we watch movies now" is bs as proof of this btw

it's actually pretty amazing how durable the image of a bank robber with a bandit mask, the prisoner with the stripey shirt, the shape of an old mortice key - so many things from that particular era (late 1800s, early 1900s) which a lot of people have never seen with their own eyes at all - are; they still show up in cartoons like clockwork

― Tracer Hand, Friday, February 20, 2009 11:28 PM (29 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

do they actually still show up like clockwork or just show up in cartoons from 70 years ago that still get shown a lot today?

no offense lamp, but i don't see any clear connection between aurelius and what i'm describing as postmodern paranoia - a near-paralyzing awareness of historical and cultural precedent, of the self as a thing which exists always under observation (both external and internal), and of the ever-resent threat that one might seem to adopt an "incorrect" stance or posture, even by accident. it's been a long time since i read the meditations, though, so maybe i need to brush up?

anyway, i think this infinite/inescapable maze of awarenesses and fears is new, in intensity if not in kind, in part due to media saturation, but also due to how little we now hid from ourselves, how little of the human experience is considered unmentionable. likewise newish is the default state this paranoid awareness seems to produce in people: a constant, defensive, """ironic""" positioning and repositioning relative to everything that seems to exist in world. i suppose it could be argued that this sort of defensive stance in response to paranoid self-awareness isn't new at all -- that it describes, for instance, the everyday state of intrigue-minded, style-conscious, politically struggling courtiers in 17th and 18th century europe and england, and that's probably true to some extent. but i still suspect that it IS new as a dominant element in non-aristocratic western consciousness, in "ordinary, normal" consciousness, if you will -- especially in its incredible complexity and subtlety.

as to your four points, i agree on most counts, but don't see as how they undermine what i was saying:

(a) it's true that there is no ideal, natural or correct way to fight. no argument. but i wasn't concerning myself with that. rather, i was suggesting that fight-styles derived from direct observation of human behavior and passed along by behavioral replication were likely to remain more consistent and stable over time than fight-styles derived from vicarious, mediated experience (models) and passed on in the same form. especially when the culture grants individuals free license to criticize, revise or even abandon the received models.

(b) i'm using "model" throughout simply to mean a constructed representation of something else (noun), or the act of conceiving and constructing such models (verb). relevant examples here include stories, drawings, songs, and films.

(c) yes, the fights we have are satisfactory in themselves, as fights, no matter what they're influenced by (or "modeled on" - another usage, oops). but the influencing models can never be entirely satisfactory - again, especially not in a culture that feels the need to constantly revise or abandon its old models.

(d) experiential reality is made of nothing but things we experience, but things can be experienced directly (i burned my hand in the fire), or indirectly, as vicarious, mediated experience derived from second-hand models (my father told me a story about a man who was bitten by the fire when he put his hand in it).

^ should have revised. bad spelling & grammar, reams of "especially". oh well :(((((

do kids still go to circuses? i was aware of them and all when i was a kid but i don't think i knew anyone who'd ever actually been to one.

i think this hyperaware sense of irony is a lot more universal now than it was during the '90s. earlier i was reading an article from 1996 complaining about the then-current ubiquity of joan osborne's "one of us," which was all over mtv and everything with nary an lol in sight, and just thinking how hard it was to imagine something that openly and unapologetically dippy and sincere and unironic achieving that level of cultural acceptance today. like, obviously people made fun of it and complained about it at the time, but it was a huge hit that a lot of people bought and (presumably) liked, whereas i can't really imagine it even existing as a hit in today's atmosphere.

(d) experiential reality is made of nothing but things we experience, but things can be experienced directly (i burned my hand in the fire), or indirectly, as vicarious, mediated experience derived from second-hand models (my father told me a story about a man who was bitten by the fire when he put his hand in it).

i sort of want to bust out the old postmodern 'ur experience of placing ur hand in the fire is already mediated by a host of things, most importantly, the language u use to process, categorize and define the experience; language derived from other sources and language that as a mediator ultimately shapes ur experience of ur hand in the fire'

i think arguing that theres a really significant dividing line btw so-called 'direct experience' and 'mediated experience' is dangerous--its all mediated; its always been mediated; its--to use another postmodern phrase--always already mediated...

i guess i can be sympathetic to the idea that even if the feeling or paranoia or 'postmodern condition' is nothing new, its just different in scope or reach or whatever but i wouldnt push it b/c 1) how on earth can you really judge or figure that out and 2) the desire to see the postmodern condition as a truly new thing is surely a symptom of the postmodern condition and 3) this would make me burt_stanton, and burt_stanton is miserable

hokay, read the eco. dunno that it applies to the postmodern position, re: comedy and self-awareness. his reduction of the postmodern quandry is too simple. we are framed by history yes, and this often makes our actions and emotions seem like parodies of something else, bits stolen from inferior source material.

but what's at issue here isn't the mere awareness of history, but how that awareness forces one into a position of paranoid defensiveness. when we say, "as barbara cartland would say, i love you," we're not just identifying and attempting to transcend mere precedent. our discomfort is largely based on the supposed shoddiness of the precedent. put another way, the postmodern awareness carries within it a projection regarding the other's values, and how we must position ourselves relative to them. the self-awareness arising from imagined resemblance to specifically shoddy historical precedent is only relevant due to the paranoid assumption that it is shared by others, and that in order to remain in the world's good graces, one must constantly identify one's position relative to ALL possible precedents.

so yes, eco's lover gets himself off the hook by announcing the resemblance, but what he's doing is not simply admitting history. rather he's identifying and criticizing the foolishness of precedent in order to demonstrate superiority and avoid parallel diminishment.

