Suzanne Moore has had enough of irony, which is nice. Not always the most spot on commentator, here she it right by completely failing to hit the target. Irony, detachment, postmodernism are so utterly infuriating because they're so protean, you think you've got then it completely slips your grasp. Irony has been declared over more than once before. Only shoot hipsters in the head. Make it a quick, clean kill, otherwise they will enjoy being shot ironically.
It is a fascinating aspect of ideological struggle. Commodity fetishism is the result of alienated labour, we come to see the results of our labour, goods and services, as having life on their own. For example, from the smallest level, where we might feel we express ourself through a ring tone or a book collection, to when we see the result of, say, an election in Greece and wonder how "the markets" will react. This fact is a building block of bourgeois ideology: the mass of humanity is worthless except as slaves, tied to the whims of a computer or a lathe or some other object (often people have to compete with lifeless objects for work). But in an age of mass media and mass education this is difficult to sustain. Irony, detachment, distance, whatever you call it, helps ideologically sustain the whole cycle of capital accumulation. You can be knowlingly exploited, ironically condescended to, enjoy living through worthless, substandard commodities, it's so bad it's good.
But the main fact about postmodernism is it is hyper-liberalism. Relativism, the death of grand narratives etc so practiced really does dissolve all forms of solidarity. We are all little atoms bumping around in a vast chamber (capitalism as a mystery box, which magically generates surplus value). Each interaction, each insight is a meaningful as the next, and so meaningless; hence, I think, the drive to rationalise the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement as leaderless or propelled, somehow, by social networks.
So long as it's only individuals who have had enough of irony and detachment, such attitudes will prevail, earnestness and involvement being just another set of postures, as good as any other.
