Table of contents Introduction 3 Mission 4 Method 4 Theory 5

Basis of movement

It becomes evident that the rise of a certain movement is inevitably tied to social and cultural beliefs or skepticism of society. It is often philosophers and theorists who question the cultural state of the society they live in. It would be redundant to go through every movement, so for the purpose of the issue at hand, I will be looking at the movements leading up to Andersen’s notion of the postironical. As mentioned earlier the Postironical can be seen as an extension of postmodernism, so it would be reasonable to begin with the notion of that. However, one must travel even further back because postmodernism is related to modernism. It becomes apparent when dealing with movements that the exact time of their arrival is somewhat difficult to determine thus they are often set within one half of a century. Furthermore, some movements are still under debate as for their emergence. For the purpose of Modernism I have chosen to place its entrance post World War II in the years between 1945 and 1980 – granted the basis of Modernism seems to be noted as early as the late nineteenth century. The reason I have chosen a different time period is due to the relation to postmodernism, because this ‘second generation’ of Modernism fueled the rise of postmodernism.

Returning to the subject at hand, Modernism became a critical tool against the Enlightenment thinking and as such it challenged or even rejected the thought of rationality and coherence of Enlightenment thinking, art and music. The basis of this new movement became the result of a fundamental theme that seemed to dominate the twentieth century, namely that of violence. According to the Michael Rasmussen in the book “Fornuften og synerne”¹³ (2000), violence became the main concern of the century and included violence between nations, between groups, between individuals and even the violence the individual exerts on itself. This prompted a central problem; how to regulate the violence. Furthermore, this affected the philosophy of the time and challenged the basis of thinking and the ideals of Western society. According to Rasmussen, “En måde at øve selvkritik på er at tematisere det man gør, idet man bruger sin fornuft, former og anvender begreber, identificerer ting med andre ting og ikke mindst abstraherer.”¹⁴ As such, this way of thinking reflects the tendency of the nineteenth century where the way of thinking became subject to one’s actions and self-consciousness was criticized. Also, this issue is seen as an expression of the crisis of philosophy because philosophy has always along with science, been a conceptional cognition of reality – that philosophy has always existed within the real, but has now resulted in human and collective catastrophes. As a consequence, people longed for a new and different way of thinking which exceeded reality seeing that the old way of thinking resulted in ruins. To explain the motives, Rasmussen uses a literary work by Albert Camus called The Fall from 1956, which is a story about a French lawyer in Amsterdam who has an identity crisis. He lives in a Jewish neighborhood where 75,000 people were deported to Auschwitz which he sees as the scene of the biggest crime in history. An interesting view made by Rasmussen is how the protagonist Clamence expresses ironic admiration of Holocaust, “I admire that diligence, that methodical patience! When one has no character, one has to apply a method.”¹⁵ However, this attitude ruins his relation to others and he is trying to improve himself as a human but always to discover that he is too self involved. “I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said.”¹⁶ According to Rasmussen, this view recasts Pascal’s notion that “Jeg’et er had-værdigt”¹⁷ and Kant’s “et jeg tænker skal altid kunne ledsage mine forestillinger.”¹⁸ As such, Camus is with this story saying;

Identitskrisen er permanent og definitiv, når man hverken kan tilslutte sig et fællesskab eller et jeg. Det er ikke for meget sagt at, Clamence, denne vox clamantis in deserto, råber efter et nyt fællesskab og et nyt jeg, og at han er moden for at brud med traditionen.¹⁹

Returning to the philosophy of this period, we see different attacks aimed at the System, the public, the totality, the hegemony and the identity i.e. everything that in some way expresses power over something else. As such the basis of banal logical thinking, subsumption – that something is something of a kind, or that something is deemed to be something else is perceived as a not entirely innocent mental operation seeing that you hereby do something to something (or someone) else. This means you change it from what it was in itself to what it becomes to you. As a result according to Rasmussen, this prompted the philosophers to deconstruct the Western way of thinking that build the Western world, which brings us to the movement of postmodernism.

Postmodern thinking

Sociology employs Postmodernity as the type of society emerged in the West where mass media has taken the ideological power over the citizens who have become a silent majority of consumers. According to Rasmussen, mathematical structures are implemented, even more in everyday life such as bar codes, payment cards, computers etc. and the production process becomes automated. Furthermore, the emergence of the Internet becomes a powerful symbol of postmodernity and is described by Rasmussen as an all-embracing home without a centre that houses all and where anyone can move incognito. As such in sociology, postmodern stands for a new immensity, an absence of a centered possibility of orientation and generalized plurality. According to Rasmussen, it is a world with only mutual connected units but deprived of overall purpose and perspective.²⁰ Furthermore, the postmodern claims the right to ‘difference’ which means that any man, city, state etc. maintains the right to be oneself which no family, country or supranational institution has the right to change. Thus, Postmodernity is about management of one’s identity, i.e. about the effort to assume an identity, which is not enforced in advance; basically it is about maintaining and validating one’s freedom.

