some fragments
I.
I went to a college that has only engineers, artists, and architects and so for the first few weeks I was goldilocksing cliques for the right position between (the engineers') milquetoast earnestness and (the artists') reflexive ironic skepticism. An emblematic example of this struggle was that sometimes artists would sometimes joke about my wilco poster, because white male fronted 00's indie rock was pretty gauche in 2016, whereas "guy who likes wilco" was still a suave, preening, or overdetermined sign for the engineers. One type of person dismisses the thing through condescension, but another type of person so humbles themselves - before something as understandable as a major label recording artist - that they have no remark to make.
The architects - who I share the most with in desires and, I think, in affirmation -, even after years of taking different classes, would sometimes surprise me with how free we could be in discourse, how little ground we have to pick up before reaching one another when explaining things, how little envy we would have for the things we had without the other. There are people that I will love forever - Ruby, Avery, Maren - for striking the right balance, with me, between laughter and explanation, between flippant insults and bear hugs.
But, at any rate, I think just because of a few envious people who had retreated up into irony, 18 year old me was deeply interested in these two categories: earnest and ironic. One inspires anger, the other bored me to tears. Since then I've found the categories less and less helpful.
II.
These categories are much, much, more slippery than they're treated as being.
What qualities are neighbors of "earnest"? the ones Oxford gives are already problematizing, and though my selection closes off a lot, here's a categorization:
- (1.) the series that evinces a respect for production-logic:
{steady, committed, dedicated, diligent, industrious, hard-working ...}
- (2.) the series that evinces consideration or wisdom:
{studious, thoughtful, profound, bookish}
- (3.) the series evincing a specific welcoming of suffering:
{solemn, grave, sober, humorless, ...}
- (4.) the series evincing a specific welcoming of joy:
{heartfelt, wholehearted, impassioned, from the heart, full-hearted, burning, passional, perfervid}
and I'd like to close the categorization there, these are some the basic strands wrapped up in the earnest.
I think all of the qualities in (1. - production-logic) and (2. - consideration/wisdom) are wrapped up in the American "good," the qualities in (3. - welcoming-suffering) and (4. - welcoming-joy) are more morally contested.
III.
Where does the ironic cleave itself from the earnest?
(1. - production-logic): the ironic disdains production-logic, or accepts the vulgar reality that a certain amount of incomplete participation in production is necessary to avoid destruction.
(2. - consideration-wisdom): the ironic is certainly amenable to consideration, to wisdom. in fact, the gesture of condescension, one of the most obvious ironic gestures, is an ambiguous assumption of the position of the wise; it is the loud provocation that, whether a sage or a loon takes the position of the wise, the actual presence of wisdom is not necessary to the stance. does the ironic defile wisdom? by no means. the ironic defiles hierarchies of nominal wisdom,
does not agree to arrangements of free-flowing information, or suggests that there is myopia in the belief that wisdom can be shared.
(3. welcoming-suffering): the ironic is not welcoming of suffering. the spartan pedigree in this category of earnestness, by no means necessary and by no means universally held as good, simply does not motivate the ironic character. the earnest character's "humorlessness" marks an obvious retreat from the game of surfaces, ridiculousness, perversion, madness-- the whole idealism that motivates the ironic to play in words instead of build - with the earnest - walls and bridges, spouts and hammers, monuments to order and extensivity.
(4. welcoming-joy): this category marks the small common-ground of the earnest and the ironic, for although the ironic can have a repetition-compulsive bent, both the earnest and the ironic have their joys.
what is more welcoming of joy than the destructive impulses of the ironic? the ironic part of me has gone to an interview and laughed at the interviewer's question, knowing full well how I've contradicted myself and destroyed what I professedly seek. but this very undermining of desire for the screaming sensation of momentary, situational catalysis is the extreme joy that the ironic can't ween themselves off from. the ironic hates their neighbors, every neighbor, they are unreasonable; but this is their very rationing.
IV.
A certain return?
------- in the Earnest: the protestant-capitalist, the spartan, the informant.
----------- in the Ironic: the skeptic, the stoic, the sinister.
these admixtures are not eternal categories, they're moral bastard children. they're as specific as can be.
V.
An obvious heteronomy:
the ironic character is never played with a lack in intentionality, with a lack of meaning, without a goal.
Language in bodies and language in shallow images can share intentions. Neither lacks joy, both are obviously wholly motivated by their specific joys. Neither is specifically interested in the suffering of others, neither escapes solipsism.
VI.
Though I can't find the passage of Alphonso Lingis'
Trust that I thought taught me this point -----
goodwill has two senses:
- (a.) whereas good means giving, literally good-will; a very christian idea, and one which nietzsche's geneology successfully draws to analysis, this has been the vulgar sense of goodwill in my life.
- (b.) whereas good means high-quality, literally good-willing; goodwill as harmony and accord between one's conscious desiring and one's activities; not contradicting oneself
I would like anyone who sees earnestness as a useful tool to have goodwill (b.) as a concept, so as to escape from fearing ironic characters (who are not bad!) and escape from seeing earnest characters (who are only good as long as one favors productivity to other joys!) as uncomplicated heroes.
VII.
One of many neologisms:
in the
Logic of Sense there was a term
interpenetration which denotes, vaguely, the absence/incompletion/graying/relativity of borders between sensorial objects. The ironic does not give up on the world, on goals, on projects, on forever-having; all of us enjoy partial states with a view of both limits. We all have it both ways. The person who tightens their grip the hardest around their being-earnest will find themselves, regularly, wondering where their earnesty went, staring off into the distance with a throbbing, reddened hand.
We enjoy having a relationship that is always, less or more, collapsing. We enjoy long periods of loneliness, betrayed in a minute by a message from the right someone. We contradict ourselves, we watch - as from outside of ourselves, as theatregoers - every derivative of our position change instant by instant, as we glacially trace an arc into the abyss.
'I feel like I'm a messenger .. sent here by someone .. my mom, probably.'