The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [72]
Chas begins to pace again. The audience members follow him with their eyes, as if he were a wild animal they dare not let out of sight.
“Make no mistake,” he says. “By ‘postironic’ I don’t mean ‘earnest.’ Innocence lost cannot be reclaimed so simply. This is more than a simple backlash. Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting. If everything is false, then by the same token anything can be taken as true, or at least as true enough. Truths are no longer absolute; they’re shifting, temporary, whatever serves the purpose of the moment. Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they choose to ignore. Ironic advertising is becoming irrelevant because in the new postironic mind-set irony itself is the base condition; it is beside the point. Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable. Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once. And we marketers, in forging a viable mode of postironic consumerism, must seek to foster in the consumer a mystical relationship with consumption. Through consumption consumers will be gods; outside of consumption they will be nothing: a perpetual oscillation between absolute control and absolute vulnerability, between grandeur and persecution.”
He walks back to the podium and leans forward, gripping its edges with either hand.
“What is postirony? Postirony is ironic earnestness. Postirony is omnipotent slavery. Postirony is giddy terror. Ladies and gentlemen, postirony, in its purest paradessence—”
He looks at directly at Ursula.
“—is schizophrenia.”
Perhaps the flaming pots in the sconces are devouring all the oxygen, because the air in the darkened room is suddenly heavy and unfortifying and difficult to breathe, as though she and the rest of these people sealing her in on every side were all neatly seated in the belly of a whale, traveling at some unfathomable, airless, lung-crushing depth. She begins to panic and fights to regain control, telling herself there is no whale, there’s plenty of air, she’s not underwater but high up in a building. But it doesn’t work. It’s not good enough. Her heart begins slamming against her chest. She tells herself that it’s not just a high building, it’s a penthouse at the pinnacle of the silver castle city on the sunlit cloud. It’s a sunny day in the Lite Age, and she’s at the very top of the cloud castle, and all the bad things are far below. The cement plain beneath them bristles with embedded shards of bone, half-sets of teeth, calcified fetuses, points of hypodermic needles, razor-blade edges, thumbtacks, electromagnetic coils, half-melted pistols with finger bones still coiled around the triggers, but it doesn’t matter because from the bay windows of her penthouse at the castle city’s pinnacle, all these hard, sharp, or otherwise cruel pieces of debris are visible only as festive, glittering flecks in a gray, frozen sea. Her penthouse is a vast greenhouse, a tropical paradise of tall trees and thick vines and powerful streams of cool, rushing water, misting the air, swirling and eddying and washing everything clean, an endless supply of water, always new and always the same. She doesn’t know which is more calming, the ever-newness or the ever-sameness of that water, or whether it is a combination of both of these attributes, but she holds the rushing water in her