A note on alienation in ironic communities

By an "ironic community" I mean anything from a university town to a cutting edge corporation where people cultivate second-order and "ironic" ways of speaking to display membership, or eligibility for membership, in the in-group.

For example, the English writer J. G. Ballard described a condo development gone seriously awry in which the dwellers, getting bored with parties and such, turned tribal and then matriarchal. He based this, perhaps subconsciously (since it was written before his Empire of the Sun), on the destruction of the "ironic" expatriate community of Shanghai in the Japanese takeover, and observations, at about twelve, of what happens to people, who regarded themselves as Bright Young Things, under the stress of Japanese internment.

I've come to realize in the "ironic" community of Lamma Island (an island off Hong Kong), especially in dealing with the extraordinarily dysfunctional site www.lamma.com.HK, the close relationship between alienation and irony.

"Alienation" is classically the separation, first described, perhaps, by Marx, of the worker from the tools and results of production. It was supposed to have disappeared in the "new", symbolic processing workplace of the computer programmer or financial analyst, who in the Official story is a sort of creative intellectual.

Or something.

Of course, as is well known by now, symbolic processor people are in fact indeed alienated.

When I worked at a somewhat leading edge computer consulting firm in the terribly ironic community of Michigan Avenue of Chicago in the late 1970s, SEI Information Technology, I was struck, at weekly cocktail parties which were a requirement to attend, by the cynical and sarcastic ways in which SEI consultants would unload about the foibles of clients.

[It was refreshing to migrate to the sunbelt and work with more innocent and less ironic engineers who'd just voted Reagan in and were hoping for a return to a more naive, more "can-do" America, but who didn't realize that history repeats itself as farce.]

Of course, most of the irony and sarcasm was just blowing off steam.

The problem was that the rest of it was passive-aggression, and I discovered its technical consequences at more than one client when I was sent in to rescue projects...most notably a perfectly "structured" mess which purported to do telecom switch billing, and which I repaired by simulating the switch in Cobol...a stunt that worked but which angered the managers who'd overseen the "structured" mess.

Passive aggressive financial analysts and programmers are universally split, divided and technically schizophrenic.

First of all, many jobs in the "new" economy are not exactly what you want to be when you grow up. When you're a little kid, you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, or a Native American *sachem*, or a nurse, or a Mom, or a professor of English.

But despite the 1960s expansion in the long-dead "Great Society" of educational opportunity, perhaps owing to it and to inflationary expectations, very few English or philosophy majors became actual English or philosophy professors, and quite a few pre-meds ended up flogging drugs for pharmas.

New jobs were in a sense created for the middle class; the playwright, David "Glengarry Glen Ross" Mamet regards much of data processing as a sort of blind WPA, a catch-all for people who'd have been foremen or industrial managers in the "old" economy.

[An interestingly sidelight on how deindustrialization delivers people into higher status jobs but doesn't change them was related to me by one of my British mates. I mentioned that in the 1990s I'd read about well-dressed British Yuppies who were also the worst types of soccer "yobs", beating up foreigners at meets all over Europe.]

[He said that these lads were not in fact upper middle class as I thought they were. Instead, they'd been excluded from factory jobs by Thatcher's deindustrialization and had qualified, just enough, for banking and City positions in which their work was carefully and narrowly surveilled and their behavior, monitored. But being the lads, they needed their hols.]

Simultaneously, and in my experience and reading, the Sixties generation formed unrealistic hopes that they might "really" be great artists, or great writers, or great somethings, and in their New Model jobs as data base administrators or credit analysts nursed hopes.

...while speaking in an ironic, passive-aggressive, and faux-knowing way to show continued membership in the Enlightened community of bien-pensance.

Now, this community world wide isn't trivial. The people who in the writings of (French sociologist) Bourdieu manifest the "distinction" (knowledge of Racine's Phedre in France, knowledge of Hamlet elsewhere, dislike of cheese fries, use of a lotta big words) represent not only those who have a shot at the *haute* bourgeois but also, in a deeper sense, the historical community of the 18th century European enlightenment from a European and American perspective, and enlightenments that in other countries (notably India and Islamic countries at the time of Averroes) actually came earlier.

Religious tolerance and access to sexual satisfaction without getting the crap beaten out of you are in fact two markers of membership in this transhistorical community.

Most jobs in the "new" economy in fact exclude people who "thought" they were being groomed for an enlightened existence in which they could be religious or not at will, and could access intimate happiness.

This reversal of Enlightenment promises starts with unbounded workdays. As my homeboy Kanthan noticed back in 1987 at Princeton, I'd been working unbounded hours in 1979 only to find, after the election of Ronald Reagan (for whom I voted because I was already sick of liberal irony), that I wasn't "productive" enough, and had no slack to increase the appearance of "productivity".

