Post-irony, memes, and media consumption
For the first time in a really long time, I decided to embrace the cringe.
I recently went to Animethon, an annual anime convention held in Edmonton, Alberta, for the first time ever. A friend invited me along on a whim, and after a period of self-consciousness and nervousness, I said fuck it and decided to go.
Why was I nervous and self-conscious to go to this convention? For most who are too online, the answer is fairly obvious: I was worried about the cringe. Even though I was someone who had consumed anime/manga and their surrounding materials on-and-off for years, my enjoyment of them had been tainted by an ironic detachment from them. Sure, I had once enjoyed going to the public library as a teen and reading through as many volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist as I could, but that was me as a stupid teen! No self-respecting adult would actually admit they authentically enjoy anime. My friends around me, as well as the internet circles in which I interacted, reinforced these views. And thus my enjoyment of this media slowly became one of disdain, one where I engaged in a satirical performance of enjoyment held together by a kernel of self-loathing.
These ironic attitudes have been pervasive on the internet for quite some time, as seen in the advent of ironic memes. Ironic memes exist purely to turn things that aren’t typically considered memeable into memes (a sort of fuck you to the idea of an authentic meme, so to speak). They are funny purely on the basis that they are constructed from unfunny material; their humour comes not from the source material, but from the undercutting of the source material. From these developments we’ve seen the overpraising of games such as Fortnite, movies such as The Bee Movie, and shows like Cory in the House (which, as we all know, is the best anime). We saw the rise and fall of montage parodies, a revival of the doge meme into something much more surreal and dark, and the rise of deep-fried memes. More and more we see a cultural pervasiveness of this kind of irony, an enjoyment of media not for its value, but for the ironic value we construct from it.
Don’t get me wrong. Ironic memes are a fun time, and I enjoy basking in the absurdity as much as any other person. Issues begin to arise, however, when one’s primary source of enjoyment comes from ironic undercutting.
The problem is twofold. Firstly, in assuming that you can hold something at an ironic distance and viciously undercut it, it follows that an objectively superior space exists where you can do it from; a space of authenticity where true taste exists. For people whose irony pervades their tastes, however, this supposedly authentic space is, in reality, hollow; there is an absence of taste because nothing can be authentically enjoyed. Secondly, and a bit paradoxically, this absence of taste serves functionally the ironist’s only taste; they derive pleasure solely from undercutting other things, never truly engaging in authentic enjoyment. They perform absurd enjoyment but secretly hate their performance; they can never truly develop tastes of their own.
So what’s the solution to this problem? The clearest answer might seem to be a return to authentic enjoyment, but that would fail to take into account the most positive aspect of irony: self-awareness. Pointing out the gaps and contradictions in what we derive enjoyment from is important, as not everything we enjoy is innocent. There are forces heavily influencing the production of most media — capitalism and its intersections with racism, gender, colonialism, sexuality, and so on — that can produce and perpetuate harmful ideological standards and sentiments. Irony can be a useful tool to bring these problems to light, especially when channelled in satire. But if one’s ironic lens only serves to dismantle everything, including the possibility of authentic enjoyment, nothing is left to hold onto. We become jaded, if not miserable.
The ideal solution, then, is a synthesis: a return to authenticity, but an authenticity informed by an ironic self-awareness. Hence, we come to post-irony. Post-irony turns a critical eye to the object being examined, pointing out its flaws and absurdities (the cringe, so to speak). But instead of undercutting the object because of its flaws, the ironic gaze is undercut instead; the irony is ironized, and the absurdity of the object is instead revelled in. The absurdity of the object, and by extension the object itself, is deeply and authentically enjoyed.
In post-irony, self-awareness becomes self-reflexivity: we acknowledge the flaws of the object, examine whether the flaws destroy the object’s worth or authenticity, and sometimes even embrace the object despite its flaws. In this sense, this is the most authentic sort of enjoyment, as it looks at enjoyment holistically, not failing to acknowledge flaws or holding those flaws over an object wholly. After all, nearly everything we consume, nearly every ritual we perform, is absurd and bizarre in some shape or form.
Where we see most post-ironic enjoyment start to emerge is in the phenomenon of “guilty pleasures.” People feel guilty over enjoying things like trashy reality TV, Haddaway, and — to come full circle — anime, because of the cringe factor. People don’t want to admit they like these things for fear of judgement from their peers, from a collective understanding that these pieces of media are fundamentally flawed in some sense. Guilty pleasures are not, unfortunately, true post-irony, because they still are held together by a kernel of judgement. True post-ironic enjoyment would entail a beautiful movement beyond this kernel towards a one based in appreciation of the whole constructed by the sum of its parts. Guilty pleasures, of course, are the place to start. For me, post-ironic enjoyment came first and most easily in music (Lil Pump, anyone?).
What would a world with post-ironic enjoyment look like? It would be a place where everyone has a sense of relative security in their tastes, as well as a sense of aesthetic pleasure, through authentic enjoyment. It would be a place that would neatly balance both enjoyment and critical engagement with media. We would be able to more easily understand each other’s tastes and have conversations about it (instead of reducing conversations of taste to mutual ridicule and posturing).
That’s all very utopian and pretty-sounding, and I don’t expect it to magically spring up anytime soon. But hey, not hating myself for enjoying things is a great place to start. And it might be a great start for you and your media consumption habits as well.
