I'd like to know, what do people find so wrong with Wampole's article "How to Live Without Irony"?
Overall I find it to be pretty true and similar to my own views.
I can understand that maybe her publication has been scrutinized so thoroughly that the essence of her point has been overlooked.. but honestly I don't see what the big turn-off is in her writing.
Here's a link
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/
Even though the author only briefly mentioned postmodernism, I wonder if hipsters and pervasive cultural irony are postmodern responses to a culture that commodifies everything. The very fact that hipsters aren’t a “real” subculture (assuming that real subcultures actually produce things outside of the corporate-owned commodification game of late stage American capitalism) may reflect the emptiness and bewilderment of a culture that has already been bought and sold millions of times over. Since irony is a hallmark of postmodernism, hipsters are the perfect personification of postmodernism. They are ironic, they always make obscure references to different forms of media to boost their own self-esteem, and they are ultra self-aware about what they are portraying themselves in public, just like postmodern art is. It seems that some of these people are living their own lives as some sort of performance art piece, probably exacerbated by the internet, Facebook, reality T.V.,etc. I acknowledge that people of all social classes and backgrounds integrate irony into their daily lives in various ways, but I don’t really have a problem with this article. I do agree with the author that the use of irony by upper/middle class hipsters is different from the irony used by marginalized groups. In my opinion, the people who use irony the most (i.e. hipsters) use irony to mask their passive approach to privilege and power; they could use irony to critique privilege and power (or better yet, just use their privilege and power to combat oppression), but instead, they use it to highlight the absurdity and meaningless of everything. These power structures may seem meaningless and useless to a middle/upper class person, but they are very real to people whose lives are regulated by them.
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