― welcome little swetty (contenderizer), Friday, February 20, 2009 8:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also dude just getting to bat to defend my boy eco here but youre adding all kinds of baggage to his example thats very explicitly not there--ideas & feelings like paranoia, transcendence, shoddiness, foolishness, superiority, diminishment. the lovers in the eco quote dont (explicitly) feel any of those things; in fact, theyre earnest in their declaration of love, and acknowledge the past (imo) expressly to avoid the problematic youre describing.

but yeah really as per nabiscos point we shouldnt even be discussing eco, we should be 'discussing' baudrillard (not ironic use of quotation marks) since hes the guy whos all about the hyper-real

like before two guys could hug, or a kid could sit on their grandfather's lap etc. and everyone in the room wouldn't immediately take a mental inventory of all the boner jokes they know

I still live in the before world.

Christ on a cracker -- what's a safely short distance to scroll up and start reading this thread?

I did read down from the top far enough to read about the Letterman Hypotheses.

i remember reading once, cant remember where, that david letterman really mainstreamed the whole lol-the-50s/lol-the-midwest school of cheap irony, like before letterman guys in an elevator would just talk normally but post-letterman guys in an elevator were likelier to be all riffing on the banality of elevator conversation and how keenly away they all were of participating in this... t/f??

If David Letterman invented this, you should all be thanking him, you ingrates.

As for the 50's and the midwest, both ripe for comedy, IMO. One of my favorite Top Ten items, on the list of Top Ten Least Popular Norman Rockwell Paintings: "Caught touching himself."

Come on, that's damn funny.

i don't see any clear connection between aurelius and what i'm describing as postmodern paranoia - a near-paralyzing awareness of historical and cultural precedent, of the self as a thing which exists always under observation (both external and internal), and of the ever-resent threat that one might seem to adopt an "incorrect" stance or posture, even by accident.

lol why was bro writing these things if not for that "ever-present threat". maybe this is obv to the point of meaninglessness but i think that while the manifestation of these behaviors have changed the underlying impulses and motivations haven't. like stoicism with its rejection of the possibility of utopia is a manifestation of the same struggling with the same anxieties your describing. and there's lots more ambivalence in meditations than maybe u remember idk

or like old tyme ppl still had anxiety over declarations of love and tried to anticipate/control/perfect those expressions just w/o being all "lol this is just like that book" about it.

earlier i was reading an article from 1996 complaining about the then-current ubiquity of joan osborne's "one of us," which was all over mtv and everything with nary an lol in sight, and just thinking how hard it was to imagine something that openly and unapologetically dippy and sincere and unironic achieving that level of cultural acceptance today.

'Cause you had a bad day, you're taking one down
You sing a sad song just to turn it around
You say you don't know, you tell me don't lie
You work on a smile and you go for a ride

You had a bad day, the camera don't lie
You're coming back down and you really don't mind
You had a bad day
You had a bad day

translation: it was YOU who grew up and adopted seven layers of comfort-snark and ironic distance, not america.

also, the whole evil clowns (wrapped in bacon omg) probably comes from the fact that clowns is a common fear of people, much like spiders. "Evil clown omg" probably comes from the same place as whatever you feel when you see this:

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/0/02/Spiders_Ceiling.jpg

a near-paralyzing awareness of historical and cultural precedent

The interesting question here is, why would an awareness of precedent be near-paralyzing?

I mean, you could be right, but it seems so wtf to me. Why not just speak and act? Expecting to speak and act in ways no one ever spoke or acted before is just some damn fool nonsense. Let it go.

max: almost all experience is mediated in some way, yes. yet i feel comfortable saying that we are now more inundated with and defined by a rapidly changing variety of narrative models than we were a few hundred years ago, or even a hundred years ago (by "we" i mean the bulk of non-aristocratic western citizens). i suppose i could attempt to prove this, but it seems a waste of time to me. phrased this way, i believe that what i am saying is self-evident and uncontroversial. the extrapolation i base on that, on the other hand, is endlessly debatable...

point being, there are different levels of mediated experience. a child growing up in a small village in the 1200s would probably be exposed to a fairly narrow range of life-modeling/defining narratives, and these would hew closely to a social orthodoxy. there would be variation, certainly, but that variation would, for the most part, be limited by immediate social give-and-take, and the dominant, publically-shared narratives would be cohesive, coherent, well-integrated with one another. moreover, they would probably not change enormously from generation to generation, relative to the way popular narratives change from generation to generation today. there's lots of room for argument here, but again, i don't see what's objectionable about what i'm saying in a general sense.

also, i'm not criticizing eco, just addressing the difference between the point he's making and the discussion of postmodern humor & identity. what he's saying is valid and interesting, but as i see it, it's only tangentially related to the point at hand. POST RELEVANT BAUDRILLARDS! (not yelling, just excited.) could help move things fwd.

finally, sort of agree w/ kenan. not necessarily about letterman himself, but about some point between the late 70s and the early 90s when everything got put in quotation marks.

