The Expulsion of Irony from Kitsch and the Metonymy of terror

[lapsedmodernist]

Here’s the thing: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About how kitsch stopped being ironic. I mean, I’ve been talking about it for a while, how that defined the post-9/11 discourse. I hate to hand it to Kundera for being right. Some of his writing is beautiful and on point, but when he tries to generalize it’s usually annoying. But he said that kitsch is the absence of shit, and while it’s one of his vaguely astute soundbites, the last year and a half has unpacked that sentence in a way that is true. I prefer to think about it as elimination of irony. Kitsch by definition is unironic, that’s what makes it kitsch, but in true pomo fashion, that’s what has made items of kitsch ironic signifiers that could be used for counterdiscourses. I thought about it last night as people holding candles in Union Square acapellaed their way through Kumbaya and Ain’t Gonna Study War No More. I thought about how much sing-ins and drum circles annoyed me but how any sort of resistance now will have to be reinfused with sincerity, in order to at least measure up as a little David to the Goliath of the media; donning kitschy items as ironic comments on American ethnocentrism/globalization/whatever simply won’t fly anymore. The space for that particular discourse has been erased. Americana Kitsch-in-earnest has become a vessel for the new kind of framework, which is the metonymy of terror. It’s kind of like taking referential mania from Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” and interpollating all the messages and signals into this kind of schizophrenic matrix where everything stands for everything else which can stand for terrorism (which becomes the primary category even for things that have nothing to do with terrorism, which are illuminated and demarcated through phrases like “there is no conclusive evidence to link X to terrorism), where in a post hoc/undistributed middle fallacy salad, thanks to this grand synecdoche, retrospectively--but really synchronically!--anything can be terrorism, unless it has proved its solemn kitsch cred. The metonymy of terror is the way to link Saddam Husein to 9-11. It is all-powerful. It transcends categories of history and logic. It deactivates cause-and-effect directionality. It amalgamates Saddam and Darth Vader, biblical binaries and moral imperatives, Hitler and the weasels featured on the cover of the New York Post a few weeks ago. Metonymy of terror creates a forum where Chris Matthews on Hardball can say that Bush’s decision to go to war is like choosing a C-section instead of waiting for a problematic delivery(na-ah he di-in! yes he did. last night.) Sure, that’s a metaphor, too, but that’s just within the context of the phrasing and the establishment of a referent and an analogy. But it’s also a metonymy for the badness of abortion, desired by selfish, slutty women who want their babies vacuumed out of them, as opposed to the goodness of a C-section, which is a medical procedure that is PAINFUL and SCARRING for a woman, and performed unnecessarily by scalpel-happy doctors all the time all over the place, but it’s good because it adheres to the Bible party line of sexuality/birth/pain and because it encompasses a sacrificial (almost ritualistic, no?) element (and our president sure had something to say about sacrifice in tonight’s address, didn’t he?) leading to the sacred birth. And on it goes, the sliding down the metonymical umbilical cord of signification, where it all feeds into the Biblical/Star Wars discourse that busts out of the realm of allegorical and into the literal.

Comments

[enemyalien.livejournal.com]

heya, who's this Kundera person? I'm trying to write an article about the stupid Broadway revival of Flower Drum Song, wanting to say how it fails after post 9-11 because white people don't want to see a stupid musical where it has Chinese immigrants laughing at white people, even tho the old version of FDS has become very campy for Asian Americans.

Or perhaps I can quote your lj for my paper...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

milan kundera is a writer who was exiled from chekhoslovakia and lived in paris. he wrote "unbearable lightness of being" and "the book of laughter and forgetting" those being his two most famous works. he writes about love and gender relations largerly from a freudian perspective, but it's all set in the context of immigration, loss of language and memory and the psychology of living in a totalitarian regime. his narratives are full of mini-prose-essays like the one about kitsch and shit in "unbearable lightness of being"
i don't know if quoting livejournal in a paper would fly.

Milan Kundera

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

That man can make me angrier more consistently than any other writer of note. I go back and read his novels every once in a while, just to figure out why they make me so angry.

He's got great thoretical concepts - his titles alone are miraculous - but once he starts mixing sexuality into it my hackles hit the ceiling.

