Irony and Television

Irony, the purposeful divergence between what is meant and what is said or written or shown, is a powerful tool. In one gnomic aside, the gifted ironist can reveal, debunk, and neutralize hypocrisy. Irony began as a tool used to reveal a self-conscious view of the world that pointed out faulty assumptions that the culture made and revealed the illogic of those assumptions. However, irony is not befitting of power, as it is unable to supplant the deconstruction and destruction left in its (irony's) wake with an eidos any less hypocritical than the one it deposed. Instead, when irony becomes a dominant paradigm, it deploys increasingly convoluted (but unchangingly nihilistic) meaning-structures that serve to distract from the aimlessness at irony's core. (Like the anarchist, the ironist may be talented at overthrowing, but he is inept on the throne.)

In the last half century, the rise of television has ushered in an era of irony that has served to create a self-serving dependence of the populace (i.e, on television) and has progressed (ironically) to undermine through co-option the power of irony, that main method of resistance to television's monolithic grasp on the imagination for identifying and criticizing the status quo. As a "bisensuous medium," television is a natural showcase for irony: "since the tension between what's said and what's seen is irony's whole sales territory, classic televisual irony works via the conflicting juxtaposition of pictures and sound."

Samuel Johnson's basic 1755 definition of irony as "a mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words" summarizes the traditional negation-based understanding of the word. Some scholarship has added refinements to Johnson's analysis, showing how "irony flouts the conversational [Gricean] Maxim of Quality" to be truthful and how irony serves as indirect negation. Newer research has shown a handful of other varieties and manifestations of irony. Echoic interpretation involves the repetition of phrases or tones of those who are being mocked to oppositional purposes. For example, if you were to confront a diehard right-winger about his view of the Obama administration, he may reply, "Well, he's certainly change-ing things. I just hope we continue to see such great progress." But techniques such as echoic interpretation lack the finesse that can be found in a framing irony, in which a speaker can put "the adoption of 'another's style ... in intonational quotation marks' in terms of irony and parody." The echoic interpretation necessitates reliance on exterior reference; a framing irony can include exterior reference but can also collapse into a loop of self-reference. It is this self-reference that television has come to rely upon to foster dependence.

While relativists can debate cultural elitists over whether there exists an ordinal difference between high and low art, it is unobjectionable to state that television is more appealing to more people than nearly any other type of art and that it also seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator (in the best, mathematical, sense of the term). So, "television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic interests." Television has allowed people the voyeuristic pleasures of watching and observing instead of doing and created the fulfillment of the ideal of contemporary leisure where "the average individual ... must verify the uselessness of his time-temporal surplus as sumptuous capital, as wealth."

Television's pursuit of viewers translates to a flirtation with the basic interests of the populace. This has led to a creation of a common bond of images and simulacra. "Moments of authentic and unfettered subjectivity are being supplanted by a Baudrillardian euphoria or 'schizophrenia' which characterizes the experience of the self in the space of the simulacrum." The replacement of beliefs with images has been, if not pernicious, extremely obfuscating. It plays on people's desire for community, fulfilling "their whole raison d'etre ... to confirm [the overall cultural plan] by being its constituent parts."[ In Don DeLillo's 1985 novel, "White Noise," a character talks about the paradoxes of "THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA." "No one sees the barn," Murray says, "Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. ... We're not here to capture an image. We're here to capture one." This scene shows how "the responses of an authentic interior self vanish in an undertow of simulacrum" and how people can be so mesmerized by images that they are unable to escape its self-referential loop. Television "has become able to capture and neutralize any attempts to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism that television requires of Audience in order to be commercially and psychologically viable at doses" of more than 140 hours a month.

Works Cited

[i] Wallace, David Foster. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Little, Brown and Company: 1997.

[i] Clift, Rebecca. "Irony in Conversation." Language in Society, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1999), pp. 523-553. Cambridge University Press

[i] Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ideological Genesis of Needs." The Consumer Society Reader. Edited by Juliet Schor and Douglas Holt. W.W. Norton: 2000.

[i] Wilcox, Leonard. "Baudrillard, DeLillo's 'White Noise,' and the End of Heroic Narrative" Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 346-365. University of Wisconsin Press: 2000.

[i] Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 346-365. University of Wisconsin Press: 2000.

[i] DeLillo, Don. "White Noise." Penguin Books: 1985.