"

agree, aimless, but things get complicated. read one ilx

in part, aimless, i think it's the need to be aware of and to "properly" negotiate so many conflicting narratives/models that makes us paranoid about getting it wrong.

lamp: on that level, i totally agree about aurelius. i just meant that i don't see much evidence (in older writing of this sort) of contemporary, defensive meta/snarky/ironical WTF pretzel-twisting gamesmanship.

i.e., little evidence of a self that cannot find solid purchase in the world of self-defining models. aurelius, in fact, seems to be entirely free from such concerns. whatever the threat of getting it wrong, he seems very confident that he can can define himself and the human condition in terms of unembarassing, unlame, even quasi-heroic certainties.

i am enjoying this discussion and trying hard not to interject with my own abstruse theoretical interests (namely, niklas luhmann, autopoietic theory, etc...)

however, i will say think this historical element is interesting......the idea of the distinction between Being and Seeming was indeed a problem for pre-modern, or medieval, or pre-scientifict society. Except it was rarely if ever given in terms of an individual experience.

Post-Modern (some might even say post scientific) society re=introduces the problem of Being vs. Seeming (since science was intended as a method for managing this distinction that failed circa heisenberg...)

the difference here is in that in the meantime we've been given this modern idea of the individual...

indeed an idea of the individual that is axiomatic for the modern liberal democratic state!

makes us paranoid about getting it wrong

The antidote for this is to redefine wrong to a much smaller number of possibilities, as in, do not do deliberate harm; then stop at that. If you define wrong based on whether other people think you are too cool for words, then you have surrendered your self to every cross-breeze that blows, like you're some weightless leaf instead of a human being.

It is helpful to consider the dilemma of Burdian's Ass, who, caught between two equidistant piles of hay, starved to death. (Considered as a bad example, I hasten to add.)

BTW, quasi-heroic certainties are definitely not lame, whatever you may have heard to the contrary. In evaluating such assertions, one should, as they say, consider the source. If the person making the assertion is a sad confused jackass of a person, one may gather a clue as to the desirability of emulating their way of life.

^ agreed, aimless. i'm not talking so much about my own POV (though i'm affected, too), but rather about what i see as part of the contemp human condition.

I guess one of the blessings of living in the provinces is that I do not live where the contemporary human condition gets defined. I mean that seriously enough. And I have untethered myself from most of the media that disseminate this definition. I did this more or less deliberately.

This somewhat decontaminates my POV from that which I cannot verify from direct experience. Mediated experience is, by its nature, largely unreal. It is best taken in limited doses, offset by a more substantial diet of literal experience.

If you are looking for better models, befriend some field biologists or people of that nature. And maybe live with a non-neurotic dog. Thankfully, the contemporary canine condition is less compromised than the human condition. ;)

Sheesh, just cover one pair of legs on that spider picture and notice how much less creeped out you feel. That's gotta be a hard-wired response, no?

I was reading Derrida's "Specters of Marx" this week for other reasons, and came across this passage, which I think nicely cncapsulates how this is all related to an idea of auto-immunity, as I tried to say above. Maybe I'm way off base in finding these notions helpful, but anyway:

The living ego is auto-immune...To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself, it is necessarily led to welcome the other within...it must therefore take the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself.

Sheesh, just cover one pair of legs on that spider picture and notice how much less creeped out you feel. That's gotta be a hard-wired response, no?

― M.V., Saturday, February 21, 2009 3:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i just noticed in the last couple of weeks that spiders are represented as six legged creatures to pre-schoolers. evidence - the wonder pets save the itsy bitsy spider ep on nick jr where itsy bitsy and mom only have 6 legs each and also the wall outside the preK3 class (ie 3 y/os) at her daycare has two diff art projects involving spiders (one made of paper squares and one made of cotton balls) and they both have 6 legged spiders. They do look a lot less creepy.
The Yo Gabba Gabba episode that has Muno singing to Toodie about how much he like bugs features ants "What's that? That's an ant!" shows a pretty creepy looking eight legged spider with fangs and all but they call it a 'bug' so its creep factor is slightly reduced.
I wonder if all of this is more about the parents and teachers not getting creeped out though. I find it hard to believe someone that age would freak out if you showed them a real looking spider for the first time. AT this point im more worried that spiders have been made out to be so cute to my kid that she'll grab the first real one she sees.

I think an evolutionary response of "those things are dangerous, run away" is more likely to apply to spiders than clowns, but again, the imagery of the spider has become so wrapped up in the general idea of what "we" find horrifying that they're pretty much vampires with the added bonus of being real.

(a topic of interest to me because that picture freaks me out so much that I can't even bring myself to test that "cover up two legs" thing. Man I need therapy.)

ryan OTM. wasn't able to make sense of that quote last night, after few beers, but it's pretty clear today. paraphrased: in order to understand and relate to itself, the self must be permeable - it has to let the outside in. in order to protect itself in this compromised state, the self must be able view itself as it would view "the other"; i.e., to view itself from a critical distance.

This isn't about history or cultural shifts. This is just basically about being in the aimless middle class and not knowing what to do with yourself.

LOL college

Results 1 - 10 of about 23,100 for "just make it stop". (0.24 seconds)

i don't even know what the origin of that is, but it's become this catch-phrase somehow, like "can you say, [word or phrase]?"

