Is Freedom an Oscillation Beyond Irony?

Step Out

Let's reassure ourselves of a definition and then ask a question. The reassurance : What does Postmodernism mean? The Question : What's irony got to do with a definition of Postmodernism? The simple answer is in this question: What is Knowingness when meaning is unstable? Then when all that's sorted out there's a judgement to be made on the value or otherwise of stability's relationship with freedom. And out of that judgement honest lies and deceit are born. 

Let's get posh and posit a Metaphysical Attitude by pottering on back to another German Idealist, he was a well fed man who was 56 when he died in 1829, he went by the wonderful name of Friedrich Schlegel. In his youth he was a big fan of Kant's Transcendental Idealism and the excitement of the Enlightenment, as he aged the poor chap became a Christian Nationalist. Schlegel, despite his frailties, in his exploration of language discovered morphemes - snippets of meaning - in the German word Ironie (which is the English word Irony).These morphemes suggested that irony should be thought of as a Metaphysical Attitude. In other words, irony reflected a deep down understanding that there were areas of thinking that no human being was really capable of capturing. Such areas included ultimate truth.  "Ultimate Truth" when used ironically, spoken with a tone of Irony, according to Schlegel was self-referential. It was bathos, it was the one little remark that turned a reach for truth, a great work of literature, a lifetime's achievement into an amusing nonsense.  But Schlegel was a tad pompous and suggested Irony placed the Artist above the work, a false modesty, rather than a "don't believe a word of it." Which for Schlegel became a faith in the form of his belief in the Roman Church. 

The refreshingly slender Jean-François Leotard in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), introduced a definition of Postmodernism that described it as "an incredulity toward metanarrative." Pretty damn spiffy and very La Belle Dame Sans Merci of him to come up with something so sprightly and Gallic. We Anglo Saxons with our stubby fingers, promptly contributed wide-eyed disbelief, incredulity, to the morphemes in the usage of the word irony. It was attached to our idea of wit, our grasp of charades.

Soon enough we sulked, we'd already stolen the word pastiche from the Italians and produced the accusation that Irony in Postmodernism has suborned the youth and while psychologists welcomed the business there was nothing they could do about it when the patient started throwing coffee tables at their girlfriends. Naturally political interests saw a future in a realignment of reality that suited the emotionally hungry.

Wordsmiths struggled on through the happy days of the new perspectives they'd found in the controversies of Postmodernism before being persuaded to employ their imaginations to produce the beautiful notion Can-Bobby calls The Oscillation Beyond Irony. He introduces Metamodernism or Post Irony through the work of two cultural theorists, as Postmodernist sociologists have come to be called. Two men, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who describe a "structure of feeling" characterized by a constant oscillation between two opposite poles. 

These opposite poles are the distance between the enthusiasm, sincerity and doubts of Modernism - which followed the convictions of the Enlightenment - and at the other pole of this structure of feeling there's the irony, skepticism and doubts of Postmodernism. This new view of the world the Ancient Greeks would have continued to call skepticism is placed in Schlegel's morphemes of this word Metamodernism or Post Irony and will one day receive a chapter in the Book of Irony 

Cutty Means Short

A Marsh Wren weighs under half an ounce

"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of the worm." Not exactly A Midsummer's Night Dream as a subject for this dreary day of the week which by Shakespeare's time was called Wednesday in England and loyal to the Roman tradition was still called dydd Mercher, after Mercury, in Wales. And yes, there's something to savor in the idea of a pompous old fart and his fishing rod contemplating the blotched and rotting yellow corpse of a king being eaten of by enthusiastic and cheerful worms at a bait shop.

In the long gone, when they were raising Silbury Hill, the Wren, a tiny creature, was declared the King of Birds. On the approaches to the shortest day, young European males since before the Celts would hunt and kill the king of birds. Protein for the soup some might say. Indeed, but there was much more to it, even back then young men weren't that bright, they needed purpose and the neolithic equivalent of buddy movies to keep them on track. On the Solstice as dictated by the priests and their calendars, the Old Year died so the New Year might rule and bringeth forth plenty. Yes indeed, whether good or bad, whether he was a winter king or a summer king, the year was a king, a noisy king at that. So why not impress the ladies by taking him out and eating him instead of waiting for the pig to fatten.

Richard the Second was ten years old when he was crowned king in 1377, he was married to a six year old when he was 29. No one liked him, they liked his courtiers even less, thieving, corrupt, arrogant and ignoble, they were absolutists of the very worst kind. Little did young Richard know that his sole contribution to Western Civilization was to inspire Shakespeare's political play and much more important to the wider world, he inspired the Keepers of Wren Lore to wax ironic on the subject of their passion with a secret poem about the Peasants Revolt.

