anhedonia essay: masks of ennui and jaded irony
We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté.
Context
The anthology's sociology of the ironic mask. U.S. arts function as a how-to for hip emptiness: because to be hip is to be included and so Unalone, kids study jaded irony as a survival skill against "peer-hunger," fashioning masks of ennui while the face is still "fictile" — and then the mask sticks. The crucial move is developmental, not intellectual: the weary cynicism is adopted originally as protection ("saves us from gooey sentiment") and hardens into a permanent feature of the face. Irony here is not a philosophical position but a deformity assumed too young to be reversed, a shape the culture teaches the face to hold until it can hold no other.