So, for a couple of years now, I’ve been yapping about something I call post-irony. It’s likely that, simply out of ignorance, I am mistaken, and it’s just old-fashioned irony or Jamesonian pastiche or something else. But whatever I’ve called it, the thing that has intrigued me so much is the indeterminacy of contemporary culture – of the impossibility of deciding whether something is sincere or ironic without first Googling something.
My two key examples so far have R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet and Heidi Montag’s music career – so take it with a grain of salt (as if you don’t already).
Still, watch this Die Antwoord video and tell me: without knowing anything about them, could you tell whether its parody or sincere expression? Performance art or… well, something else? Is the chorus a feminist critique? Or its opposite?
‘Cause dudes? I have no fucking idea what to think about anything anymore.
By the way, get to the end. ‘Cause that’s when it gets extra-awesome.
Edit: It occurs to me that the cultural distance works to either further or exacerbate the indeterminacy – i.e. is this normal for ‘them’? Are they aware of ‘our’ culture and are playing with it? Which seems more than just North American narcissism – part of Buzzfeed’s whole shtick is that it uses non-American as fodder for entertainment. This feels like another of those things that is very ‘contemporary’ – in the face of so much access to difference, is the response to reinscribe the cultural hierarchies that we supposedly moved beyond?
#1 by adm on April 23, 2010 - 10:22 am
What happens if you mix your idea of “post-irony” with the “post-history” you discuss in a recent post? One of the ways that we determine whether stuff that looks like Die Antwoord is ironic or not is by comparing it to what we consider “current.” Die Antwoord is funny — whether ironic or not — in part because it recontextualizes dated hip-hop expression in a contemporary setting. In other words, I think ideas like “post-historical” start coming apart a bit when you look at them from a broader perspective. (Similar effect with “post-racial,” too — in this case and others.)
#2 by Tim on April 23, 2010 - 2:31 pm
I think — and I’m not sure about any of it, so feel free to qualify or disagree with me on this — what might be taking the place of “irony” here is “fun.” The ethos of “fun” dodges sincerity in the same way that irony does, but there’s no source text to criticize, nothing to bounce off of. Ninjas are fun. The Pussy Wagon in Kill Bill/Lady Gaga’s Telephone is fun. The toy airplanes, etc., in a Wes Anderson movie are fun. Hello Kitty is fun. You genuinely like these things (if you like them) without committing yourself to them. You’re just having fun.
I don’t know if there’s an easily identifiable content to “fun,” but that seems to be the contours of it. What’s easy to criticize in “fun” is its subjectivity — its inherent unwittingness about people or problems outside its immediate scope, its assumption that fun is without consequences.
#3 by Nav on April 23, 2010 - 6:52 pm
No, I think that helps, Tim. And it’s pretty similar to Jameson’s idea of the difference between parody and pastiche, right? Pastiche is the thing that makes the same moves as parody, but it’s like the criteria by which we judge the difference change (or something).
@adm – But the alternate reading there is that, if its humour is dependent on knowing what came before and what is contemporary, the collapse of those distinctions makes it fuzzy (i.e. atemporarality may make the distinction between what’s genuinely retro and what’s parodically retro hard to figure out). But, this is all loosely sketched out, and you could be quite right – the problem the whole ‘post-’ prefix, people say, is that it that the little hyphen still marks out how things are mired in the thing that they’re trying to move beyond.
#4 by xtian on April 30, 2010 - 1:22 pm
I’d agree with Tim on the presence of “fun”, but I think Die Antewoord is trying to move beyond a hollow sense of fun without consequences or political engagement. As that chorus rattles through my brain on a continual loop, I think it’s noteworthy that while I believe she says “I need your protection” it sounds like “I need your production”. That awareness of play as manufactured (echoed in the presence of masks) and Ninja’s chuckling admission of the greatness of his song, might be trying to deploy the self-aware tools of postmodernism without the underlying nihilism. The name Die Antewoord translates from Afrikaans as “the answer” and I think there is something charmingly sincere about their utopian vision.
Whether it is successful may be open to debate, but in the intro, the character of Ninja imagines himself as a figure who embodies and represents all the diverse aspects of South African culture; the ninja becomes an amalgam of identities that everyone ‘should’ be able to relate to. It seems that ‘fun’ is a space of inclusion where differences (like DJ Hi-Tek’s progeria) between alien and normal are effaced and the space of play becomes inclusive and non-hierarchical.
Of course, if people don’t buy into the awesomeness of Ninjas then their model is problematic however. So maybe I have come around to Tim’s notion of subjectivity in a round about way, but the video still seems to me like an earnest effort to imagine an invested and aware aspect of fun.
#5 by Nav on May 4, 2010 - 4:23 pm
Delayed response, but – great comment Christian! (And yes, I’m an asshole when it comes to staying in touch. Drink soon!)
But yeah, I think that’s an interesting way to look at things, and also, I can now NOT hear ‘need your production’.
The thing I’m still stuck on is the semiotic context of interpretation. We do these kind of recuperative readings of something like Die Antwoord in order to say something useful and to say something smart. But if hermeneutic systems are subject to the same kind of ‘de-hierarchisation’ as everything else – as indeed, some notion of cultural relativism makes them – then cultural production becomes somehow blank. Which is to say that the production needs our interpretive protection – but in doing so, we resinscribe the hierarchies of interpretive systems because, always implied in a reading is the suggestion that this finally is the right one.
This is why I’m wondering about the function of irony. What I recently said in another post is that foregrounding the politics of representation relied on a implied hierarchy of ideologies – but when all ideologies are equal, I don’t know what happens next.