Oh yes, you know you're alive in a pointless era when the passionless fellas with the port, the diplomas and house maids claim that street demonstrations and other disturbances do nothing. I mean God Lord! Think barrels of tea, guillotines and the Cutty Wren, then try and find your imagination.

Simple enough, the boys out hunting thought it might be fun to chase down the idea they should be paid what they were worth and not what the nobles and the King's men at arms decided they were worth. It all got a bit out of hand, they'd eat the only king left to them, divide the bounty amongst those in need.

Defining Freedom by Fiat

Apple Sauce

If you're looking for a mid twentieth century statement on human nature you can't really do better than Arendt's book The Human Condition. But first, you don't want to aggravate the 'precision in language' people by throwing around a phrase like human nature as if it was a roll of toilet paper in social crisis.

Human Nature can be defined as: ways of behaving, thinking and feeling that are shared by most people. Arendt's concerns, like so many before and after her, were with the whys, whats and hows of those ways of behaving. And like so many before and after her, Arendt made the distinction between the Active Life and the Contemplative Life.

The Active Life was beavering around climbing the slippery pole. The Contemplative Life was high on the hill contemplating. Of the two, in them old days before indoor plumbing, beavering was a little on the physical side, the preserve of the dullards or slaves. Contemplators sat nearer to the gods when they weren't cutting deals.

Then in the middle of the 19th Century, possibly because someone was a little upset and wanted to stick it to the classic liberals, a movement afoot turned the trickle down theory of the period, often called the Hegelian Dialectic, upside down. It was observed that Contemplators made nothing, they just sat there. Without beavers, contemplators had nothing to contemplate.

Hannah Arendt saw room in the heavens for both the Beaver and the Contemplator. She suggested that neither was better or worse than the other, something like a cultural revolution was simply counter productive, it was a waste of resource.

Arendt suggested that on a more personal level for us people, through the years there'd been another distinction made. This distinction was between Private and Public Life. In the old days the Private Realm wasn't the intimate setting it's supposed to be today, it was a servitude to biology, food, shelter and raising babies. Back then the Public Realm was freedom from that sort of hard labor, it was the place for "great words and great deeds." Having climbed the slippery pole, the Public Realm was a place free from labor, toil and sweat. It was the place to think high thoughts and earn high status. 

As time moved on, numbers and complexity in societies increased, production techniques changed dramatically and  there came a necessary third realm for us people. This was the Social Realm, characterized by biological needs becoming a public matter, a matter of national security and as a result the public realm started interfering with that former provider of food shelter and raising babies which had hitherto been thought of as the Private Realm.  For Arendt this new Social Realm was a fundamentally corrupting influence on both the public and the private realms.

Go ahead, raise your hackles, spit and kiss a fat man. But know that by corruption of the Private and Public Realms, Hannah Arendt was inclined to see the dominance of a Social Realm that was creating a cycle of production and consumption that drew its strength from endless and continuous labor. She saw it as a servitude to a form of individual poverty. Rather than a society born of individual creativity with a chance to grow in a public space matched with the solitude and intimacy of a private space, she saw the advancing Social Realm as leading to a diminished human being whose existence was focused on survival and consumption.

Yes indeed Caesar's dogged legions, thick as planks, doing as they were told to win Gaul against the brilliance of the Celts in exchange for the pensions as craftsmen.  A Celt or a Roman, whose freedom would you have preferred to belong to. 

Relief from the Human Condition

Roadway in Early Autumn

Where does a dualism go?  The suspicion always seems to be that dualism as a manager of balance doesn't go anywhere. It remains as a state of tension that gives you your chance to introduce the word dynamic which is a central yet rather ill-defined and for some reason much admired feature of anything that goes to the Department of Propaganda under the general title of a 'A system.'

An example from the medical profession might be : "How are your bowels?" "My bowels aren't as dynamic as I wish them to be!" Follow on questions could well mark a distinction between good hearted hedonism and the dour 'woe is me' of stoics, to either of which responses should be "Drink more water, eat your vegetables, invest in an inexpensive Polish Sausage that's on sale and take a walk now and then."

Anything dualism, dualistic, or whatever happens when opposites symbiotically combine and produce explanatory symbols, Cognitive Psychologists see mental representations of the internal world. They get excited, they see the building blocks, the patterns and shapes of what's actually going on in the mind and they can come away with sense making ideas that might have some basis in an old fashioned training of our capacity to comprehend a world of fact. To be clear  about these shapes and patterns, they are representations of the invisibly tiny, they are projected, cast onto a surface to give them visibility.

Be brave, imagine the vastness of the reality being explored, absorb the errors. Of course that might mean accepting a level of insignificance that doesn't come easy to the "what about me" of a dynamic community that fills the diploma lined offices of the Analytical Psychologist Industry which feeds on the host of incurable dualities by offering relief from the Human Condition.