Irony: Irony Cannot Work (note: not 'does not work')

It is quite commonplace to describe irony as no longer working because everything has been ironised and so nothing can be ironic and irony does not work.  There are several good theoretical justifications for this  but the sublime Stewart Lee has made this point most clearly in his Comedy Vehicle.

The sense that irony doesn't work is unfortunately an ideological trick.  The really point is that it cannot work.  Zizek was quickly on to the problem of Irony in his The Sublime Object of Ideology; "in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally." (p24)

Which is to say that "the ruling culture" deals with irony through recognition "it takes into account" through cynicism (p26).

This cynicism is a means of ensuring that the ideological systems of the ruling culture continue to function in the face of criticism. Zizek again: "It is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to 'symptomatic reading', confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency - cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance." (p26-7).

We cannot turn irony on the 'ruling culture' because it has been incorporated into that ruling culture.  Ideology is "no longer meant, even by its authors, to be taken seriously - its status is just that of a means of manipulation, purely external and instrumental; its rule is secured not by its truth-value but by simple extra­-ideological violence and promise of gain"(p27).  Irony is thus a direct support to the repressive state apparatus because it warns of its impending use.

NOTES ON S/Z BY BARTHES

Notes on Barthes SZ

S/Z XI The Five Codes & XII The Weaving of Voices

Barthes emphasizes five codes/voices in sections X-XII (p16-22) of S/Z;
• Hermeneutic - Enigma - The Voice of Truth
• Semantic - Signifier - The Voice of the Person
• Symbolic - Antithesis - The Voice of Symbol
• Proairetic - Action - The Voice of Empirics
• Cultural - (codes) Reference/Knowledge - The Voice of Science

These codes/voices are not the limit of codes/voices that could exist or be analyzed but are rather the ones that his re-reading of Sarrasine requires or calls-forth.

Together these codes/voices "create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes" on its way to becoming a text. They do not structure the text and nor are they "a paradigm that must be reconstituted" rather they "a perspective of quotations" that refer to the process of reading and re-reading the text. We must use them as a starting point for our own explorations of the text and our own discovery of other codes/voices rather than as an end.

Feminst Media Theory: Prezi

FEMINIST MEDIA THEORY on Prezi

Post-Modernism: Media Resources

A page of brief guides (in PDF) to the topic of Post-Modernism.

Grammar of Twitter

• @ - @ functions as an indicator (in the same way your 'index finger' does). As such it is used 'conversationally' to initiate contact, refer to a twitter user, act as calling-card or introduction, and as a phatic instrument. [N/B @ spam is therefore a common problem on twitter].

• Retweet [auto] - the 'auto-retweet' function causes you to echo a tweet without editorial comment. It is the principle mechanism in twitters 'cascade-casting' [where twitter become a broadcast media - try auto-retweeting and you'll see what I mean].

• RT - the RT mark is used when manually retweeting and although originally used to simply 'cascade-cast' tweets is now, following the introduction of auto-retweet, used to comment on a tweet. An editorial retweet if you like.

• follow & followers - the follow option causes the tweets of the followed twitter user to appear in your 'tweet stream' [the flow or feed of tweets that constitutes your twitter home page] this is the whole point of twitter and it's most important mechanism. The more people who follow your twitter feed the greater the count of your follows (those who have chosen to follow you) and thus the wider your tweets are 'cascade-cast'. So far follower count has been a function of already existing fame and celebrity and noons has become famous from twitter use in the way the myspace popularity was, in at least one case, used to achieve celebrity status. [N/B follow spam is therefore a very common problem in twitter].

• lock - a privacy mechanism in twitter that restricts who can see your tweets and prevents them being retweeted.

• 'in reply to' - this is a 'threading' tool that allows one to follow the line of a twitter conversation back though the tangle of tweets that make up any given stream. As such it is a marker of conversation and conversational action.

• 140 character limit - twitter was originally conceived as a 'text-to' service that users would SMS. This required twitter to restrict the length of any tweet to 140 characters to allow the easy translation of SMS to web via their servers and thus save them server space (& costs). This limitation then became the most important mark of twitter as a media form. So a technical limitation became the convention of the form and is retained on that form basis rather than for technical reasons; as tweets could now be of any length or type what so ever.

• integrating services and clients - a wide variety of other services integrate with twitter and expand it. Twitpic, tweetlonger, wefollow, all extend the functionality of twitter. Various 'clients' (local software that sits on your computer and or phone) allow for the integration of twitter with a your local computer and a variety of services but most importantly allow for a re-ordering and presentation of the informational structure of twitter in new and different ways (see tweetdeck, osfoora, etc).

• hypertext - hypertext is the essential mark and element of the WWW. The web is a massively- multiple-distributed set of hypertext documents (that exists on the Internet, which is an ICT infrastructure) and twitter is a part of this. This means that any tweet can 'link-to' any other part of the web via hypertext and the sharing of links is one of the most common activities on twitter.

• url shorteners - The 140 character limit of twitter causes some hypertext problems as some www.addresses.of.sites. are far longer than 140 characters. As it is conventional to give web addresses as URL domain-names (www.xyz.abc) and not as IP addresses (012.345.678.910) it has become necessary to use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly to provide a reduced format URL in twitter b

• Phatic communication - phatic discourse is any kind of communication that enables, opens and/or maintains social interaction. Saying 'hello', talking about the weather, making 'small-talk', discussing shared experiences, etc, are all phatic actions. Twitter is a phatic space par-excellence because the restrictions of the form prevent overly-long statements, inhibit complex interaction (twitter arguments are very hard to conduct and even more difficult to follow), and because of its hypertextual nature encourages distraction and movement away from the main twitter space (although the coming redesign and some twitter 'clients' may address this).

What Counts as Documentary: Redux p.s.

historypin neatly illustrates the mixed nature of the new forms of documentary appearing online.  Combining the googlemaps and streetview interfaces with audience provided photographic material and comment historypin clearly displays the characteristics of Flickr and Googlemaps discussed in my previous post.  historypin is not unique as the Museum of London's Street Museum offers a similar approach, although with a more interesting means of interacting with the 'augmented reality' potential of this material.