zeitgeist-bound syndrome

[lapsedmodernist]

from IM with apropos (hope you don´t mind I am reproducing this, B!)

pasapropos: hey i guess you haven't seen the new cartoon 'american dad'
LafemmNica: um...no...
pasapropos: it was on after the superbowl yesterday, i think it was
the first episode
pasapropos: by the poeple who do 'family guy'
pasapropos: it's weirdly subversive and not at the same time
LafemmNica: ooh!
LafemmNica: I LOVE family guy
pasapropos: the dad works for the cia and is a paranoid republo-freak
LafemmNica: nice
pasapropos: and he sets up boobie traps all over the house to catch bin laden
LafemmNica: !!!
LafemmNica: oh my god that sounds amazing
pasapropos: it's weird
LafemmNica: I HAVE to see it
pasapropos: they must have balanced things pretty well to get it on
after the superbowl
pasapropos: but you know, he's got a long-hair hippie feminist liberal
daughter, and she's the butt of most of the jokes
LafemmNica: ahh
LafemmNica: lovely
pasapropos: "do you like shaving your armpits, missy? cuz that'll be
the FIRST TO GO if the terrorists win"
LafemmNica: *eye roll
LafemmNica: or maybe it´s funny
LafemmNica: I don´t know!
LafemmNica: I think I have a new condition
LafemmNica: it´s, like, I can´t tell if I am being ironic or not
LafemmNica: and also I can´t always tell if I am being real-ironic or
Alanis-ironic
pasapropos: haha
LafemmNica: it´s a Zeitgeist disorder
LafemmNica: a temporal version of a culture-bound syndrome^*
LafemmNica: a disorder that is a neurolinguistic consequence of
weltschmertz in the context of total postmodernism
LafemmNica: like some weird aphasia or variation on aphasia

I have thought about it and I think ironiagnosia is a good diagnosis. The first representation of ironiagnosia in pop culture occurred in that episode of The Simpsons, you know, with Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins / Homer Simpson, smiling politely. With the disaffected teenagers. I think this also relates to Gregory Bateson´s largely linguistic-based definiton of schitzophrenia as a condition where the subject cannot differentiate between "real" and "metaphoric." An analogous collapse of "framing" happens to me (and probably to you) daily as I read The Associated Press and then The Onion and find that not only am I incapable of telling the difference, but also the same perception/comprehension centers in my brain are mobilized to process both of them. It´s like rods and cones have become redundant in day vision vs. night vision, or the same taste buds started registering sweet and sour. It´s a consumption disease (haha! consumption!), but with time it advances to regurgitation, which is what happens when I make with the ironic and then pause, thunderstruck, all my modernism totally prolapsed, unsure if I meant it. I remember how it started, and I remember how it progressed

STAGES OF IRONIAGNOSIA:

STAGE 1

Familiar categories are becoming fluid. You think of a joke. Your reaction is: "it´s not funny anymore, it´s just true." (a particularly prescient QED may be found here)

STAGE 2

You are propelled into a world where everything is perfectly and demonically equivalent to each other. There is no qualitative difference between The New York Times, The Onion, The Daily Show, CNN, your granfather´s grumbling, the Tom Skerritt TV special "Homeland Security," the neü-tro desktop cuckoo clock and your own hysterical interior monologue. Everything is data. You feel like Data. Second-order nuances have been bled out of semiotic consturctions. You feel like an Oliver Sacks patient.