Crap, always had trouble parsing Derrida ...so I'm not saying contenderizer is wrong ... but my take is that it's less about critical distance, and more about analyzing or understanding other people and systems/cultures/communities as potential threats to oneself and creating internal antibodies to resist those threats, going back to the immune system metaphor. Maybe irony and critical distance play a role in this as antibodies against appearing foolish or avoiding humiliation.

yet i feel comfortable saying that we are now more inundated with and defined by a rapidly changing variety of narrative models than we were a few hundred years ago, or even a hundred years ago (by "we" i mean the bulk of non-aristocratic western citizens)

Going back to kid and grandpa ... maybe I just came from a really wholesome family, but l recall that kind of thing remaining unironically wholesome until the 80s, when there was this surge of panic that resulted in all sorts of programs, ideas, policies based on "won't anyone think of the children!" Maybe it's just my age, but I feel like in the 80s there was this puritanical "you should be scared and creeped out by stuff" thing going on, (just say no to drugs, America's Most Wanted, paranoia about teen satanists, child molesting satanists operating day case centers and preschools, etc.) that morphed into perceiving kid/grandpa - like pics as "LOL - didn't I see this guy on to catch a predator."

sarahel:

i think we're on the same page. in trying to translate, i assumed that the self already possessed "antibodies" for use in dealing with "the other" (not-self). antibodies = critical stances, intellectual/psychological defenses. but the crux of derrida's argument, as i read it, is that the self must also use these antibodies against itself (hence "autoimmunity"). in order to understand and to better protect itself, it must be able to recognize itself as the other. hence critical distance, irony, etc.

thing about the derrida quote is that it identifies (correctly, i think) self-critical self-awareness as a fundamental component of the human cognitive experience. therefore, it's only tangentially related to the idea that this "autoimmune" system has somehow metastasized in Western (American?) culture over the last few decades. if, in fact, this can be said to have happened...

was thinking about the idea that human self-awareness - as a codified, shared understanding - is a kind of artificial intelligence. (this related to bloom's idea, presented upthread by ethan, that shakespeare essentially invented "universal human emotions" by identifying and naming them.) over many centuries, we have constructed an armature of understanding that we use to define the "human". we view this armature as a simple tool, but as bloom observes, the tool shapes us at least as much as we shape it. and the tool can be viewed as something that exists at least in part outside of us, as a sort of alien intelligence whose function is to gather information about human beings. as it gathers more and better information, its understanding and modeling of human nature becomes becomes more accurate and more complete, and it in turn becomes, in essence, more "alive".

so we carry with us at all times this only half-contained thing, this human-describing A.I., that both documents and shapes us. basically, we all carry inside our "self" a duplicate self, a homunculus or daemon self that we look to for instruction in the nature of the self. derrida's "autoimmune system" is as much a being as a simple process.

i suspect that the "lost in the funhouse" effect is a consequence of the rapid development (metastasis) of this semi-internal A.I. in response to equally rapid developments in technology and media over the last century. in other words, in response to accelerated culture, the A.I. that models self awareness became self-aware in turn, resulting in a sort of neurotic recursiveness in the human personality.

or something... i'm really just thinking aloud, trying (and partially failing) to retrace some thoughts i had last week while this discussion was still going strong. don't really have any of this worked out to my satisfaction

the mirror looks back at you, imagining that you are its reflection

Think of how smoking and drinking were seen in 1950s/60s movies (or as recreated in Mad Men), and there's clearly a different self-consciousness about these things now, too. Present day, a guy with a bar full of hard liquor in his office: so wrong. So maybe part of what's happening is the more we understand underlying pathologies (addictions, compulsions, PTSD), the more we see previously harmless behavior as a manifestation of these diseases.

thread is full of sutff i intend to steal next time i want to sound smarter than i am

P*******
needs a DP and an AD for a low budget short shooting in May. Any recommendations? 4 hours ago

an ultra hardcore misreading

I only meant it as a gag

The Yo Gabba Gabba episode that has Muno singing to Toodie about how much he like bugs features ants "What's that? That's an ant!" shows a pretty creepy looking eight legged spider with fangs and all but they call it a 'bug' so its creep factor is slightly reduced.

haha Archibald the worm!

self-critical self-awareness as a fundamental component of the human cognitive experience

this was kind of what i was trying to get at when i was talking about stoicism upthread - i def dont think actual cognition has changed as much as you seemed to be arguing

it kinda goes back to what someone (nabisco?) was sayin about how we read older cultures as well. as our understanding of cognitive processes has improved and permeated non-specialist culture we're better at describing these processes and using them to analyze our world. but as that type of language/expression becomes the norm we lose the ability to see the way older/other cultures express irony, distance, self-awareness and so assume that impulse isnt present or is lessened somehow.

okay I guess im sayin just I dont buy into this metastasis you talk about I don’t think that people's thinking has changed all that much even if the way we talk about ourselves has become more obvious. although lol theres so much to argue in my divorce of thinking and behavior idk lol postmodernism lol

This thread made me go back and look at some Chaucer, actually, which left me even less convinced the "ironic distance" mode of the present is really anything groundbreakingly new.

it's the same with dickens and melville too

not that the three have much in common other than they're old cannonical writer dudes

can someone who believes that things change please explain why and how

Some of this is "I am different/more special than the generation before me" blinkers that every person goes through mixed in with assuming that the culture that existed 10 - 15 years before you started noticing/caring about current culture evolved from an unbroken, cumulative collection of forebearers rather than appearing as part of a cyclical pattern of human expression.

