I remember from university the following experience. Almost any conversation one chanced to overhear in the Senior Common Room, if it was about something other than everyday chit chat, if it was about politics or philosophy or literature, would invariably sound ‘pretentious’. I soon realised that this was less to do with the content of people’s conversations and more an effect produced by ‘interrupting’ them at a more or less arbitrary point. If you suddenly hear ‘but how can you square that with atheism’, or ‘you’re definition of class is a-historical’ or ‘but he seems to imply you can negate the lure of the image with the image”, then this can only meet with embarrassed giggles. One only has to remove certain kinds of language from their context to frame them with sniggers. Real philosophical work typically has to also create the frame through which you read it, so as to tear the reader away from common sense. Nothing is easier than to destroy this patiently wrought frame through an act of random quotation and an appeal to what everyone knows. Not Kant nor Hegel, nor apparently plainer speakers like Bertrand Russell would have escaped Pseud’s Corner. And as George Steiner once said, the English expression ‘Come off it’ would have stopped even Beethoven in his tracks.
The metastasis of irony touches everything and yet everything is left curiously untouched. To be ironic about one’s work, one’s beliefs or even one’s feelings saves one the trouble of finding different employment or of thinking and feeling differently. We are spontaneous dualists: our bodies can perform routinely what our post-modern consciousness wraps in quotation marks and treats with arch and careless levity. To change your life, to commit oneself to a cause or a project might be to take oneself ‘too seriously’ – two words which are for some almost a tautology. It is no accident that nothing seems more risible and unfashionable these days than the existentialist rhetoric of commitment and authentic choice. For the existentialists, the commitment of one’s being to a project was synonymous with Life. ‘Life’, however, has become merely pretentious. The enjoinder to 'get a life' means little more than ensuring a full and diverting social timetable.
If our beliefs and passions are placed in inverted commas then they are ultimately no more than pseudo-beliefs and pseudo-passions; the low current of feeling is short-circuited by the knowledge of contingency, that it’s all just a game. The claim to have real beliefs and passions, by contrast, is now the worst kind of affectation. Adorno spoke of the ‘jargon of authenticity’, but would have been dismayed to see authenticity treated as mere jargon. So it is that the ironic Pseuds are today’s realists and those who really believe are the Pseuds.
The false appearance is that the world is split into the ironists and the fundamentalists. We are told that what the ironists fantasise about is some traumatic or adamantine encounter about which irony would be impossible. And what the fundamentalist wants stridently and shrilly to shut out is the possibility that he/she inhabits just one culturally relative belief system. Each is haunted by the spectre of the other. Each is the bad dream of the other.