jane dark's sugarhigh!

Revisiting a theory of irony, or "Less Rock More Talk" (+ Joshua Clover)

I'm going to assume that modernism changed enough that it became useful to have a whole different word for the art-cultural moment, albeit different in each particular circumstance and place, yadda yadda yadda. This assumption is pretty much like calling espresso with steamed milk a "latte" even though it's still mostly coffee -- except, what the hell, I'm fitna use the word postmodernism. If this raises your henna hackles, halt.

Morevoer, I'm going to accept as a contingent axiom that the various qualities of postmodernism often have to with effacements and distortions of the singular power of the individual maker-of-stuff to impose from above meaning and order which travels down unto a host of receivers-of-stuff below. So I graciously include Angry Penguins, immanent critique, "the Death of the Author," deconstruction, sampling, Orlan, "the fragment," Barbie Liberation Front, and mislabeled mp3s in GnutellaLand, without suggesting that any of this is good or bad, or offers a scope for the category, or that any of these things cast down the primacy of consumer capitalism in the western world. And...onward.

"Irony" is generally adduced to postmodernism, and it makes sense within the terms just presented, it being a kind of undercutting of the author's claim on coherent assertion, and/or a presentation of language as always-already quoted, as being in prime reference to other language rather than the intentions of the speaker.

But what of ironic covers? You know, the rockin' mettallic dirtying of some piece of sentimental hygiene, the lounge'd version of Disturbed, Dynamite Hack's sweetly harmonized remake of Boys In the Hood? Each of these does a different kind of reframing of the original song and everything requires special delicate shadings and niceties so please don't send me an email explaining this (but do send me an email about what flowers are in bloom near you as April ends!)

Now I'm not one of those nitwits who thinks that covers, because they involve doing something someone else already did and yet have existed for centuries, somehow prove that there's no such thng as postmodernism. What I want to suggest is that the particular form of irony we'll call "cover irony" is indeed deeply relevant to the postmodern, but often as a counter-strategy. That is to say, by producing a form which refuses the literal meanings of the original lyrics and/or/via a shift in the understood emtoional tenor of the original sounds (Frente's "Bizarre Love Triangle" would one example), it's a strong assertion of, rather than an effacement of, authorial power. Irony is a way of controlling meaning in a circumstance where meaning is already rich. It needn't displace the previous meaning to function this way; it simply needs to show a new meaning there. (Even respectful or simpy usurious covers have the function of celebrating and thus securing the singular meaning of the original and thus are, differently, counter-strategies to postmodernism)

This explains why there are so many fewer covers of Nirvana than one would expect (I don't, in the end, find Tori Amos's "Teen Spirit" ironic in the slightest, unlike her Eminem et al). The meanings of those songs retain their crawling ambuguity, their facbric whipping around like flags in a gale with sigils that cannot be made out; they have yet to still into fixed screens on which a new meaning can be projected. Nirvana remains, for the moment, not so much unduplicable as undisplaceable (they can be, however, colluded with -- but this is the exact opposite of a counter-strategy; it's postmodernism in the purest form of its impurity).

This leads to another contingent axiom: the postmodern era supposes the production of communication will occur on a surface already coated in prior communication, abandoning the model of creation into a void.

Click the link below for Joshua Clover's analogic EMP celebration of Freelance Helllraiser's "Smells Like Booty."

When I was younger and more of a supergenius I used to try to have sex on ecstasy. Two pleasures at once! Which is sort of the modern dream: none of that rustic purity, but instead, dealing with the new world of excess: excess pleasure, excess commodities, excess stuff.

But I couldn’t come and this got frustrating. It got frustrating and abstract and my mind would slip away into really ferocious geometrical hallucinations.

They were something like Venn diagrams where the two areas overlapped almost entirely, or maybe like looking at something cross-eyed so the image splits. But even more separate: like there would be one shape over here, and the other over here. These shapes, I understood vaguely, were the two pleasures, like two signals you are trying to tune in at once, and as long as the two signals don’t quite match up, there’s a fuzziness, and there’s a frustration.

So there I am, fucking on ecstasy and having these RISD hallucinations and periodically wondering what’s going on for my partner and then flipping back into the visuals, and if it’s all...working, then the two shapes start moving. Actually, only one moves -- because the ecstasy pleasure is pretty steady, and pretty bright, I am pretty high -- so this one is moving, they are starting to grow congruent, and I am aware, somewhere in the near distance, that if the shapes match up exactly then I’m going to come and even though I am very distracted by the shapes and the ecstasy and the weird things the lights are doing, well, I really want to come.

This is not thinking. Every time I try to think it gets lost. This is just trying to match up two shapes. If they match up I am going to have this harmonious excellent experience.

It mostly eluded me. But it turned out to be a powerful analogy for a lot of my experience, living where I live, at this time. It’s easy to joke about 500 channels and nothing on, but it’s exciting and it’s the world. It can be overwhelmiing and threatening -- the postmodern sublime. A lot of it’s stupid and a lot of it’s pleasure and sometimes these overlap. There is too much going on, not just in terms of stimulation but signal, there is excess, and the labor of consciousness is not to screen stuff out, but to make the compelling and intense signals all be audible at once, exactly so that you don’t have to exclude this for that, rob the signals of Peter to pay for the signals of Paul.

It’s a dream I find myself having all the time. When I am miserable, the world narrows down to a few points. When I am ecstatic, it’s not about purity or simplicity, but excess possibility. The air is howling with signal. In the slightest case, I think it’s the ecstasy of the shopper, consuming more, and more efficiently. In the most philosophical case, I think it’s the escape from seriality, from the clock’s grim rule that first you do this -- and then you do that -- and then....finally you can tune in two, three, a dozen stations at once. Most immediately it’s living in the world, this world, with the static and the excess briefly clarified, the signs falling into an intense and surprising relation, though inevitably it’s a new order.

Posted by jane at April 27, 2004 09:18 AM | TrackBack