Peace is a naked woman from Greece. Her body, according to fourth-century BCE playwright Aristophanes, stopped the Peloponnesian War. In Lysistrata, its eponymous lead recruits other women from both Athens and Sparta to withhold sex from their husbands until they put down their arms and end the war that, by the time of writing, had dragged on for 20 years. The women make an oath over a bowl of wine to Peitho, the goddess of persuasion, and strike in the Acropolis until their demands are met. In the end, Lysistrata is able to force a meeting with magistrates from both sides who belittle her strategic proposals on how to end the war until she brings out her curvaceous handmaiden Peace—or Reconciliation, as some translations name her—whose hot body proves that there is one thing both Athenian and Spartan men can agree on. They identify her curves as hills and valleys, using her dips and swerves like a map as they would divide the lands of Greece, coming to a literal treaty over the body of the woman named Peace, and the war is over.

In reality, lasting peace was still seven years out, but through its combination of comedic absurdity and connectivities to real life, Lysistrata would later be understood as a prime example of farce: a narrative style that blends the genres of comedy and drama through situations so unlikely that their serious nature comes off as funny. The actual term “farce” comes from the Middle English term fars, meaning “stuffing,” and was used in 15th-century France to characterize comedic elements then considered indecent. Satire, clownery, caricature, parody, slapstick violence, the violence of war: farce is stuffed with it all. Aristophanes’s Lysistrata is humorous social commentary that also reinforces the cultural norms of womanliness. Part of Lysistrata’s “joke” is that a woman could be as versed as a man in politics.

While farce once required the mediation of stage or book or screen, the indecent elements of comedic drama stuffed within the term explode onto contemporary America’s political stage: Lysistrata’s fictional sex-striking women protected themselves behind a makeshift wall built around the Acropolis and guarded by a foul-mouthed chorus armed with insults for intruders; former US President Donald Trump’s real life idea for national immigration reform was to build a wall too big to climb over. Farce’s unreality conditions the real itself. In this manner, might farce have ceased to exist?

This media dissolve meets “alternative facts” and “fake news” to produce an epistemological crisis: we can no longer differentiate real from staged. From a podium at the White House, the real world adopts all the absurdity of a comedic play yet with all the consequences of real life.

There’s always been dishonesty, but what uniquely primes this moment for farce’s dissolution is the pervasiveness of post-irony. Post-irony is defined by sincerity that is indistinguishable from irony and, like farce, is based on the blurriness between events real and fantastical, plausible and absurd. It is a phenomenon that blends the sincere question (“How are you feeling?”) and the ironic quip (“How banal of you to ask how I’m feeling”) to create an irreverent amalgam: “How banal of you to think it’s banal to ask what I’m feeling.” “I’m not sure what you mean” is the only response. Today, post-irony in action looks like a Vetements sweatshirt with absurdly long sleeves on a Paris runway. It sounds like a deepfake edit of clubpop singer Charli XCX’s album Brat using Kamala Harris’s voice. Though synthetic, Harris’s voice singing lyrics like “Should we do a little key? Should we have a little line?” might as well be real; it feels just as bizarre as “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”, an actual viral statement made by the now-presidential candidate at a White House event in 2023. It’s not just that the Vetements hoodie with absurdly long sleeves is shown at Paris Fashion Week, it’s that such an everyday clothing item is constructed using haute couture techniques. It’s not just that the quality of the Kamala Brat deepfake makes it sound like she was the album’s original singer, it’s that “kamala IS brat” becomes a legitimate campaign marketing strategy endorsed by the presidential hopeful herself.

And what of her opponent? Where people attribute Trump’s 2017 inauguration to a sincere want from the American people for a swashbuckling fellow “like them” in charge—God-fearing, gun-toting, pussy-grabbing—what landed him in the White House was a campaign whose messaging deployed post-ironic signals to get people to ignore the distinction between irony and sincerity, to believe in irreverence and in alternative facts over documented events. After losing to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, the unproven claim du jour was that somehow Biden had stolen the election and that confirmed vote counts were fake. In 2024, a conspiracy circulates on Reddit that Kamala Harris only stepped into the running for president because Joe Biden is actually dead.

“Farce’s unreality conditions the real itself. In this manner, might farce have ceased to exist?”

The origins of post-irony can be traced back to the ’90s, heavily associated with the work of writer David Foster Wallace. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction,” Wallace advocates for a reactionary response to postmodern irony—a form of cynical mockery toward conservative establishments that emerged during the postmodern period—in a movement later called New Sincerity. “The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values.” He makes the distinction between postmodern irony and New Sincerity clear in the stakes for both movements: postmodern ironists risk “the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship,” while “new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs” of the too-cool-for-school ironists.

