This piece in the Onion, about ironizing one's life to the point where one has actually assumed the traits which one is ironizing, is quite amusing:
"But what good is all this hilarity if there's no one else hip enough to appreciate it? On the 8:12 a.m. commuter train, everybody just assumes I'm one of them. So does my secretary, my assistant, and every single one of my colleagues at the law firm, where I'm now a partner. I even married this clueless girl from Connecticut—loves shopping and everything—and we have two ironic kids. I swear, they look like something out of a creepy 1950s Dick And Jane reader—I even have these hilarious silver-framed pictures of them in my cheesy corner office. But still, the humor is lost on everybody but me. I'm probably the most fashionable guy on the planet at this point, but no one understands. God! Do you have any idea how difficult it is being so far ahead of your time? Some days, it's enough to make me want to embrace conformity like all the other sheep."
The serious question which I believe this article implies is: to what extent does ironic performance depend on 'an audience'? The article hinges on the "writer's" assumption that the effectiveness of irony lies in other people "getting it"; that is, it implies that the subversive effect is to be gained through making others realize that, e.g., corporate existence is hollow and worthy of parody.
Yet - and I say this in all honesty - if we were to be a bit less ridiculous than the ostensible writer of this column, I think that this type of "lifestyle irony" could be a legitimate form of subversion. The key is not conceiving of it as a sort of external performance, a question of instructing others or revealing to them their own conformity - in the end obviously a self-aggrandizing hipness, which is obviously where this article gains its humorous effect - but rather as a practice. If we look at Foucault's notion of ascesis (in Vol. 3 of the History of Sexuality), the"work of the self on the self," I think we can come to conceptualize lifestyle irony as a legitimate way of navigating one's social existence. If one feels - how could one not? - that this social existence is in some fundamental sense patently absurd, and that the options for a self-sufficient, self-realizing subjectivity are extremely circumscribed, I think a limited self-ironizing which is directed at assuming one's position in the social order while attempting to preserve a critical perspective on it at the same time, and artfully "enhancing" that existence with a sense of the existential hilarity of the whole situation, is a potentially ethical position to take. Though it is easy to criticize such a practice as pure aestheticism and ultimately conservative - and this is a critique often leveled at Foucault, e.g., by Habermas - I think it provides a potential foundation for a critical existence that, while it may not presume the progressivist ability for constant, real, and practically unemcumbered social change - is a more solid foundation for anything that could come to be useful as social praxis. I subscribe wholeheardtedly to the Marxist notion that some sort of critical subjectivity is necessary for praxis; thus I think we need to start by examining the positions of possibility for such a position. I don't believe that these positions are easy or well-defined; the unpredictable and "irrational" commitment to "lifestyle irony" mirrors these difficulties, and is I believe a site, perhaps, for their realization.
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