(it says a lot that I consider the above to be one of the worst things I've ever written, ugh)

Well I was talking about Restoration stuff before, so I suppose the goal is tracing back here ... the problem is that original Chaucer isn't exactly skimmable, and I forgot to jot down examples I came across. (I'm not just talking about, you know, "LOL Chaucer and Cervantez = full of fart jokes," but an actual tone to certain jokes that strikes me as being similar in intent to what we're talking about on this thread.)

xpost - I think things change, though explaining "things change" seems like a tall order -- but I do think something like a human mode of communication, or a cultural habit like this, is bound to have had its counterparts in the past

CervanteS

it's as if all this has happened before...

can't wait until 2012

Well I was talking about Restoration stuff before, so I suppose the goal is tracing back here ... the problem is that original Chaucer isn't exactly skimmable, and I forgot to jot down examples I came across. (I'm not just talking about, you know, "LOL Chaucer and Cervantez = full of fart jokes," but an actual tone to certain jokes that strikes me as being similar in intent to what we're talking about on this thread.)

― nabisco, Friday, February 27, 2009 2:57 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not 100% on this - still think there's more of an automatic reaction now, you cant compare bored office workers to cervantes and chaucer, etc, but one thing i remember from when i read an interview with billy wilder years ago was how suprised i was to learn he was basically amused by fred macmurray in exactly the way me and my friends were at the time - as a out-of-touch, stodgy white guy in a suit. he talks about giving him hipster slang like "ya DIG" in the apartment and cracking up at makig this uptight 50s square talk like that - it really did kinda blow my mind a lil

Is that really mind-blowing, though? I mean, I agree with you that this is way more of a mode of communication for a lot more people than it appeared to be over the last century -- my point with the old lit stuff, though, is just that I get the feeling it's existed as an understood thing for a long, long time, so ... well, it's not a recent invention (I know, nobody's claimed that), and it strikes me as possible that there may have been other historical periods where certain classes of people did a lot of it.

Another good lit example that surely ties in with what Clover was saying upthread about "aimless middle classes" -- London's jazz-age rich kids would seem to have been every bit as ironic, facetious, distanced, sarcastic, deliberately and comically frivolous, etc. as anyone today. (Haha they even had the equivalent of flashmobs!)

i dunno dude i still get the feeling, and none of us were alive then, but there was just a lot of campy shit being uncritically consumed that you'd never get away with now - you keep saying, oh yeah there's more now, and maybe it is just a casualty of having an enormous leisure class in america, but it seems like you're talking about the difference between a few thousand rich closeted gays or 60s zine artists and basically EVERYONE, where taking shit sincerely unironically or non-sexually - thinking like kenneth from 30 rock there - makes you the weirdo instead of the norm

there was just a lot of campy shit being uncritically consumed that you'd never get away with now

i just think our definition of camp has changed tho... i mean are basically everyone really better at parsing/thinking critically or are certain kinds of kitsch just more obvious now?

Yeah, I don't disagree! Yeah, my sense is that this sort of thing has mostly cropped up in the past among people who (a) were not struggling economically, (b) all had lots of access to a big pool of media, including lots of stuff they felt smarter than, and (c) spent a lot of time on leisure, as opposed to, say, raising ten children. Which describes a lot more people in recent decades in the US, until the mode of communication becomes mainstreamed? (Per Clover, you could probably note that the more true those things are about people, the more you see this kind of communication -- if I meet someone who works three jobs to raise 15 foster children, I do not expect to hear this kind of talk the way I would with a middle-class college kid. Also consider those three points w/r/t Kenneth!) There's that switch from being able to master physical/economic circumstances to being able to master culture/media.

It'd be interesting to compare this in the US to this in similarly developed countries, though, because it seems maybe especially American, for reasons I can't sort out -- maybe something to do with having less of a long-term national culture to be earnest about?

xpost - there was definitely a point where the idea of something being camp/kitsch was really co-opted by mainstream culture, where being able to recognize and be amused by it became part of being able to deal with popular culture itself

Would it be wrong to suggest that there have been other eras where this sense of mainstream irony also was prevalent (I have nothing to back up the assertion but I'm specifically thinking of the 1920s)?

of course irony and self-awareness exists in the characters created by cervantes, dickens, melville, etc., and going back much farther than that. but what i'm talking about isn't as simple as that.

the "condition" identified in "lost in the funhouse" is a specific kind of awareness of self-awareness. it is the awareness that the self cannot perceive things without perceiving, in turn, all of the associations those things trigger, and being aware at the same time that one IS perceiving and evaluating all those triggered associations, and also evaluating one's position relative to them as perceived by others, real or imaginary, and at the same time perceiving this whole tangled mess, and running it through the same changes, etc. i'm arguing that this multiplex, infinitely telescoping awareness of awareness of awareness (etc.) is fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being in the late-20th/early-21st century.