STAGE 3

The equivalency of everything is preserved but revivified with zombie irony juice. Everything is the same and everything is ironic. Zombie irony is not the sharp, incisive coping mechanism you are used to. It is a slow-moving total eclipse that eats your brain. It´s un-irony (pronounced, Nacirema-style, as "ooni-roni"). This is not a sustainable phase, and eventually it breaks, like a fever, at which point you proceed to

STAGE 4

This is the chronic stage. Your categories of perception and epistemological tentacles have been demolished and rendered useless, respectively. You are like one of Pavlov´s Pets destabilized by a lack of correlation between stimulus, reward and punishment. You are like a passenger in the NYC subway a week after 9/11 when the train suddenly stops in the tunnel and the lights go out and you check the faces of your fellow passengers to see if you should be scared, and they are checking your face. You can´t assign a proper mental emoticon. You cry more. You become an asshole. Reality feels like you are trapped in one continuous neverending calculus problem and you failed precalculus. You hear something and you are not sure whether it´s ironic or not. You say something and you are not sure whether it´s ironic or not. Your interlocutor is infected by your ironiagnosia and so it reproduces, like a discursive retrovirus, unstoppable as ice-9, a narrative-bound disaster of a fiction that shook off its fictional status like a lizard leaves its tail behind.


^*Culture-bound syndrome is a term used in psychology and medical/psychological anthropology referring to a nuanced symptom cluster that is repeatedly observed within specific cultural contexts. It is also sometimes referred to as "folk illness." As in, "Smile darn ya smile/that´s all folks!" Repressive desublimation is a culture-bound syndrome characteristic of Late Capitalism at the End of History. Also next week we will discuss blogorrhea as an epiphenomenal metasyndrome.

[On Edit: in the interests of metonymy please also see Pimp: The Backhanding. Please pay attention to both

THE DESCRIPTION
Forget growing up to be a fireman, cop or doctor. Join the profession so highly regarded for its virtues — become a pimp! Mack some ho’s and put them to work. Make the biggest roll of dough and be declared the Mack-Daddy. Just watch out for other pimps as they try to put a beatdown on you and your ho’s. A ho in the hospital don’t earn you no dough!

and

THE DISCLAIMER
Please note: Arthaus Games does not condone or support the illegal sex trade industry. Pimp is a fictional game about the humorous stereotypes created by television and film and is in no way representational of the true horrors of the sex trade. If you would like more information on organizations focused on Women’s Rights and support groups, please visit: http://www.amnestyusa.org/women/ ]

Comments

[fengi.livejournal.com]

1. Have you seen this - http://www.livejournal.com/users/nuncstans/63608.html - it captured what your talking about in a pithy way.

Metapause affects over a billion people per second.
Unlike mal de siècle, ennui or the Enlightenment, Metapause is not an autoimmune response to the philosophical inconsistency of modern life. It is a linguistic disorder not unlike autism. Confronted with a reality which seems to be nonsense, the metapausal individual will feel out of control, inarticulate, powerless to insult that which seems literally to insult itself and thereby stripped of the primary coping mechanism of our generation.

2. Someone, Garry Trudeau I think, is quoted in a book about Saturday Night Live discussing how sometimes the "Bully Boys" (Ackroyd and Belushi) were not satirizing racism and sexism in some of their sketches, but indulging it (especially with Garret Morris). The person said, "At some point, undoing by doing is just doing." When I was organizing performance art shows, I sometimes had to explain this to white men who wanted to do something "edgey" which didn't quite get the whole concept of satire.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

1. I don´t read nuncstans' journal. However, given that for many years she and I wanked about such things together, and thus many ideas (and neologisms) that occur on this journal (and occurred on hers back when I used to read it) were co-authored creations, so to speak, it is not surprising that we would address similar phenomena through analogous heuristic.

2. "At some point, undoing by doing is just doing."
That is brilliant!

[apropos.livejournal.com]

Hahaha this is so funny.

Another thing about "American Dad" that I forgot to tell you about: the scene where GWB is on the phone with God.

God: Um, hey George.
GWB: Hey, buddy!
God: Um, could you maybe downplay our relationship in the future in your public appearances?
GWB: What do you mean?
God: Well, you know, saying things like, 'God wanted me to win,' stuff like that. Could you maybe, you know, tone it down a bit?
GWB: Uh... I guess so.
God: (phone beeps) Oh, damn, it's Cheney, I gotta take this. [To Cheney:] Yes sir.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

classic! In a very South Park way.

there's a new god in town

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

> God: (phone beeps) Oh, damn, it's Cheney, I gotta take this. [To Cheney:] Yes sir.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/uclickcomics/20050210/cx_tt_uc/tt20050210

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Also next week we will discuss blogorrhea as an epiphenomenal metasyndrome

*laughs out loud*

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

oh my god, your new icon is hilarious! where is it from?

