Layers of Irony

[desert turtle]

Irony, postirony, metairony; layers of irony; theories and history of irony

Layers of Irony

[desert turtle]

https://forum.memestudies.org/t/irony-discourse-on-youtube/141

[noble pine]

At what point is it layers of irony indistinguishable and thus not useful

like post irony is muddy as it is

uh i mean layer 3

i remember he made that 9 layer chart lol

god i love olivia sun video so much

[desert turtle]

i think layers above 2 are only useful in the context of historical analysis

i think semantically it's meaningless to talk about higher ironies

but that might not apply to cases where the meaning we want to communicate is precisely "social" or "historical"

[muted reef]

What would you classify as useful though?
As was mentioned by Jreg in his videos, Meta-Irony (or layer 4) can be used by people, usually teens who are still maturing and want to experiment with different ideas safely as it provides an "Ironic escape rope". Somewhat like the "Schrodingers Douchebag", in that when observed or called out they can claim they were "JK bro haha"

[muted reef]

I've thought that "Meta-Irony" could be called "Quantum Irony" as it can be 'observed' and 'forced into one state'.

[noble pine]

im concerned with weird levels where it’s nonsensical

level 4 could truly just be labeled level 3

i agree tho meta irony as a shield (for both lets say identity formation or defense as a fascist for example)

[gleaming flame]

We might as well post the original comic here:

[desert turtle]

https://ruj.uj.edu.pl/xmlui/handle/item/300212

recently sumbitted masters thesis on the pragmatics of irony and postirony

This dissertation aims to summarise the current state of knowledge regarding internet memes, irony and post-irony, and propose adequate definitions with a coherent framework for understanding and analysing these phenomena. Internet memes have come far from niche forums to being an omnipresent mode of communication. In the context of progressing insularity of internet communities and their entrenchment in irony, the need for a framework capable of describing and explaining new internet phenomena becomes apparent. To this end, an investigation into internet artefacts and their roots in pre-internet culture was conducted, paired with a reflection on the grounds of philosophy of language with a review of published pragmatic theories of irony. Further parts include a survey of instances of post-irony, described as a category of responses to the problem with the impossibility of sincere expression in an ironic environment. After discussing how post-irony manifests itself, a pragmatic theory attempting to outline its essence is proposed. Finally, this framework is used to interpret exemplars of modern memes. Ultimately, this dissertation was created with the hope of providing a salient picture of an extensive social phenomenon, and adding a formal theory for a serious discussion on a topic that is far from serious.

[noble pine]

this is brilliant

excellent work i only read an exerpt but nice

[pallid tusk]

My friends and I tend to use the term "half layer" to describe making a joke where you're making fun of something but also kind of mean it seriously. I think it came from somewhere but I can't remember where.

For example if someone asks if I like anime I can say "I fucking love anime bro" and with that sentence I'm kind of making fun of people who like anime but also saying I like anime. I think it's most often used to say "here's something I unironically enjoy but I also agree that it has problems / is cringe"

I think some people would call this layer 4 but I don't see a reason to go that far. I am typing a message meant to communicate equally two things at the same time; one at layer 0 ("I love anime") and one at layer 1 ("I acknowledge the love of anime is cringe"). So it averages out to a half layer.

If I'm "mostly joking" I sometimes say I'm on 3/4 of a layer etc. It basically works as a ratio of how serious you are to how ironic you are.

I think a lot of people are overly concerned with the idea that every message you post needs to have an a single explicit intent that can be associated with a single layer of irony. I on the other hand think we often don't even know what we ourselves are trying to say or we feel two opposite things at the same time, so we often write ambiguous sentences meant to maintain ambiguity. This is the purpose of the fractional layer.

[silent lichen]

ive been thinking about this a lot, and i think your half layers of irony is actually just irony -- that the straightforward "saying what you dont mean" kind of irony doesn't actually exist, and all irony is full of ambiguity.

basically, the question is, why does someone use irony to express something that can be expressed sincerely? it is always a choice, and i think that choice is reflective of a deeper internal ambivalence.

consider even the most basic form of irony: "yeah, RIGHT". embedded within that statement is mockery, or mimesis. the speaker does two things:

• the speaker imitates someone who the speaker thinks is ridiculous.
• this imitation is held up for ridicule by others.
  imitation, even malicious imitation, requires identification. a sarcastic remark requires that its speaker identifies with the object of ridicule, and this moment of identification sparks a moment of possibility, however short or oblique: what if i actually did think this way? behind every sarcastic remark is a withheld difference of opinion: what is spoken implies its opposite, and vice versa.

every satire contains a wish that it was straightforwardly true -- the exaggeration of its object is a fantasy. the challenge of 1984 is not that society is becoming like 1984, but that society will never be as simple as 1984. one wishes that the world could be so transparently understood.

