A response to The
Stone article: How
to Live Without Irony
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| credit: Leif Parsons |
IRONY: “It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself [do I even need to cite Anonymous here]. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism […] to dodge responsibility…to secretly flee…”
-OR, are we just unconsciously recognizing, finally, the fallacy of causality?
Irony is a defense, “a shield against criticism” but it also
a weapon, or rather, a tool. It is what we use to sift through the bullshit. It
is what we use to shift the power structures.
Value? From whence, for whom? In the old clothesline paradox, as
value recedes, retreats, packs it bags and gets on a plane to Iceland, we
use irony to make sure it doesn’t come back home. Back home to the banks and
the corporations.
Irony is a shield, not just for us the users, but for the
value itself, the lambswool that hides the wolf, but, in this case, not to
penetrate and attack, instead to escape, like Iranian-crisis hostages.
It is not us who
are hiding. We are hiding something, a game of hot-potato, or hide-and-seek, or
just keep-away, just long enough for Big Everything and Big Everyone to lose
track, or lose interest.
MEANING: “Moving away from the ironic involves saying what you mean, meaning what you say and considering seriousness and forthrightness as expressive possibilities, despite the inherent risks.” Sounds as if being absurd were a cop-out, yet the author says just prior, that being a hipster entails processing “several stages of self-scrutiny”.
In a world where it is almost possible to predict the
future, (Barabasi’s Bursts, Sandy and
the success of meteorological
prediction, election forecasting, speculative futures, financial
engineering, predictive analysis, etc…), how else can you avoid being a
foregone conclusion unless you completely make no sense.
Absurdity is the antidote to the probabilistic world.
Interestingly, Hipsters ^here are referred to as Harlequins; John Twelve Hawks,
in his 2005 future-fiction,
also writes of Harlequins’ using random
number generators to help them make decisions randomly, thus subverting the
Vast Machine (or as PKD called
it, the Vast Active Living Information System).
If Big Data has given us anything thus far, it is “The
Search for Meaning”, and if culture has offered any comfort, any insulation, as
is its purpose, it is giving us new ways of meaning, new ways of being.
How do you make
meaning out of absurdity? That, of
course, is the new frontier. Artists, in all regards, are always one step ahead;
Hipsters, with their slieght-of-hand tautologies, giving us a glimpse of the
future, ghettouflaged in junk data – an encrypted program for a ‘way of living’: a
generation not-yet has the cipher.
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| partially unrelated image |
MODUS OPERANDI:
As my own page for a few years now has read in its subtitle:
‘Clarification, Contradiction, and Confusion’, I somehow seemed to have fallen
victim to this pre-emptive defense. Or have I?
I gave feliz navidad christmas cards to my family for years
(we don’t speak Spanish). It is not because I fear dislike, however, it is
because I’ve tried to give away all my fucks, like an anti-Scrooge McDuck.
If I do not speak in the language of the world around me,
how can I live? And yet, as such, I write, for cultural critics of the future
to point out with effortless accuracy, the Greta
Garbo Lips of my portraits.
BONUS:
ART THOUGHTZ: To Catch A Millennial (Live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 9-07-11)
Hennessy Youngman
NOTES:
How to Live Without Irony
CHRISTY WAMPOLE, THE STONE November 17, 2012
Bursts: Can Human
Behavior Be Predicted And Controlled?
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2010
“Sandy shows storm-prediction progress”, Business of Federal
Technology
Frank Konkel, The, Nov 05, 2012
[Argo, the 2012 film]
“Hidden Economies and the Shifting of Value”
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/hidden-economies-and-shifting-of-value.html
http://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2012/10/hidden-economies-and-shifting-of-value.html
Stevens Institute, “Financial Engineering”
The Traveler, John
Twelve Hawks, 2005
VALIS, Philip K.
Dick, 1981
Greta Garbo Lips and the Van Meegeren effect, in:
The Forger’s Art,
Denis Dutton, ed., 1983
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Forger_s_Art.html?id=wV_CHAAACAAJ
POST SCRIPT:
U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/
POST SCRIPT:
U.S. Cities Relying on Precog Software to Predict Murder
KIM ZETTER 01.10.13
The software parses about two dozen variables, including criminal record and geographic location. The type of crime and the age at which it was committed, however, turned out to be two of the most predictive variables.
“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk told the news outlet. “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”
-Richard Berk, criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania who developed the algorithm
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/precog-software-predicts-crime/
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