[mysteryjesse.livejournal.com]

( brilliant )

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

thankyou

[apropos.livejournal.com]

You are like a passenger in the NYC subway a week after 9/11 when the train suddenly stops in the tunnel and the lights go out and you check the faces of your fellow passengers to see if you should be scared, and they are checking your face.

This is the kind of excessive-demystification that Zizek wrote about in his post-9/11 essay. (I don't know where to find it, but I was reading it the other day.)

What emotional reactions like this betray (and I've been there... not in the subway but in traumatic situations in general, especially when people die, where I have absolutely no ability to gage appropriate behavior) is that we're always already doing this all the time, it just seldom registers, and so emotions in most situations appear spontaneous and interior and prior to social stimulus.

Culture shock does this too. Another Japan story. The father of the woman I was living with died. I hadn't met him, so I didn't really know how to react. I figured the best thing to do would be to act subdued, be polite, withdraw from her personal space. Apparently I wasn't doing it hard enough. Her husband approached me one day.

"Please..." he said, "My wife is very sad."
"Yes," I said, "I'm very sorry."
"You need to be... more blue feeling. Yes?"
"Okay," I said, "I will try to be more sad."
"Thank you," he said, smiling.

(Following this I had to attend a Japanese funeral, in which I made the ultimate faux-pas: forgetting that I would have to take my shoes off in the temple, I wore all black but for clownish, stripy socks, which I spent the rest of the evening trying desperately to conceal from the mourners.)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Do you mean Zizek´s "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"?

http://web.mit.edu/cms/reconstructions/interpretations/desertreal.html

I agree with you that we always do this thing, but as your examples would suggest, or my example with the train, the domain of such moments is usually some kind of point of crisis. The problem with the chronic condition is when it affects all of your interfacing with the world and as such renders moot your ability to differentiate between "special events" and "regular life," I mean my brain is on Code Orange every time I read the news. It´s like the difference of finding yourself off-balance, momentarily, and having your vestibular apparatus completely fucked, permanently, as much good to you as a demagnetized compass.

"Asked to describe a river, he drowned himself"

[jeremyrichards.livejournal.com]

-- David Herman

Perhaps it's a--forgive me for it--metairony that many of the recent theories struggle over an either/or distinction for irony, not allowing for gradations of irony, a spectrum of dissonance between intention and effect, self and self-consciousness, expectation and relief. The dissonance here provokes a deep hunger for something closer to the marrow, so the more recursive we get, the more we return to the tonic of sentiment.

Are you familiar with Ricoeur's second naivete?

Re: "Asked to describe a river, he drowned himself"

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

right, except I am afraid that we are are conditioned for a comforting regiment of Ricoeur´s decentration, which does not go over well when the power symbol of that narrative in which the subject lets-self-go/finds trustrworthy Other becomes a simulacrum of self. I actually don´t find the idea of "second naivete" particularly useful--it is like chasing after Lacan´s "real" via Geertzian method of "turtles all the way down." I mean, it works conceptally with Ricoeur´s anti-Hegelian approach to historical narratives, but most people operate in closed narratives.

[schrodingersgnu.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

"You are like one of Pavlov´s Pets destabilized by a lack of correlation between stimulus, reward and punishment."

Now see, this is where I'm getting scared. This lack of correlation has been repeatedly used as one of the chief tools of keeping people in check in prisons and concentration camps. Shoot someone at random, and the remaining prisoners will rationalize that the dead prisoner must have broken the rules somehow, and they will all strive harder to be model prisoners.

