Sublime

then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today's avant-garde tries to write about? One clue's to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It's not a mode that wears especially well. As Hyde puts it,

accused their vanishing

Perversely, irony relies on some remains of cultural capital in order to coherently express its destructive message. If elevated beyond commentary and analysis to its own pedestal of artistic value, its essence become desacralization and the making trite of deep truths we might prefer to respect and conserve.

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first, the Orwellian culture becomes a prison. In the second, the Huxleyan culture becomes a burlesque.

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countena

(I find myself thinking of Terry Eagleton’s assertion that “capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.”)

every authoritative