What makes New Sincerity attractive, at least in the style of Wallace, is its explicit call to action to encourage young writers, artists, and creative types to resist merely adopting the gestures of those postmodern ironists who actually risked disgust with their challenges to modern Western philosophy, and instead, to dare to put forth original work that risks accusations of banality. For Wallace, the risk makes the rebel. While he cites TV as the culprit for the lower consciousness gesturing of fiction writers emerging in the ’90s, his New Sincerity feels no more revolutionary than proclaiming “irony is out, sincere conservatism is the new black”—a reactionary response to postmodern irony by flipping the ideology. New Sincerity made the argument that a return from irony to earnestness was necessary to preserve a sense of moral honesty in writing, but in reality, the movement only signals sincerity as a reaction to irony. Instead of the radical sincerity Wallace proposed, the question becomes: ironically sincere or sincerely ironic? Maybe neither. This is the foundation of post-irony.

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It was October 2021. Thirteen years and some change after Wallace’s death by suicide, I stood on the sidelines at the New People’s Cinema Club Film Festival afterparty watching my young film contemporaries enact permutations of his New Sincerity in a pervasively post-ironic age. A rainbow coalition of mememakers and filmmakers had converged on Eldridge Street, a Benetton Hearts crew of artists whose films deal with transgressive topics (death, life, the performance of racial and sexual identity). Everyone and everything was “retarded”—their word. The women of the former dirtbag left and current right-wing, post-ironic Red Scare podcast interviewed John Waters, who applauded the NPCC for platforming transgressive thought. Where Waters’s transgression was sincere through its irony—see the putrid Divine of Pink Flamingos (1972) and bratty Francine Fishpaw of Polyester (1981)—the NPCC party flirted with both irony and sincerity to the point where the line between the two disappeared entirely: once again, sincerely ironic, or ironically sincere?

Trevor Bazile—the since-deceased NPCC creative director and a talented filmmaker in his own right—funded this event using money from billionaire tech mogul and active Trump supporter Peter Thiel, a fact that became increasingly hilarious to me when looking around at the throng of young provocateurs with questionable politics. I wondered what Thiel would think of Bazile’s event had he been in attendance, if he’d register the irreverence of the partygoers as sincerity or sarcasm, if he’d be into the NPCC films, or if he even cared to know what they were about. I also wondered if anyone here considered the impact of Thiel’s e–money apart from how it paid for their beer that night. Does letting a rich guy with rancid values fund your party affect what those parties look like or who they cater to? From the NPCC event, I couldn’t have easily read what Thiel stood for—he probably wanted to make money and elect politicians who could help him in that pursuit, but what did an alignment with the NPCC do toward that end? And then I remembered that I didn’t know what Bazile stood for either, other than the pursuit of artmaking among his friends. Perhaps the only thing Thiel and Bazile had in common was that I couldn’t tell if the discursive noise surrounding them represented or obscured their beliefs.

For Bazile, this ambiguity is a strength. His first film, mingus’s the clown (2019), holds a mirror up to the post-ironic present by parroting it. As the title suggests, the film is based on jazz musician Charles Mingus’s “The Clown,” a 1957 song that tells the comedic tragedy of a clown who, as quoted in archival footage used in the film, “tries to please people like most jazz musicians do, but whom nobody liked until he was dead.” Bazile’s clown is played by Brooklyn-based performance artist Nile Harris, who executes a foolish routine in a concrete warehouse, sometimes accompanied by five to 10 shirtless white men in jeans who act as the crew to a film set, adjusting the scaffolded platforms around Harris’s stage while he jests around. The clown’s antics only elicit insistent booing from a displeased audience who are not in the warehouse with him, but rather exist in the intercut stock-footage clips of white people sitting in what look like movie theaters or comedy clubs. They only start to laugh when the clown begins to hurt himself. Edited together at neck-breaking pace, the clown’s desperation for laughter becomes apparent in the increasing severity of his antics: he slips on a banana peel, gets smacked with a bag of flour leaving him cast in white dust. There are narrative interludes that provide ironic fodder to the clown’s sincere attempts at gleaning audience laughter: a scene where six of the shirtless white men try to post up the clown as he dribbles a basketball, a choreographic break between the clown and a spandex-clad dancer, a slideshow-esque slog of images detailing the evolutionary advancements of monkeys. One scene nine minutes into the 12-minute film combines the sincere and the ironic: a transparent mask of a computer cursor reordering Adobe Premiere Pro clips named “white man stands story.png” and “black_guy_story.png” overlays footage of a tug of war, the dance sequence of Beyoncé’s 2013 “Grown Woman” music video, and a hand holding out a banana as if to offer it to the viewer. The clown eventually hangs himself from the rafters with a yellow rope which snaps—he can’t even kill himself right. Laid out on a giant circular red tarp like a puddle of rubbery blood, the clown howls in pain, gripping his leg, begging people to stop laughing, asking for help. But since the audience only exists in the edit, there is no one to heed to his screams. He was just the dancing monkey all along.

