A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (15 page)

Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a
grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions
behind
early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed
toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.

So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde
tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is
still around
, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well.
As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped
who have come to enjoy their cage.”
³²
This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive,
a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to
constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome.
It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at
parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country
with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling
not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

Think, for a moment, of Third World rebels and coups. Third World rebels are great at exposing and overthrowing corrupt hypocritical
regimes, but they seem noticeably less great at the mundane, non-negative task of then establishing a superior governing alternative.
Victorious rebels, in fact, seem best at using their tough, cynical rebel-skills to avoid being rebelled against themselves—in
other words, they just become better tyrants.

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying
is that an ironist is
impossible to pin down
. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what
does
irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible,
but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally
banal
of you to ask what I really mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking
like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability
to interdict the
question
without attending to its
subject
is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

This is why our educated teleholic friends’ use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. And this is
why the fiction-writing citizen of our televisual culture is in such very deep shit. What do you do when postmodern rebellion
becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second answer to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become
dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally
set themselves athwart.

Not that television is culpable for any evil here. Just for immoderate success. This is, after all, what TV
does:
it discerns, decocts, and re-presents what it thinks U.S. culture wants to see and hear about itself. No one and everyone
is at fault for the fact that television started gleaning rebellion and cynicism as the hip upscale Baby-Boomer
imago populi
. But the harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, schticks, not only sterile
but perversely enslaving. How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc.
advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be a bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion
rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual
culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving
commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-last-century
Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchists and anarchy. For if anarchy actually
wins
, if rulelessness become the
rule
, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting
for an end to all voting.

So here’s the stumper for the U.S. writer who both breathes our cultural atmosphere and sees himself heir to whatever was
neat and valuable in avant-garde literature: how to rebel against TV’s aesthetic of rebellion, how to snap readers awake to
the fact that our televisual culture has become a cynical, narcissistic, essentially empty phenomenon, when television regularly
celebrates just
these features in itself and its viewers? These are the very questions DeLillo’s poor schmuck of a popologist was asking
back in ’85 about America, that most photographed of barns:

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from other barns,
how was it similar to other barns? We can’t answer these questions because we’ve read the signs, seen the people snapping
the pictures. We can t get outside the aura. We’re part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”

He seemed immensely pleased by this.
³³

end of the end of the line

What responses to television’s commercialization of the modes of literary protest seem possible, then, today? One obvious
option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary
culture evil and turn one’s back on the whole spandexed mess and invoke instead good old pre1960s Hugh Beaumontish virtues
and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Fluoride, antediluvian. The problem with this is that Americans
who’ve opted for this tack seem to have one eyebrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and
really tall hair and in general just seem like an
excellent
crowd to want to transcend. Besides, the rise of Reagan/Bush/Gingrich showed that hypocritical nostalgia for a kinder, gentler,
more Christian pseudo-past is no less susceptible to manipulation in the interests of corporate commercialism and PR image.
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

Another option would be to adopt a somewhat more enlightened political conservatism that exempts viewer and networks alike
from any complicity in the bitter stasis of televisual culture and which instead blames all TV-related problems on certain
correctable defects in technology. Enter media futurologist George Gilder, a Hudson Institute senior fellow and author of
Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life
. The single most fascinating thing about
Life After Television
is that it’s a book with
commercials
. Published in something called The Larger Agenda Series by one “Whittle Direct Books” in Federal Express Inc.’s Knoxville
headquarters, the book sells for only $11.00 hard including postage, is big and thin enough to look great on executive coffee
tables, and has very pretty full-page ads for Federal Express on every fifth page. The book’s also largely a work of fiction,
plus it’s a heartrending dramatization of why anti-TV conservatives, motivated by simple convictions like “Television is at
heart a totalitarian medium” whose “system is an alien and corrosive force in democratic capitalism,” are going to be of little
help with our ultraradical-TV problems, attached as conservative intellectuals are to their twin tired remedies for all U.S.
ills, viz. the beliefs that (1) the discerning consumer-instincts of the Little Guy will correct all imbalances if only Big
Systems will quit stifling his Freedom to Choose, and that (2) technology-bred problems can be resolved technologically.