(sorry to lean so heavily on LITF, but it's a good capsule descriptor for what i'm talking about.)

this kind of multiplex awareness will not settle - fundamentally cannot settle - on any given thing. it is indeterminate at the deepest possible level. things are not what they seem, they are merely clouds of association and expectation. the self has no center, it is simply a set of reflections reflecting one another endlessly. none of these ideas are philosophically new, but they seem new in the documentation of "ordinary" human thinking. after all, we can't know what or how people in the past really thought. we have only their documentation to go on. same is true today. and i think that when you compare the documentation of the present with the past, you see a grossly magnified awareness of this sort of "autoimmune" self awareness.

when we read bloom on the relationship of shakespeare and "universal human emotion", we probably assume that the previously unlabeled things that shakespeare gave narrative form to preexisted their documentation in some form or another. that while the "true love" meme may not have been part of the general human lexicon, the yearnings and passions we now associate with true love were not suddenly invented from whole cloth. nevertheless, the act of organizing and narrating these experiences gives them a resonant, lasting shape -- a shape that was able, in turn, to organize and narrate subsequent human experience & even history.

that's the point i'm making with things like LITF and the ironic self-awareness of popular media (see long posts about this way upthread). in the late 20th century, we came up with "new" ways of describing the human experience. the things described were certainly not entirely new (and perhaps not new at all), but i suspect that the creation and popularization of these new narratives profoundly altered the way human beings conceive of themselves and the world around them.

maybe i should read lost in the funhouse huh

"the end of the road" was another O_O moment for me like the billy wilder thing where 19 yr old andtwat realized maybe his generation wasnt the first to see things the way we did

family guy and 30 rock are examples of modern comedy that reflect this kind of meta-awareness. the joke much of the time is that there should be a joke, or that you expect there to be a joke, or that jokes work like "this", or that certain types of things aren't funny (or are they, and to who, and not to you, but yes to you, and isn't it weird that we're talking about this in the first place).

Lost in the Funhouse is terrific, E, I get the feeling you'd really like it.

Wait -- going back to the donkey between two equidistant piles of hay -- wasn't it The End of the Road whose narrator is literally paralyzed by something a lot like this form of consciousness? I wish I could remember this better: the doctor walks up to him in a train station, where he's staring at two equidistant seats, unable to decide between them

(NB one of the reasons I keep mentioning that this sort of thing crops up in the past is ... well, no one has actually said this, but I feel like there's a tendency to view this kind of thing as somehow inauthentic, like you're somehow becoming self-conscious about being human and then somehow aren't anymore, and that's something I'd definitely disagree with, since this sort of thing seems like an ongoing human capacity)

I felt really smart when I figured out what the character was in the first section of lost in the funhouse

but I was p young at the time

end of the road gets really fucking o_O as it goes on though

I thought end of the road started with the dude sitting down and not having a reason to get up

really fucking aweso_Ome

lol suggest book. but, yeah, srlsy lost if the funhouse is great

the "condition" identified in "lost in the funhouse" is a specific kind of awareness of self-awareness. it is the awareness that the self cannot perceive things without perceiving, in turn, all of the associations those things trigger, and being aware at the same time that one IS perceiving and evaluating all those triggered associations, and also evaluating one's position relative to them as perceived by others, real or imaginary, and at the same time perceiving this whole tangled mess, and running it through the same changes, etc. i'm arguing that this multiplex, infinitely telescoping awareness of awareness of awareness (etc.) is fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being in the late-20th/early-21st century.

I vehemently disagree w/ this

cf. rilke

xpost - Yeah, I might be misremembering the circumstances -- but it was a sort of decision-making paralysis, which is just amusing me, given the post before. (Haha he also lives for a while in the building across the street from my old place.)

xpost - I think I disagree with that, too, but I also think contenderizer was sent by god to teach me why people give me tl;dr reactions. (that's not a dis, contenderizer, that's totally an "I know where you're coming from, bro")

or some german older than rilke maybe

xp

Is that really mind-blowing, though? I mean, I agree with you that this is way more of a mode of communication for a lot more people than it appeared to be over the last century -- my point with the old lit stuff, though, is just that I get the feeling it's existed as an understood thing for a long, long time, so ... well, it's not a recent invention (I know, nobody's claimed that), and it strikes me as possible that there may have been other historical periods where certain classes of people did a lot of it.

Another good lit example that surely ties in with what Clover was saying upthread about "aimless middle classes" -- London's jazz-age rich kids would seem to have been every bit as ironic, facetious, distanced, sarcastic, deliberately and comically frivolous, etc. as anyone today. (Haha they even had the equivalent of flashmobs!)

― nabisco, Friday, February 27, 2009 12:09 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark

There's a lot of it in Evelyn Waugh novels about that period, and it crops up in Fitzgerald as well. But Nabisco's right, it's definitely there in Jane Austen novels, esp. Northanger Abbey, which makes me think about all the Austen film adaptations in the past decade or so. That's the earliest example that I can think of (late 18th century) where you could easily substitute "horror movie" for "gothic novel" and it would feel pretty contemporary.

I think a key part of this is the sources we're looking towards (and can look at) for historical verification -- literature, music, plays, art -- and these things, of course, are somewhat determined by the culture, customs and markets of their times. So we don't really answer the question, "were people always as self-aware and self-conscious as they are now," instead we're answering, "was media always as self-aware and self-conscious as it is now."

we're also asking "can we find evidence of what we're looking for in the past?" and of course we can.

but i don't think we can find convincing analogs for 30 rock, the family guy, LITF, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, warhol's persona/art, kaufman/letterman-style non-comedy (metacomedy), hipster runoff, etc. all of these things express a critique of the world and of the self in the world, and of the self as a member of "the audience", and of the self as a being that is VERY uncomfortably aware of all of the above. moreover, as time goes on, popular art runs this awareness-kaleidoscope in an increasingly efficient, subtle and assumptive manner, as though less and less of the groundwork of first-level observation has to take place before second-level observation of that first-level observation can kick in to subvert it, before being itself subverted. the technology of 360-degree meta-awareness is improving by leaps and bounds, and i think we see it reflected in the culture and people around us -- ILX, again, being an excellent petri dish.

that said, by "fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being" i don't mean "existing fully-formed in everyone". people vary, but i do think it's become integral part of the general, shared human experience - at least in a passive, second-hand sense.