mingus’s the clown shows the politics of the performer as well as the consequences of post-irony: we’re laughing so loud we don’t care that someone’s been hurt. This marks an ethical shift from understanding irony and sincerity as separate responses whose appropriateness is based on the circumstances of risk. Post-irony bins appropriateness; knowing when to laugh at the clown and when to express concern for his well-being no longer matters when his physical comedy and bodily harm become interchangeable. In a chapter of his 2020 book What Comes After Farce? called “Père Trump,” American art historian Hal Foster posits what he calls ethical aesthetics as a point of comparison to relational aesthetics that respond to the Trumpian moment. Relational aesthetics, like New Sincerity, is a theory of the ’90s. The term was coined by French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe a subtype of contemporary art that uses social context and human interaction as its form, exemplified by projects like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 1990 (pad thai), an artwork in which he invited visitors to New York’s Paula Allen Gallery to partake in a free dinner. Projects like this quickly spread across the art world, and were even restaged at MoMA PS1 last year as part of a retrospective exhibition of Tiravanija’s work. (The food was fresh; the exhibition text cataloged them with the historical ’90s dates.)

What relational aesthetics suggested, according to Foster, was that “if sociality was largely wrecked by neoliberalism (recall the Thatcherite motto ‘there is no such thing as society’), then a remedial preserve might be carved out in cultural institutions.” Today, as “codes of conduct” are obliterated across professions and politics, cultural institutions fight harder for them: “Just as the social was in part outsourced to culture in relational aesthetics, so the ethical is now in part relocated there in ethical aesthetics.” Newly funded centers for diversity and inclusion, “teach-ins” on racial justice, and minority-driven programming at contemporary museums and galleries who don’t practice equal opportunity hiring, don’t sign onto initiatives to boycott genocidal funders, and hold exhibitions for marginalized artists with no intention of selling their work are examples of this. However, mingus’s the clown aestheticizes ethics differently. Outside of the museum— the traditional bastion of classical liberalism—the artwork accepts the frame of a Peter Thiel-funded film festival that platforms transgressive art by young people whose invocation of Trump may or may not be sincere. The film emerges not as a direct way for a cultural institution to encourage some moral accountability as in ethical aesthetics, but as a means of turning post-irony back to its audiences, using the blurred lines between irony and sincerity to encourage them to think about what moral accountability means. To engage with mingus’s the clown, audiences have to decide if they should be laughing at the clown’s pain from an irreverent, removed vantage, or taking concern. Bazile’s short is a sincere approach to artmaking that doesn’t pretend that a museum or film festival can solve societal issues. Instead, it implicates its audiences to demand they develop their own relationship to ethics as opposed to shrugging them off post-ironically. Refusing to accept that one can take a stance—whatever that stance may be—renders mingus’s the clown illegible; that’s the film’s way of punishing a post-ironic response.

“Perhaps the only thing Thiel and Bazile had in common was that I couldn’t tell if the discursive noise surrounding them represented or obscured their beliefs.”

Relational aesthetics do not solve social problems just as ethical aesthetics cannot solve ethical problems outside the art space by virtue of being constrained to it. A cultural institution’s insistence on aesthetic means to solve political ends is not feasible in a Trumpian society where, Foster writes, “critics take Trump literally but not seriously, while supporters take him seriously but not literally.” Essentially, the Trump campaign in 2016 created a culture industry that linked itself with the political sphere because he was a figure branded as belonging to both—the socialite and politician as one. Brusque yet diplomatic when it comes to money, filthy rich and tapped into the concerns of poor white Americans: Trump’s initial campaign messaging presented these tropes as post-ironic claims, using a language that made it seem like not only was he a champion for the polarities between, say, rich and poor or brash and measured, but that his presidency could be a political solution to a cultural divide. Now well into his third campaign for the presidency of the United States, we have seen no such solutions. Where there could be an ethic has emerged a post-ironic aesthetic. The transgressors Wallace imagined, his new rebels—they are sincere in their efforts. They are Trevor Bazile, who used the money from the conservative elite to platform artwork that challenges a Trumpian moment of confusion between irony and sincerity by performing both. They use the many paradoxes presented by post-irony to present an ethics that is self-aware. The NPCC understands that, like Bazile’s clown, they’re just dancing monkeys, and no one’s going to care if they’re hurt.