[silent lichen]

what irony contains then is a contradictory authoritarian impulse: a desire to tame one's opposite through imitation, and a fear of becoming one's opposite that propels the ironist to back out of imitation. the fear of the individual becomes a fear of the collective, and vice versa. hence the half-joke: one wants to agree with something that one is afraid to agree with.

[noble pine]

cant wait to read this thread

[desert turtle]

the part about how irony facilitates the experimental "trying on" of various positions is quite interesting. Irony is something that ostensibly facilitates detachment in a unidirectional way (of course, we know this is not true; hence, the layers invert the directionality of what is misunderstood as "detachment" and instead scaffold onto one another). A popular conception of irony, which is mistaken in precisely this way, resembles the fake Aristotle quote about entertaining a thought without accepting it: https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/09/22/nope-aristotle-did-not-say-it-is-the-mark-of-an-educated-mind-to-entertain-a-thought-without/

from what I've seen, the true mark of an educated mind is to be able to choose which thoughts to accept or reject, and to have the capacity to find your way back out of a thought which you had accepted prior

maybe there is a one-to-one parallel here between the two conceptions of irony you've distinguished, and the two formulations of the mark of an educated mind (unidirectional irony : multimodal irony :: detached contemplation : immersed contemplation)

[pallid tusk]

I ignored this for a bit because I wanted some time to give it some thought

I completely agree with the first claim you outlined - roughly speaking irony is being used to convey something more than just the opposite of what they are saying. If that was all that was meant to be conveyed, they would just say the opposite of what they said.

But I think you too easily dismiss the uniqueness of the half layer. I think think the uniqueness of this particular form of irony is what gives me the desire to assign it some name separate from irony or sincerity.

If you just have irony you are conveying the opposite of the statement plus something extra. Yes, you could say if you are conveying the opposite of the statement plus a little bit of sincerity, then this is just normal irony - the opposite of the statement plus a little extra. Similarly, If you are sincere you are conveying the statement, but you could also be conveying something extra on top of that statement - you could for example say that's... ehhh... correct, sure to state that something is correct plus state that it's a little bit incorrect.

In both cases there's a clearly defined main statement you are either agreeing or disagreeing with as a whole. In both cases you are aligning yourself with either agreeing or disagreeing with some thesis, plus something else.

_ _
The half layer comes into play when it's not clearly defined what the intent of the statement is, even in the head of the author. Whether you are conveying the opposite of the statement plus something extra (irony), or a sincere statement plus something extra (sincerity) is ambiguous and undetermined. It's not a dogwhistle, where there is an explicitly defined idea of what is being conveyed within the original message that some will take as ironic and some will take as sincere. The effect may be nearly the same, some take your half layer to be fully ironic and some take it as being fully serious, but within the authors head it was never explicit which of the two was the dominant message being conveyed. And those who are interpreting the message pefectly, understanding the precise intent of the author, should receive both messages equally.

I think when you try to define a half joke as simply one wants to agree with something that one is afraid to agree with I think you miss the point - this is the case of dogwhistles and hiding behind irony, but I think a half joke can be something more. In the case of the half joke when it is conveying the half layer it's more like one wants to agree with something that one also wants to disagree with. It's having two contradicting feelings toward one idea. You could claims this is just neutrality and you could convey your feelings by saying "I agree for these reasons, but I disagree for these reasons" but that takes a lot of the emotion out of it. When you say are neutral you are generally saying you don't have a horse in the race, you don't care. What you're conveying with the half layer is more like being on two extremes at the same time - you fucking love anime but you fucking hate it. It's silly to convey that by saying "I am neutral on anime". To convey contradicting feelings efficiently, plus some comedy or to garner empathy from both sides or whatever else you get along with it, it's useful to use the half layer.

[desert turtle]

The description you offer very clear. This half-layer irony (and similar ideas people have been developing about 3+ layers of irony) does seem to be phenomenologically distinct from more conventional forms of irony, in which the intent of a statement is clear to the insiders but perhaps not to outsiders.

I've been tinkering with this notion: whether something is ironic or not isn't about the truth or falsity of the ironically presented belief or statement; it's about what counts as the correct interpretation or reading of the act or statement which was presented ironically. The "half-layer" irony, and the "higher ironies", are about the array of feasible interpretive frameworks open to the interlocutors. The phenomenological uniqueness of the former comes from the fact that the author of an ironic statement is also involved in the meta-epistemological process of picking out the correct interpretive framework (alongside the audience, perhaps consisting only of himself); and the phenomenological uniqueness of the latter comes from the fact that this process is read recursively (either historically or projected) onto the object of interpretation, thereby incorporating the inferred history of this semantic negotiation into the meaning of the object of interpretation.

Perhaps there can be said to be a "half-layer" of irony partway through the process of any meaning-making activity, at the stages leading up to the formation of certain belief. The phenomenon it's describing certainly seems real to me, and the description feels right. I hesitate to understand it in terms of layers of irony though, because it seems to involve something other than ironising acts and concepts, and instead to be a more generalised aspect of learning per se. For example, consider the case of a child repeating some saying without really understanding the implicature; this is often how they learn what the sayings mean. It resembles the "half-layer" irony, but I hesitate to refer to it as such.

