Irony dies because ideology and reality have collapsed into agreement

Evidence

The impossibility of satire today should not be blamed, as sentimentality is apt to do, on the relativism of values, the absence of binding norms. Rather, agreement itself, the formal a priori of irony, has given way to universal agreement of content. As such it presents the only fitting target for irony and at the same time pulls the ground from under its feet. Irony’s medium, the difference between ideology and reality, has disappeared. The former resigns itself to confirmation of reality by its mere duplication. Irony used to say; such it claims to be, but such it is; today, however, the world, even in its most radical lie, falls back on the argument that things are like this, a simple finding which coincides, for it, with the good. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 230

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-level claim about the death of critical distance under total administration — dense and hard to compress.
• XREF: Echoes the Frankfurt school’s critique of one-dimensional society and connects to Adorno’s notes on the culture industry. — connects to: Ideology ends by being flattened into inert material signifiers in media. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 360; The purported postcrisis consensus was ideologically incoherent and self-contradictory — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 537; Critical theory reads ironic humor as pseudo-rebellion that masks conventionality. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 665 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Ideology ends by being flattened into inert material signifiers in media. #expands (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 360