Gilder’s basic diagnosis runs thus. Television as we know and suffer it is “a technology with supreme powers but deadly flaws.”
The really fatal flaw is that the whole structure of television programming, broadcasting, and reception is still informed
by the technological limitations of the old vacuum tubes that first enabled TV. The

expense and complexity of these tubes used in television sets meant that most of the processing of signals would have to be
done at the [networks],

a state of affairs which

dictated that television would be a top-down system—in electronic terms, a “master-slave” architecture. A few broad-casting
centers would originate programs for millions of passive receivers, or “dumb terminals.”

By the time the transistor (which does essentially what vacuum tubes do but in less space at lower cost) found commercial
applications, the top-down TV system was already entrenched and petrified, dooming viewers to docile reception of programs
they were dependent on a very few networks to provide, and creating a “psychology of the masses” in which a trio of programming
alternatives aimed to appeal to millions and millions of Joe B.’s. The TV signals are analog waves. Analogs are the required
medium, since “With little storage or processing available at the set, the signals… would have to be directly displayable
waves,” and “analog waves directly simulate sound, brightness, and color.” But analog waves can’t be saved or edited by their
recipient. They’re too much like life: there in gorgeous toto one instant and then gone. What the poor TV viewer gets is only
what he sees. This state of affairs has cultural consequences Gilder describes in apocalyptic detail. Even “High Definition
Television” (HDTV), touted by the industry as the next big advance in entertainment, will, according to Gilder, be just the
same vacuous emperor in a snazzier suit.

But for Gilder, TV, still clinging to the crowd-binding and hierarchical technologies of yesterdecade, is now doomed by the
advances in microchip and fiber-optic technology of the last few years. The user-friendly microchip, which consolidates the
activities of millions of transistors on one 49¢ wafer, and whose capacities will get even more attractive as controlled electron-conduction
approaches the geodesic paradigm of efficiency, will allow receivers—TV sets—to do much of the image-processing that has hitherto
been done “for” the viewer by the broadcaster. In another happy development, transporting images through glass fibers rather
than via the EM spectrum will allow people’s TV sets to be hooked up with each other in a kind of interactive net instead
of all feeding passively at the transmitting teat of a single broadcaster. And fiber-optic transmissions have the further
advantage that they conduct characters of information digitally. Since, as Gilder explains, “digital signals have an advantage
over analog signals in that they can be stored and manipulated without deterioration” as well as being crisp and interferenceless
as quality CDs, they’ll allow the microchipped television receiver (and thus the viewer) to enjoy much of the discretion over
selection, manipulation, and recombination of video images that is today restricted to the director’s booth.

For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be “the
telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers
around the world.” The fibrous TC “will forever break the broadcast bottleneck” of television’s One Over Many structure of
image-dissemination. Now everybody’ll get to be his own harried guy with earphones and clipboard. In the new millennium, U.S.
television will finally become ideally, GOPishly democratic: egalitarian, interactive, and “profitable” without being “exploitative.”

Boy does Gilder know his “Larger Agenda” audience. You can just see saliva overflowing lower lips in boardrooms as Gilder
forecasts that the consumer’s whole complicated fuzzy inconveniently transient world will become storable, manipulable, broadcastable,
and viewable in the comfort of his own condo. “With artful programming of telecomputers, you could spend a day interacting
on the screen with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham.” Rather ghastly interactions to contemplate, perhaps, but
then in Gilderland
each to his own:

Celebrities could produce and sell their own software. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium you choose,
or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan. Visit your family on the other side of the world with moving pictures hardly
distinguishable from real-life images. Give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendents
from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color.

And not just warm 2-D images of family:
any
experience will be transferrable to image and marketable, manipulable, consumable. People will be able to

go comfortably sight-seeing from their living room through high-resolution screens, visiting Third-World countries without
having to worry about air fares or exchange rates…, you could fly an airplane over the Alps or climb Mount Everest—all on
a powerful high-resolution display.

We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.

So, in sum, a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity, at TV’s institutionalization
of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis, loneliness. It’s not our fault! It’s outmoded technology’s fault! If TV-dissemination
were up to date, it would be impossible for it to “institutionalize” anything through its demonic “mass-psychology.” Let’s
let Joe B., the little lonely average guy, be his own manipulator of video-bits. Once all experience is finally reduced to
marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly,
from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images
hardly distinguishable from real-life images
, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in
the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.!!!