Enjoy!

Interesting

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

This is by far one of the most interesting, chewiest things I've read on LJ to date. I'm adding you to my friends list, if for no other reason than you reminded me of the current market value of the word metonymy.

Re: Interesting

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

And kudos on the Guy Gavriel Kay! I cry almost every time on the way to Caer Sedat.

Re: Interesting

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yeah, i agree with you on kundera, fundamentally. i think he is unrivaled as far as phenomenology of nostalgia and exile goes, as well as the particular brand of insanity that festers under totalitarian rule, but his discourse on sex and romance...oh lord. i guess i used freudian in my reply above as a shortcut for "really fucking annoying and reductionist and archetypal in the worst way." which makes it all the more annoying, because he is so compelling in these other arenas...well, my dad, who is a fiction writing professor, teaches "unbearable lightness" each year under the theme rubrik of "philosophy as soap opera" so there's something...
and i love g.g.kay. i am completely obsessed with Tigana because, well, it's just amazing, but i also think it's such an amazing metaphor for colonialism (the whole erasing language/memory etc.) and then ending of that always makes me cry...as does the ending of The Darkest Road...speaking of caer sedat, it's interesting, in terms of the arthurian legend, i was very into them when i was younger, and having read the lot of them assumed that the whole thing of arthur killing babies in Fionovar Tapestry was apocryphal (w/r/t the Arthurian canon) but then i did some research and found out that no, there are in fact stories about that, they are just not the ones that get re-published and re-printed most often.
i'm gonna add you back, if you don't mind.

Re: Interesting

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

Please do. You sound like someone I want to keep tabs on. :)

I remembered something about Arthur and the children, but not a lot. As much as I love legends, sometimes source material isn't as interesting as the way it's been interpreted over a thousand years.

I think GGK does amazing things with word/unspoken - putting the reader in the position of knowing things that the rest of the characters will never or almost never know. I've read most of his work, but the ones I return to most often are the Fionavar Tapestry. Now, though, I'm inspired to go pick up Tigana again. And maybe the one based on courtly love in France, although I don't remember the name...

...as for philosophy as soap opera, ug. Yes. Although I would add to the mix that I think Kundera has fallen prey to massive egotism at this point.

Re: Interesting

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yeah...i think that for a long time kundera has been an institution and once an author becomes aware of themselves being an institution, it is usually not great for their writing (people like nabokov being notable exceptions, although my absolute favorites among his writing are still his early short stories, like Spring in Fialta). I guess the Arthur-killing-babies thing was after he had sex with Morgan LeFey, and Merlin prophesized that his son, born on a certain day, would kill him, so he had all babies killed that were born on a specific day (same mythological gesture as Herod killing babies in an attempt to thwart the advent of Jesus) but, like Herod, he failed and Mordred was born anyway. I reread the Fionovar Tapestry often, but I think overall Tigana is still my favorite, it's just so complex and heartbreaking. is "Song For Arbonne" the France one? I remember not liking it as much. it wasn't as well structured in terms of drama and catharsis, and I've noticed that in both Song For Arbonne and The Lions of Al-Rassan he is getting away from magic and doing more historical fiction. While I think his obvious historical erudition is what makes books like Tigana really come to life, I like the role magic plays in his text both in terms of narratives and larger metaphores, and his less-magical books don't hold my interest as much. Have you read any of the Sarantine Mosaic series? Are they any good?

Re: Interesting

[flynngrrl.livejournal.com]

I remember thinking Song for Arbonne wasn't as qell structured either, and I remember little of the Lions of Al-rassan except that it also involved a duel seen from far away at the end. They were getting more into historical fiction, and although they had some great moments, they weren't worth the re-reading that his other things are.

I read the first mosaic. I remember wanting to read the rest. It has magic, but it's not a world of magic, as I recall. Magic is not the norm. There's some great stuff with the forests of Germany, though, and his usual excellent use of rituals and beasts and what not. I'd recommend picking it up in mass market paperback, you know?

The turning point for me with MK was Slowness. I thought it agonizingly egotistical, both in its writing and in its publication. Arg!

As for Nabokov, my least favorite flavor is that occasional ego that comes out, although he probably would have called it "superiority." ;)