Damon Young Publishes Ironies of Web 2.0
Damon Young published "Ironies of Web 2.0" in Post 45's second issue, "How to be Now." The essay is a fantastic investigation of irony in the age of the internet.
From the article:
I have discussed the prevalence in contemporary digital culture of an irony of infinite reversibility, of texts that offer no critical vantage point for determining to what extent they mean what they say. It is not clear how far a criticism that seeks only to "indicate what the text says about itself" can take us under such conditions. If surfaces no longer conceal hidden depths, it is because they are stretched over an actual abyss. Rather than retreating to the modesty of simple description or giddily embracing the inexorability of a system with no outside, facing up to the contemporary requires paradoxically affirming the critical negativity that is writing and thought. We must become even more suspicious in our hermeneutics. To the real power and terrifying opacity of the signifier in the era of finance capital, we oppose the uncompromising negativity of the critic, who, like Freud's Jew, knows that nobody who says he is going to Crakow is really going to Crakow, even if he is.
Read the full text here!
Damon R. Young is associate professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches in the Program in Critical Theory. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor, with Nico Baumbach and Genevieve Yue, of "The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism," a special issue of Social Text (2016).