Sardonic irony can conceal unexamined metropolitan cultural assumptions

Evidence

The tone of mockery is designed, meanwhile, to destabilize the meaning of the passage itself. Despite this strategem, however, one can detect the tendency to repeat, almost unthinkingly, the commonplaces and even inaccuracies of the metropolis’s High Culture. It is doubtful, for example, that something called ‘the West’ was, in the summer of 1967, ‘in the clutches of optimism’; that was the year the Vietnamese finally began concentrating their forces for what became the Tet offensive, and at lease a parr of ‘the West’- American imperialism, for examplewas not at all ‘optimistic’ It is equally doubtful that ‘optimism’ - the idea that ‘the fut’ure still exists’, the hope that we ‘would overcome some day’, the conviction that ‘there is a ‘world to change’ - is as such a ‘disease’ (a ‘microscopic, invisible bacillus’, we are playfully told). — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 608

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s strategic-essentialism research: Ahmad is exemplifying how an ironic/playful stance (Rushdie’s mockery) fails to inoculate against absorbing the very discourse it gestures at rejecting. — connects to: Intellectuals’ praise of mass culture masks self-denunciation; Modern mass culture’s out-of-phase ideology creates a split between its overt and hidden messages — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 220

Broader Connections

• Intellectuals’ praise of mass culture masks self-denunciation #complicates (0.75)
• Modern mass culture’s out-of-phase ideology creates a split between its overt and hidden messages #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 220