For about forty years the safest way to say anything in public was to put it in quotation marks. Advertising mocked advertising. Television made fun of television. Earnestness, whether in a politician or a pop song, was taken as proof that the speaker had not understood the game. This was irony as a general atmosphere, and it was so pervasive that people who grew up in it took some time to notice that it was a style at all.
This essay is about why that style won, why it soured, and what the generation raised inside it has built from the wreckage, which is something odder than a simple return to sincerity.
Why irony won
Irony is a method of saying something while reserving the right not to have meant it. That makes it an excellent weapon against authority. Grand claims, about progress, the nation or the good life, depend on being taken straight. Quoted in the right tone of voice they deflate, and for a long time deflation was necessary work. A great many pompous things deserved it.
It is also a superb defense. The ironist cannot be caught out, because the ironist has not committed. Whatever you accuse them of believing, they were only doing a bit. In a culture where sincerity is the one unforgivable mistake, the person who mocks first is safe.
The combination of attack and armor explains the style's success. It let a whole culture be critical without the risk of being wrong.
The cage
The trouble is that irony can only subtract. It clears ground; it cannot build on it. It can show that a value is hollow, a slogan dishonest, a tradition compromised. Asked what should stand in their place, it has no answer, because any answer would be a commitment, and a commitment can be mocked.
Carried on long enough, the habit becomes a trap that the trapped mistake for freedom. Everything is seen through, and so nothing can be seen. Institutions learned to use this. A corporation that winks at its own cynicism has made itself immune to the charge of cynicism. Irony, which began as a way of resisting the official voice, became the official voice.
Everything is seen through, and so nothing can be seen.
By the end of the twentieth century a number of writers were saying openly that the next real rebels would be the ones prepared to risk embarrassment: to state a plain belief and endure the eye-rolling.
Oscillation
What followed has been given various names, of which metamodernism is the most durable. It is defined in our short primer, and its central image is the pendulum.
The metamodern sensibility does not abandon irony. It could not; the lessons were learned and cannot be unlearned. Instead it swings: between hope and doubt, enthusiasm and detachment, the wish to mean it and the knowledge of every reason not to. The attitude is sometimes called informed naivety. One acts as if a thing matters while remaining fully aware of the arguments that it does not.
In art this produces work that is frankly sentimental and knowingly artificial in the same breath. In ordinary speech it produces the characteristic contemporary sentence, in which a real feeling is delivered inside a joke about having feelings. The joke is not there to cancel the feeling. It is there to get it past the guards.
The meme as native form
Nowhere is the oscillation easier to observe than in the meme, which is the first popular art form to be born already aware of all this.
A meme is an image or phrase that spreads by being altered. Each copy comments on the copies before it, and the original context is soon lost; nobody needs it. Early examples were simple captioned jokes. What they became is a system of layers. There is the ironic meme, which mocks a sincere one. There is the post-ironic meme, which repeats the mocked thing so many times that it is no longer clear whether mockery is intended. There is the meme about memes, legible only to people who have followed the whole sequence. The joke is frequently that there is no joke.
Two features deserve attention. The first is absurdism. A great deal of this humor is deliberately meaningless: distorted images, nonsense captions, punchlines that refuse to arrive. This is not laziness. It is a comic answer to the feeling that the world has stopped making sense, and it stands in a long line of art that responds to meaninglessness by exaggerating it until it becomes bearable.
The second is its darkness. Jokes about collapse, burnout and having no future are a staple, particularly among people who came of age during a run of crises and were told that each was unprecedented. The tone is flat, even cheerful. That is gallows humor, and gallows humor has always been a way of saying something true about one's situation without giving it the satisfaction of a straight face. Our own cabinet keeps a drawer of it, including a set of terms and conditions for the end of the world.
What the layers build, beneath the nihilism, is belonging. To get the joke is to have been there for the earlier jokes. The meme is a shrug, but it is a shrug that people do together.
Sincerity with a helmet on
It would be pleasant to end by announcing that irony has been overcome. It has not, and the new arrangement has a hazard of its own.
A style in which nobody can tell whether you mean it is a gift to people who mean something ugly. Cruelty, bigotry and worse have learned to travel inside the ambiguity: stated as a joke, defended as a joke, and absorbed as a belief. "Just joking" was always the ironist's alibi. In the layered version, even the speaker may not know whether the alibi is true.
So the useful question about any ambiguous statement is not whether it is ironic. It is who can afford the ambiguity. Irony costs nothing to those whose lives are not at stake in the subject of the joke. That asymmetry is usually a reliable guide.
What the better examples of the new mood manage is harder than either pure irony or pure sincerity. They mean what they say and know how it sounds. Call it sincerity with a helmet on: a willingness to care about something in public, wearing just enough protection to survive the attempt. It is not a noble posture. It may be the only honest one available to people who were raised on the joke and would still like to believe in something.