Like Lucy with the football, the dream of a return to sincerity in the cultural mediascape can only ever be a send up of earnestness, reason being “that ship has sailed,” as the saying goes. The cold fact of this might dampen our enjoyment of gimmicky shows selling the end of irony, unless you’re in on the joke of a doubling down on irony through the ushering in of a new sincerity.

It’s just as well if sincerity is recognized as a thing of the past, since the very notion of a standard of ethics has fallen away with the rise in global media conglomerates that ironically present sexualized and racialized violence as harmless entertainment. Of course, we know this to have deleterious effects on heavy consumers of mass media, effects such as a hardening of attitudes toward vulnerable populations and a greater tolerance for repressive tactics toward them, not to mention extensive limitations on communicative dialogue, i.e., how a thing may be said in order to be understood, and in the ways a thing may be interpreted (Gerbner).

This arrangement helps to explain the findings of a particularly damning report on the state of public education commissioned by the Reagan Administration nearly 40 years ago:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war” (“A Nation at Risk”).

The 1983 report warned against the long-term repercussions on the world stage of “a rising tide of mediocrity” imposed from within, amounting to what the authors described in effect as “an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.” The authors observed not much had changed 25 years later. So much for earnestness.

A standard of ethics premised on truth demands is unrealizable for the same reason that high standards in public education continue to go unrealized. There are too many moneyed interests in maintaining the status quo. An ironic stance points to this understanding, whereas a sincere one merely serves as a cover for ongoing unsustainable and unethical practices. Otherwise, we might’ve had someone ask why the three major religions continue to remain silent on the mistreatment of animals in what has by now hardened into globalized industrial practice, a moral issue if ever there was one. They’ve had thousands of years.

Politics is in everything, it’s true. Even at the level of poetics. A lying poetics that seeks to subvert truth regimes is itself appropriated for political gain, and this only works as long as there are no criteria by which to recognize misuse of this subversion to create the spectacle of social change. Everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. Nobody wants to be Mr. Jones who doesn’t know what’s happening. Which makes it easy to overlook the impossibility of a representative politics of subversion.

The end of sincerity was actually flagged some time ago in the 1978 work of Jacques Derrida who wrote, “Sincerity, which is simplicity, is a lying virtue. It is necessary, on the contrary, to accede to the virtue of the lie” (Writing and Difference, 68). And, as an endnote in the same volume, “…The ‘poetical’ interpretation of interpretation does not seek truth or origin but affirms the play of interpretation” (311).

Rather than subject the finite mind to questioning the sincerity of the infinite number of objects that come to us from the outside world, a turn inward to ‘survey and estimate’ the mind itself would give a more accurate measure of its ‘worth or worthlessness,’ whether it’s mostly comprised of good or bad investments (Kant). That kind of investigation is more likely to uncover what thereby cannot remain concealed, according to Kant. It would allow one to pin down processes that are otherwise notoriously difficult because unconscious. Yet the need for such an investigation seems to have gone unheeded since it was first flagged, also in 1983:

“Perhaps the most powerful influence of the doctrine on working journalists was unconscious: It obscured and therefore made more palatable the unprofessional compromises with managerial imperatives and corporate politics. The subtle workings of the doctrine over the years and its rationalization of avoiding judgements made it easy for serious writers to remain silent about social ideas and political forces and to concentrate on contests of personalities” (Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly).

Altogether, it would appear that media conglomerates are in a pickle, since there scarcely can be a confession of the truth that media representations are by nature “without the phallus,” a condition Lacan characterized as an absence of spirit as it is lived and as involving real change. It’s a debatable stance that becomes less so as long as there is an unwillingness to relinquish institutions that are closed off from change, that very change which would bring about dissolution of bonds of unknowing, those bonds supplying the tension necessary to present an “objectively true” confirmation of the time “we” live in.

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