So who is in charge here? Who can we lynch? Has Cosby orchestrated this, to get people back to his physically painful wholesome preaching comedy?

Eh, fuck it. I'm going back to listening to Beautiful South. At least there I know the songs are ironic. They are. Right?

[contrasoma.livejournal.com]

Post of thee week. I'm guessing I'm in the latter end of Stage 2. As for producing stuff on my own end, I find I end up second-guessing my own motives, as I'm firmly convinced they were co-opted while I was sleeping the night before. So I don't write much, and end up exploding (at the pub, at friends, whatever) into fits of aimless ranting. No focus. Can't keep eyes on prize.

Nice catch on Pimp. That thing was a whole mess of...somethin'.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing I'm in the latter end of Stage 2.

You are in Canada, right? That´s probably why you are not at a more advanced stage yet. Let me know when you get to Stage 3, willya?

I'm firmly convinced they were co-opted while I was sleeping the night before

Interesting. By whom, would you say?

[mycrust.livejournal.com]

Your interlocutor is infected by your ironiagnosia and so it reproduces, like a discursive retrovirus, unstoppable as ice-9, a narrative-bound disaster of a fiction that shook off its fictional status like a lizard leaves its tail behind.


This is a very wonderful sentence.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

thankyou.

[creed-of-hubris.livejournal.com]

Hey, you should submit this to McSweeney's, it's hilarious.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I wouldn´t know how to go about doing that! Do they actually accept submissions? I thought they only published things from a dozen specially bred and/or genetically engineered authors, much like New Yorker does with its cartoons.

[boymaenad.livejournal.com]

best post I've seen all day. and by day, I mean, lifetime.

and by lifetime, I mean, see? I write/think in ambiguities like that all the time, whether I mean to or not, and I feel somewhat distressed to find that this may now pronounce me hip.

my ex used to point out how often I laughed as I cried. like, she felt like she rarely saw them apart. the glorious humorous pain of the meta-understanding of my own limited situation.

I knew a girl once who loved The Simpsons, and complained to me that her boyfriend and his friends appeared also to love The Simpsons, but when questioned about its satirical content would look at her blankly between droplets of beer-sweat and explain to her, as if to a toddler, "dude. it's just a cartoon."

which means, when things happen in detectable patterns in the alternative-looking-glass-reality of ironically intended television, there are people out there who are accepting and subtly learning from the (perhaps too brilliantly consistent) rules of causality they uphold. and they who don't get the joke may be mindlessly internalizing the life's lessons all back-assward. then when it influences the zeitgeist enough to start happening on the news, nobody is or should be all that surprised.

I'm woefully undereducated in any official capacity about these things, but isn't it so that if you go back to the 1950s, you get a very straightforward standard of communication, which gets progressively more post-modernly perverted through the decades until you find in the '90s that more headlines are made of bad puns and ironic turns of phrase than simple direct language? I remember noticing through that time more and more storefronts and menus made of puns and references. it started with the "rooty tooty fresh and fruity" (the food you'll be too embarrassed to order!), then came the "moons over my hammy" (which, as a lover of puns, even I find too painful to eat).

skip ahead and for my money, it's like we've exited the other side of concrete ironic reference and are now facing a trend of companies with made-up words that sound like real words for names, with this sort of doublethinky cognitive dissonance about whether they were real words all along. verizon, cingular, google, et al. more pollution in the bloodstream, though probably largely motivated by nothing more similar than the need for unique search terms and available domain names.

but really, who needs old-fashioned doublethink to subdue the masses when we can make nightmarish satire become the building blocks of world events? (Dark City comes to mind, as it often does, here...)

I mean, half the time, it seems like something the Simpsons would have made up, doesn't it? I mean, The Ten Commandments, The Musical (http://www.vkn.com/movies/the10com)? starring VAL (http://imdb.com/find?q=top%20secret!) KILMER (http://imdb.com/find?q=real%20genius)??

let alone the whole concept of a war on terrorism. that's like developing a pesticide which only kills roaches named Henry. it's like firing a gun into your own head to kill your split personality. but even more ironic than that.