Whereas Bazile appropriated post-irony to sincere ends, Trump and his media-versed cronies leverage post-irony to manipulate desperate Americans, drumming up voter support for a president who stands for nothing. Behind Trump in 2016 was political strategist and former investment banker Steve Bannon, then-executive chairman at neoconservative media outlet Breitbart News who became Trump’s chief strategist during his presidency. Bannon’s media strategy for Trump’s 2016 campaign mobilized post-irony as a language that came to its own defense: Trump never met Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke and doesn’t support him, his account just tweets to him; Trump definitely condemns the violence caused by white nationalist and neo-Nazi participants in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but his official statement on X, then known as Twitter, reads “We must remember this truth: No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are ALL AMERICANS FIRST.” America First, Bannon’s genius media strategy that inspired Executive Order 13769— officially titled Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States, known colloquially as the “Muslim ban”—was popular among far-right racial nationalists and tamer conservative civic nationalists alike. It was farcical for Trump to so openly conflate people of the Muslim faith with terrorists; the question, to reference Foster, was no longer whether or not to take Trump “seriously but not literally or literally but not seriously,” because here was an executive order that legalized Islamophobia. The latent threat of white supremacy hides behind Trump’s apparent sincerity in this messaging to protect America, his never-overt condemnation of the far right and its associated acts. After seven months in the White House, Bannon was fired after the Unite the Right rally, later blacklisted for anti-Trump comments revealed in journalist Michael Wolff’s 2018 tell-all Fire and Fury, and eventually sentenced to four months in federal prison for refusing a subpoena for the trials prosecuting the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

—

“I call Trump a Marshall McLuhanesque figure. McLuhan called it, right? He says this mass thing called media, or what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of the noosphere, is going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything. And Trump understands that,” said Bannon in an interview with The New York Times this past July before beginning his prison sentence. Bannon reveals the post-ironic strategy that garnered enough support to land Trump in the White House: signaling to white supremacists with a level of sincerity so debatable that to everyone else it felt absurd, implausible. That is, until laws condemning children to cages made that farce a reality. “Watch what they do, not what they say,” said broadcast journalist Rachel Maddow in a 2019 MSNBC episode of The Rachel Maddow Show that focused on the messaging of the Trump administration. Post-ironic communications evade accountability even as they instigate actions with real effects.

In American politics, the post-ironic rhetoric that caters to the sincerity of voters has demonstrated its ability to win elections because it targets those at the polls who need something to believe in. Rather than filling in that belief, it tells them, in its advanced stages, nothing is real—not belief, not irony. Post-irony is both a language and a social reading protocol that survives by skewing belief through performance. When that performance is artistic, whether as a farcical play, an overly self-aware novel, or a comedic fiction film, post-ironic performance can be observed as a funny hypothetical. When that performance is political, it loses its humor.

—

The setting is Butler Township, Pennsylvania, July 13, 2024. As reported by the FBI, 20-year-old assailant Thomas Crooks acted alone, staked out the rally site 10 days prior, set up his assault rifle on the roof of a nearby roof during the event and fired eight rounds at the presidential hopeful, nicking his right ear. Two people were injured, one died. A counter sniper took Crooks out before there could be any more casualties. That day, Trump joined fellow out-of-office president Theodore Roosevelt and incumbent Ronald Reagan as the third American president to survive an assassination attempt, the bullet missing a fatal entry point in his skull by a quarter of an inch.

But even in the face of bloodshed on the presidential stage, we have limited ability to make meaning of it. Conspiracy theorists across the ideological spectrum blame each other. Federal authorities offer no insight into Crooks’s possible political views. “How far away was Oswald from Kennedy,” “when is the DNC convention,” and “when is the RNC in 2024” were among his Google searches leading up to the attack, according to the FBI. Are we supposed to laugh or shrug? Are we supposed to take this as an “assassination attempt” or yet another American mass shooting? Without answers, the shooting’s moral and political implications can’t clearly register. It can be whatever you want it to be, possibly nothing at all. We are left at a communicative standstill in the aftermath of Butler, Pennsylvania, one that not only mirrors the logic of post-irony, but is post-ironic itself. When we are unable to tell sincerity from irony, when violence fails to signal its motive, the speculative noise that remains around the unknowable reasoning of the killer distances us from the mortal reality of his actions. This post-ironic moment begs the question: what could be more irreverent than a mass shooting? As the media index frays, reality suffers: Corey Comperatore, a fireman and father, died by Crooks’s hand; Trump injured his ear.

Post-irony liquifies even the stakes of life and death, leaving in its deliquescence a disturbing disregard for meaning-making. “Constantly, we’re in a battle of narrative. Unrestricted narrative warfare. Everything is narrative,” continues Bannon in The New York Times. “And in that regard, you have to make sure you forget about the noise and focus on the signal.” The corpus of farce bloodies the American stage. The noise of a garish political pundit and the debates surrounding the intention behind his more problematic sentiments joins the sharp pops of Crooks’s AR-15 as a distraction from the signal. We are immersed in the sonority of post-irony. Trump understands that this is how he wins.