Unbounded workdays, which I think are the bane of data processing, destroy marriages, destroy fatherhood, destroy motherhood, and cause early death; but in the (alienated) world of "analysis", of processing symbols, they are coin of the realm: because even if the banking analyst produces crap analysis, even if the New York Times reporter is, like the infamous Jayson Blair, filing "stories" from his filthy apartment, and even if the programmer can't code, he's as they say in the Army "assholes and elbows", working many "hours".

This continues with informal harsh discipline of the analyst who produces the "wrong" answers using enlightenment.

This produces alienation.

On the Lamma website, I wrote better than most posters and was told I couldn't write by people who don't like to read and cannot, in fact, write. I then posted figurative art that was (far) beyond the ability of most of the would-be artists (who in "real" life were analysts and subeditors) and the howls of condemnation only increased. I then climbed Mt. Stenhouse and was told by Fat Bastards that I didn't and was lying.

I now realize that this was ironic alienation. Very few posters were in fact saying what they "meant", and I was told by one who I also knew in meatspace (and who was a stalkerette) that, in essence, they were good old boys having a bit of fun; I was to show compassion for people too ironic to be able express anything like compassion for anyone else.

[When I refused to to so, this person, who'd made offers of friendship turned on me on a dime and on SMS. This was when I first remembered Tom Paine.]

The alienation in fact comes out with regard to knowledge claims regularly on the Internet. This is because the "official" ideology of college faculties today happens to be "liberal irony" as described by Richard Rorty in that philosopher's book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Rorty describes the "liberal ironist" as having lost his trust in the "grand narratives" of the past, including but not limited to Communism, Socialism, and even the Whiggish hopes of the 19th century that a peaceful world would evolve through global free markets.

Interestingly, in making his case, Rorty has to gently mock one of Shakespeare's more admirable characters, Isabella in Measure for Measure, and her Anita Hill-like disgust at the sexual corruption of Vienna, for Rorty denies that man has what Isabella calls a "glassy essence", presumably giving license to the universal rape of the ape, but stopping ironically short of the same as too much work.

At one point in the Lamma Brou Ha Ha, I was told by the stalkerette that the good old boys were being Rabelaisian, or Bahktinian: the stalkerette had gone to graduate school. She said that they were "merely" puncturing the pretensions of power in a universal *kermesse* or Feast of Fools.

Of course, in a Feast of Fools, the pretensions of a powerful group or class are punctured: a Feast of Fools is not a Lynching bee in which the community asserts its coherence by turning on a minority or a minority of one, as happens with alarming regularity on the Internet.

It is true that the mediaeval *kermesse* (peasant drinking blast) or Feast of Fools did turn into anti-Semitic riots because of the pressures of the same rapid economic change that triggered the Reformation of the 16th century, and anti-Semitic tom-foolery triggered the Thirty Years War in Bohemia, but this was because the princelings wanted a break from the traditional reversal of the traditional "carnival", an exclusively Catholic tradition that was eradicated in Protestant lands (and replaced by anti-Semitic "Passion Plays").

But post-Bakhtin (a Russian theorist of the early 20th century) and way after Rabelais (for Pete's sake), Zizek, a first-rate contemporary thinker from Slovenia, has pointed out that the feast of fools is now the global economy, and that at least since the Beatles, the mockery avoids mocking real power: it serves the real power by turning on that which is unique, idiomatic, concerned with content and "human".

Now, I said as much on the dysfunctional site. The problem is that in "liberal irony" (of which conservatism has since Reagan evolved its own forms) any one argument can be refuted at will, simply by eye-rolling and charges of "verbosity", since logic and coherence themselves are suspected of being grand narratives.

However, I am just enough of a Marxist to realize something very interesting.

It is that in the "new" economy, insofar as it produces and consumes knowledge, the stance towards knowledge in the old economy, where you could study at night like my grandfather to learn engineering, has changed.

Starting in the 1960s, and ironically triggered by Weinberg's work in the psychology of programming, it became questionable to assert ownership of knowledge as regards, not the technical rules of a programming language, but of the company's data systems in the large.

I can use Terence Parr's Antlr parser-generator to generate a little language for mortgage credit analysis, or my own approach as described in Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler, if I'm ever damnfool enough to re-enter data processing, and a bank is damnfool enough to offer credit again to near-deadbeats.

But I don't think I'd be able to take the parser approach one step further, and use compiler optimization theory to see if the rules made sense from multiple conflicting viewpoints.

"Liberal irony" and street-irony in fact work perfectly to ensure that the scribal class, the producers of information, do not assert knowledge or control of that knowledge which has been "reified" to streaming bits and bytes, with no relevance to the data processor's "real" life, spent in extension classes in "creative writing" or on the dance floor.

It's a grim fucking spectacle. Argument isn't controlled by coherence and "logic"; instead, the liberal ironist can always become a literary critic or psychoanalyst when the going gets tough, showing the "verbose" or merely disturbed the door, because we've all learned at uni that the Beatles didn't worry about grand narratives and Rabelais mocked "pretension".

Sucks to be me, except for one thing. My work ethic as regards these issues demands that I work out regularly because this level of writing ain't as easy as it looks, and I enjoy fighting for what I believe.