I love, by the way, that you brought Alanis into this. because for all the coolness that is she, she has miseducated a generation of us on the subject. more people will think of rain and misfortune than twists or contradictions, maybe forevermore.

my Simpsons friend, by the way, killed herself. I think it was unrelated, but I always felt like her hanging around with people who didn't get the Simpsons was instrumental at least.

I leave you with this, from Six Feet Under, Season 3, episode "Making Love Work":


RUSSELL is helping CLAIRE dye her hair.

Russell: This is gonna look hot, hot, hot, baby!

Claire: I did blue hair in like eighth grade, ya know.

Russell: Yeah, but that was sincere blue hair. This is a comment on blue hair.

at what point does hipsterwear cease to be a comment on slovenly? the real irony, for my money, is when The Squeaky-Clean Mouse can make $40 off of each of them for a Magic Kingdom t-shirt that looks like it was coin-op laundered by 30 years of bachelorhood.

[boymaenad.livejournal.com]

and by "similar", I meant "sinister".

though it was tempting to leave it interestinger.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

that's fabulous.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

thanks!

[chitinous.livejournal.com]

God, it's kind of like syphilis. Thank you SO much for this post!!

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

At first I thought you meant my post was like syphilis...the "condition" IS like syphilis in that it makes you crazy in the end and you may spout reactionary Nietzscheisms.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose...

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

This is one of these posts where I realize what an incredible community this is and why I have switched from spending too much time reading the paper and listening to the radio to : spending too much time reading Live Journal. There are so many things that come to mind about every single comment in this entry. I'll throw just a few out...

* I am surprised the word " Renaissance" was not yet mentioned in relation to Hipness. Lately I have noticed people using that term instead of hip. As in "Oh no, you're no hipster. You're a Renaissance girl/boy. "

* On irony ( which to my distress, is often thought of as a form of humor)... From Gertrude Stein ( one of my favorites on the subject):
"Write as if the fact of writing something were continually becoming true and completing itself, not as if it were leading to something."

It's also interesting to notice that we are stuck in post~modernism. It's the reason why the Arts are stagnant right now. No one knows what's next. We are reinventing the wheel and yet we are on the brink of a revolution. But one that is much more subtle than the industrial one, because it exists mostly in the virtual world. It doesn't yet know how to express itself outside of that world because it exists in a time and space that is extremely difficult to contain and quantify. Hence the language loops.. We are in the middle of this revolution hence we are having trouble seeing it. It can be seen as complete chaos and absurdity or .. as enlightenment and Zen. Essentially it is all of the above.

" The self that lives in a realm of absurdity, embraces a tone of mockery and self mockery along with a spirit of Irony, and often bathes it's projects in humor. The sense of absurdity has to do with a perception of the world as ' discordant', or 'out of tune', or in some way 'deaf', 'mute' or in chaos - that is, as reflecting the dictionary meaning of absurdity. Important here is the absence of 'fit" between individual self and the outside world. Absurdity is not only an absence of meaning but a barrier to creating it. To express that absurdity, to make use of mockery, irony and humor is to take steps toward asserting more authentic feelings."

From Robert Lifton The Prothean Self
Also see American Apocalypse : he is amazing.

Re: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I´ve never heard the Renaissance thing--maybe it´s an East Coast vs. West Coast thing?

I remember the Lifton article back when it ran, when was it, last winter? It was brilliant.

Unrelatedly, I kept meaning to ask you and forgetting--about your comment on that post of mine with the village photographs
http://www.livejournal.com/users/anthrochica/227093.html
are you using saudade in some way that I am not familiar with? I only know saudade to mean a feeling of intense longing and nostalgia for home, often associated with diaspora, like bittersweet pride and nostalgia for something left behind. I wasn't sure how that applied to the village kids?..

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

ha! that is an awesome cartoon.

And thanks!