TL to tha motherfuckin DR

but i don't think we can find convincing analogs for 30 rock, the family guy, LITF, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, warhol's persona/art, kaufman/letterman-style non-comedy (metacomedy), hipster runoff, etc. all of these things express a critique of the world and of the self in the world, and of the self as a member of "the audience", and of the self as a being that is VERY uncomfortably aware of all of the above.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_c1yVlEiBDNM/SJUwhHCAQUI/AAAAAAAAAEY/Mqb_gk6KllY/s400/velazquez-meninas.jpg

but i don't think we can find convincing analogs for 30 rock, the family guy, LITF, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, warhol's persona/art, kaufman/letterman-style non-comedy (metacomedy), hipster runoff, etc.

Some of these examples make zero sense to me, but I'll just pick on one: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is like ridiculously earnest and a BILLION times less self-conscious about being a text than, say, Tristam Shandy

but that's, again, just a very documentation of the most superficial sort of "self-awareness" -- something that we all agree has been part of human consciousness for a long, long time. looking at that painting and finding in it something akin to andy kaufmann's stance relative to his audience requires a MASSIVE assumptive stretch. i mean, more than anything else, it seems like a wry, simple joke about the relationship of the artist to his subjects.

i don't get your point

tristram shandy is a precursor of the kind of think i'm talking about. and "earnestness" is in no way at odds with this kind of awareness. in fact, i think the successful integration of earnestness and irony in works like AHWOSG is evidence of how completely ironic recursiveness has been absorbed into human consciousness.

but that's, again, just a very documentation of the most superficial sort of "self-awareness"

this goes back tho to my point about how we're conditioned to read for self-awareness rather than the actual perspective of the painter

also if irony is reflexive rather than critical how self-aware can it be?

Contenderizer, I don't want this to go the way of the acting thread, but I don't understand how you can say "I don't think we can find convincing analogs for XYZ" and then, when someone names the most convincing analog in the universe, you go "well that's more of a precursor"

again, i'm not talking about whether or not this mode of thinking was "invented" in the late 20th century (it wasn't) but rather the way it was packaged and popularized, and the extent to which it has, as a result, become part of the "ordinary" default state of human awareness.

granted, nabisco: i overstated my case. analogs do exist. but, again, i'm more concerned with cultural saturation than with existence/nonexistence.

contenderizer if you dont think theres more going on in las meninas than velazquez saying "hey! look! im in the painting!" may i refer you to http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=las+meninas&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

Although to be fair I guess the best modern-day analog for Tristam Shandy would be "How I Met Your Mother," since it is essentially the same thing -- "let me tell you a story," and then the joke is that the story goes on forever before getting to anything remotely resembling what it's supposed to be about

xpost - ok, Cont., but then I don't really get what you are arguing -- I think everyone pretty firmly agrees that this is a more mainstream habit in the modern-day US than in the past

Although to be fair I guess the best modern-day analog for Tristam Shandy would be "How I Met Your Mother,"

i just sb'd you for this

if irony is reflexive rather than critical how self-aware can it be?

― Lamp

this is part of the LITF effect -- understanding this paradox and yet being no less trapped by it

haha it's true, man! TS gets through like three volumes before getting to the part where he's born

I think everyone pretty firmly agrees that this is a more mainstream habit in the modern-day US than in the past

― nabisco

dude, all i've been doing from word one is defending that very simple point, and talking about what i see as the cultural/psychological consequences. if the point weren't controversial, there wouldn't have been so much controversy.

i dunno, maybe my mode of argument encourages it. and maybe i've been unclear. hard to say from over here...

if that had been "all you've been doing" then no one would be arguing with you you've def been more far reaching than that simple point

xpost - ok, Cont., but then I don't really get what you are arguing -- I think everyone pretty firmly agrees that this is a more mainstream habit in the modern-day US than in the past

Someone upthread mentioned being part of "the audience" - and I think that's definitely something that has changed, in the sense, that the performer/audience dynamic has grown to encompass more and more of our lives, and the lives of a larger segment of the population. Going back to Velasquez and classical painting: it used to be that we only saw pictures or read stories of the rich and powerful and religious, it really wasn't until Capitalism took hold that there were portrayals of regular middle class people, but it wasn't like everyone was painting self-portraits 24-7, which we can do with facebook, live journal, flicker et al. Add to that all the passiveaggressivenotes, vice, hipsterrunoff type sites that chronicle the banality of the lives of nobodies, and not only is the average person presented with the opportunity of performing their whole life for an audience, but that they are not in control of that audience, who can criticize and recontextualize their "performance" for cheap lols.

i just went back and read all my posts in this thread - not to prove you wrong, just to verify my own sense of the argument(s) i've been making.

from time to time i've overstepped the bounds of that box, or seeemed to, but for the most part, that really is the gist of what i've argued. that in the late 20th century, due to the collision of a number of factors*, the seeming self-awareness popular culture changed radically, reflecting and also instigating changes in deep culture & individual psychology. basically that "we think differently now", especially WR2 our awareness of our own thinking.