In philosophy, according to Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge the term the postmodern is about the condition of decay in Modernity, where Lyotard views Postmodernism as Modernity’s ‘grand narratives’ which have collapsed. According to Lyotard a grand narrative consists of three parts; the origin, then the emancipation or division and lastly the atonement and as such modernity’s grand narratives gather their validation in a future or idea, which will be carried out. This idea of for example freedom or socialism has a legitimating value since it applies to all without exception. As a result the characteristic structure of Modernity is ‘the project’, which concentrates on the reestablishment of something lost and the implementation of the project will correspond to man’s rediscovery of his identity. Consequently, Lyotard sees the Modernity project and its legitimation²¹ forward in time, all while referring to a lost origin that can be reestablished and made current again, such as God’s law as it applied in Paradise and as the classless society in Marxism. However, the postmodern thought denies these ‘projects’ as naive and mendacious because Lyotard sees “the postmodern condition” to be based on the dissolution of the grand narratives. This is mainly due to the failure of East European communism that realized the classless society was a lie and the false promise of liberal capitalism, which noted that mankind, should gain wealth as the decisive condition for ultimate emancipation. However, the world saw an emergence of economical crisis, GULAG and continued exploitation of deprived countries. The final break with modernity, as Lyotard sees it, is in 1942 when the Nazis decided total extermination of all Jewish people. With that the entire modern project aimed at the liberation of mankind died. From this, Lyotard notes some prevailing negative features of the postmodern,

a. hvad der uafviseligt findes, er sætninger og diskurser. Men metadiskursen findes ikke, ingen universel diskurs findes hvori diskursernes mangfoldighed kan integreres. Metadiskursen ville jo selv være et sprogspil. Syntesen er ugyldig, verden kan ikke være ’hel’.

b. dissensus er vigtigere end konsensus. Det gælder om at bekræfte diskursernes uforenelighed således at hver diskursgenre forbliver inden for sit område og ikke uretmæssigt overskrider det. Dette skal til for at undgå terroren.

c. generelt: det postmoderne defineres ved dette at udholde det inkommensurable, det ufremstillige, det sublime, det at tilværelsen ikke går op i en enhed.²²

To sum the characteristics of sociology, philosophy and culture debate within the modern vs. the postmodern, it becomes apparent that criticism has been the basic term of thinking in the twentieth century. Furthermore, key words such as self development are important tools and that there is no whole, no overall solution because everything is autonomous. But according to Rasmussen, many people feel that the ideals of Western culture lack substance and are at the same time irreversible. This leaves many people perplexed and this uncertainty, fear and crisis result in often religious motivated attempts to seek back to a safe foundation. As a result, the search for personal clarification is much coveted – in a time where everything is a mess; we all want a definite and undisputed truth.

The Postironical²³

The American author David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was according to Tore Rye Andersen one of the leading figures in the American showdown with the postmodern and ironical literature of the sixties and seventies.²⁴ In Wallace’s work he argues that irony, which had an oppositional role in the literature of the sixties and functioned as an important critical weapon in the struggle against the establishment, has lost its literary value in the nineties. According to him the sixties’ irony was first and foremost a characteristic of marginal literature, the avant-garde, where it served as an effective critique of society. This aspect is noted by Wallace in an interview where he says,

Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it.²⁵

As such and as also mentioned in the introduction, postmodern irony was thus a healthy, critical reaction against the System and a way of unmasking the conservative establishment, of shaking the monolithical power in Washington. The problem is that during the eighties and nineties, the System as Fredric Jameson has argued in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) has transformed itself. It has increasingly turned into a flexible, adaptive network, which has the ability to contain contradictions within itself. And as a result of this increased adaptability of the System, it has become an elastic assimilation of the ironical counter-language of the sixties. This is seen in the mainstream culture of television where the previously effective catalogue of countercultural strategies has been transformed and taken over, causing the rebellious and norm-breaking irony to lose its critical potential and become a norm in itself. Consequently, Andersen argues that the rebellious and ironical attitude of early Postmodernism can be found in a wide spectrum of today’s popular culture.