@pallid tusk it will be very cool if you wrote something about your theory for the blog. I'll do the same, and then we can compile a selection of the discussions about layers of irony into a collection for the site

[pallid tusk]

oh boy

ya that would fun

[pallid tusk]

How do I get the details for when to do this and how long and what form etc? Is this all related to the TPM blog site? That thread is deep in here somewhere.

it's pretty wild how we have channel group->forum->thread

the layering

[desert turtle]

that's separate, an article is just a collection of words and media if you want to include any, so you dont need to worry about that

im setting up a self hosted ghost blog

[desert turtle]

i think it's good; it lets us organically generate increasingly more polished and researched content, simply by indulging our intellectual curiosity (in a disciplined manner) in a well-designed environment

it will make more sense as we get some research content (among other resources we'll build as a community) out this way, and they compound over time

im still feeling out what a good length is. 1500 words and 7500 words seems about right

[pallid tusk]

I'd have to think about it some more but I think a figure or two might be nice

makes it more readable as well I think

either a diagram explaining what I mean and / or screenshots of examples in the wild

[desert turtle]

yep that would be excellent

i think ghost layout editing is quite limited

anyway this is for #1026676154716934265

[pallid tusk]

that's a good point, I guess I should just get some text and some PNGs no latex lol

I normally try to do zany stuff on sundays so I think that would be a time I could have a draft

[silent lichen]

mostly im wary of talking about "layers" of irony, because i dont think people are actually able to consciously sort out these layers, or understand their ambivalence

[pallid tusk]

I think I have more to say on that

I'll keep thinking about it as I write some stuff later

There's a lot of interesting directions to go in

a very rough though is I think I use layers 0 to 1 to kind of measure ambivalence

along one axis

you know it's good when the theory starts becoming a hilbert space

anyway ya I'll think more about it

[noble pine]

@minor zinc

[warm spear]

could JrEg be the opposite of Gondola, the same way Jobu Tupaki is teh opposite of Evelyn?

idk where 2 post diz lawl

if diz iz the case where wud Ecco2k be?

[vague shadow]

Could you explain a bit more?

[warm spear]

JrEg n Jobu, Anti-Centrist, Schizoautistic, Everything Everywhere, Donut theory

Gondola n Evelyn, Taoist, Centrist, Googly eye, Everywhere but more grounded

u cud put diz 2 irony where one iz meta-ironic and unpredictable n the other one sincere

[vague shadow]

That's interesting, but I don't know how I feel about gondola being pegged as centrist

[warm spear]

Well he does do nothing n iz apolitical

[vague shadow]

This is something talked about in #1049223865609506856 but gondola and coziness that they embody isn't apolitical or centrist but as leftist of Anything

But I also disagree with them being put as leftist

[warm spear]

there iz the gondola datz more melancholic so it isn't cozy as alwayz

[vague shadow]

I feel like the best way to describe it is something that isn't apolitical but is extra-political, being outside the paradigm and nonsectarian and just is

[warm spear]

yeah strip away the political centrist and anti-centrist stuf kinda still works, I wouldn't say all the works of art r political, JrEg is more bout mental illness but does it in an anticentrist way saying everyone shud b schizoautistic n EEAAO isn't even bout politics

[vague shadow]

I would say that JrEg was deeply political, not in a mainstream left vs right way but in a societal critique way

[desert turtle]

reading taoism as centrist or apolitical is a common mistake

it's much more widespread in the west because not even laozi and zhuangzi are distinguished in popular western understandings

but the laozi is a highly political philosophical text and sometimes even interpreted as a realpolitik manual in the same tradition as the prince

[warm spear]

i see

[silent lichen]

im skeptical of the idea that gondola is un- or anti-ironic in some way

in most depictions hes not really daoist except in a pop philosophical way, and anyway he seems more like a deposit of peoples antisocial cynicism than anything

a lot of which is campy kitsch, if not outright ironic

the original copypasta about gondola is ironically self serious

which is not to diminish its power or emotional weight but to say that its psychologically deep and ambivalent

it has layers

like an onion

at least thats my interpretation

[warm spear]

still an evolvin meme

[warm spear]

k jus watched it again on da plane 2 japan, i think Waymond fitz way better

[lilac dew]

thoughts on this? from the post-irony wikipedia entry

imo:

just because postirony exists does not mean that irony has to be dead.

and his definition of post-irony was probably different than the one we use. he may be describing what we call meta-irony today, since he is comparing it to postmodernism (i would argue that post-irony is post-postmodern)

and perhaps the criticism that we do not have greater ironic distance was somewhat true in 2003, but not now; there are definitely clearly discernible steps in ironic distance currently