* those "factors" identified in my first post here in the following manner: "...a response to the omnipresence and sophistication of commercial media (as nabisco suggested), and also to the mainstreaming of camp sensibilities (kingfish). there's also our social internalization of early 20th century psychology/psychiatry: freud, etc. plus the breakdown of old taboos & social conventions that kept certain "unpleasant" ideas & realities out of the public view..."

** plus sarahel OTM. i was talking about "the audience" upthread: the way performer/audience dynamics have invaded "ordinary" life and consciousness. particularly interesting is the way we now have to balance both states (performer AND audience) at the same time, while also maintaining ironic distance from each

opening of that last addressed to lamp

haha contendo, I think you've been perceiving "controversy" where no one is necessarily arguing -- i.e., I don't think your point has been "controversial," I think people have generally left it be and maybe added some other, umm, perspectives

I mean, you might find me upthread pointing out that we don't really know a lot of the things you've claiming, which for the record I still think -- you guys are sort of making this assumption that this stuff has only recently crossed over to "the audience," but part of the point of my mentioning a lot of older things is that this isn't necessarily the firmest assumption. There are pockets of cultural history -- yes, mostly involving an educated upper class -- where I don't think anyone on this thread has much certain evidence that people didn't communicate in a way that maybe resembled or anticipated the way we do today. A surprising number of examples have cropped up here, which I really find interesting! (The jazz age is a fascinating one, especially w/r/t this "audience" idea)

^^ this is stipulating that today is different from yesterday -- don't disagree -- and then saying "well, it's interesting to ponder whether yesterday was that different"

I think we're, yes, agreeing with the main point, and arguing over semantics and levels of degree and popularity (in terms of applying to a larger portion of the population vs. Waugh's "smart set").

think y'all are understating the degree of controversy/contention about the crux point over the past week, but i'll readily admit that i often get kinda defensive in these debates. like whenever someone takes up a point i've made, even if indirectly, i feel obliged to man the ramparts at full battle strength. which sometimes impedes more than clarifies...

ike whenever someone takes up a point i've made, even if indirectly, i feel obliged to man the ramparts at full battle strength. which sometimes impedes more than clarifies...

http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/130/009_575-010~Norman-Rockwell-Triple-Self-Portrait-Posters.jpg

So I don't have the text with me, but there is a bit in John O'Hara's BUtterfield 8 (1935) where a woman is going through a paper and reads a recap of a baseball game in which there was a "squeeze play" and someone "lays down a perfect bunt," and she says something along the lines of "I guess that shouldn't sound funny but you know I have a dirty mind."

But to be honest there is so much about that book that feels so amazingly modern that I keep flipping back to the copyright page to make absolutely completely sure that it was seriously written in the 30s and I'm not just tripping

http://books.google.com/books?id=2SEBBT6MWG8C&pg=RA1-PA309&img=1&pgis=1&dq=%22squeeze+play%22&sig=ACfU3U3yubgf1L47NNcniQ4crDTAmj2P5w&edge=1

omg why thank you

really <3 that book and its whole atmosphere of tawdry boozy sex

was thinking about this thread the other week cuz my grandmother & i were having a conversation about sports that involved liberal discussion about handling balls

the "condition" identified in "lost in the funhouse" is a specific kind of awareness of self-awareness. it is the awareness that the self cannot perceive things without perceiving, in turn, all of the associations those things trigger, and being aware at the same time that one IS perceiving and evaluating all those triggered associations, and also evaluating one's position relative to them as perceived by others, real or imaginary, and at the same time perceiving this whole tangled mess, and running it through the same changes, etc. i'm arguing that this multiplex, infinitely telescoping awareness of awareness of awareness (etc.) is fundamental to the conscious condition of the intelligent, media-saturated human being in the late-20th/early-21st century.

This sensation is the reason I quit smoking weed.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rebeccae/first-recorded-thats-what-she-said-joke/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6SMOSXa7A

will someone please school me on the history of "I'd ____ her ____ statements?"

I imagine there's a long history of innuendos like "I'd stick my plug into her socket," where the action is clearly suggestive of sex. but how long have people been making innuendos like "I'd higgs her boson" or "I'd school her seven bells", where the action is deliberately nonsensical and not suggestive of sex in any concrete way? the latter is obviously an absurdist spin on an existing trope, but is it (fairly) new?

"I'd like to fuck her on the tennis court, if you get my meaning."

"I'd serve her balls..."

"I'd balance her bank statements! Um, wait..."

"I'd like to fuck her on the tennis court, if you get my meaning."

yeah but the kind of thing I'm thinking about is more like, "heh, I'd restring her racquet with synthetic multi-filament catgut for improved tension and better durability." the whole point is that it's clinical and unsexy as fuck.

the whole point is that it's clinical and unsexy as fuck.

exactly!

there's another "thing" (which is what jaymc just did) where someone will say something that's unambiguously sexual but act as if it's a really subtle double entendre that will probably fly over most people's heads (but really doesn't). "I'd fuck her in the ass, if you catch my drift *wink wink*" and stuff like that. this might be a recent development too, I dunno.

http://www.escuchar-musica-espagnola.com/musica.internacional/Alanis-Morissette/images/alanis-morissette-ironic.jpg

"I'd balance her bank statements! Um, wait..."

― WHEY AHR MAH DREGUNS? (DJP), Tuesday, 5 June 2012 10:04 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agh i was going to make this joke