Objective Irony

Definition

Objective irony is Baudrillard's name, in Fatal Strategies (1983), for the object's mode of resistance and victory over the subject — an irony that is not the subject's pose but the world's own duplicity. "It is objective irony that lies in wait for us, the irony of the fulfillment of the object without regard for the subject or its alienation. In the phase of alienation, it is subjective irony that triumphs; it is the subject that constitutes an insoluble challenge to the blind world." Now the poles have reversed: "The power of the object lies in its irony. Difference is always serious, but indifference is ironic." The evil genie of the object, the silence of the masses, the "parodic behavior of disappearance," the fate of polls, and the revenge of the analyzed object are all its figures. Baudrillard's favored micro-form is the Witz (joke/wit): "language itself knows it, and it alone knows it" — "objective irony (of the Witz)… is the objective form of this dénouement." The concept is the antidote to "eternally critical theory": "there is perhaps another, more joyous way of seeing things, and of finally substituting for eternally critical theory an ironic theory." It is the operative mode of the principle of Evil and the halo of the supremacy of the object. See principle-of-evil, supremacy-of-the-object, fatal-strategies, the-secret.

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the concept's author: "objective irony… lies in wait for us"; "indifference is ironic"; "the objective form of this dénouement" (1983).
• Friedrich Nietzsche — the model of the "more joyous" ironic theory against critical melancholy.
• Jacques Soulillou — the wiki's theorist of ornament as order's appearance; a neighbouring register of the decorative's irony.
• Sigmund Freud — the Witz (joke) and its "objective" operation, which Baudrillard says Freud "only barely missed wrecking."

Related Concepts

• Principle of Evil — objective irony is its mode.
• Supremacy of the Object — the object's sovereignty expressed as irony.
• Fatal Strategies — irony is the fatal strategy's tactic ("the significant form of sovereignty").
• The Secret — irony preserves the secret against confession.
• Reversibility — irony as the "reversal without a counterpart."
• The Masses — the masses' silence as objective irony ("the masses are very snobbish").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Fatal Strategies (Baudrillard 1983) — the defining source: "Ironic Strategies"; "objective irony lies in wait for us"; the Witz; the polls as involuntary humour; "an ironic theory" instead of "eternally critical theory."
• Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard 1981/1994) — the pataphysics of simulacra and "challenge" as the ironic counter-move.
• The System of Objects (Baudrillard 1968) — the object-world thesis that later hardens into objective irony.
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Is objective irony a discoverable structure of the world, or an interpretive stance Baudrillard adopts? The concept risks making every failure of prediction evidence of the object's cunning.
• The book distinguishes "subjective irony" (the subject's challenge to the blind world) from "objective irony." Does the wiki's own ironic register (Oulipo, the decorative, weak architecture) belong to either?
• Can "ironic theory" escape the fate of critical theory, or is it simply critique in a different mood?