For better or worse, critics and irony are the dissenting voices of our generation.

Well, maybe for worse, because there's a problem: criticism and irony are negative. I don't mean this in a touchy-feely sense of "bad vibes," but in the sense that they can only work as negations of an already existing culture to which they refer. This relationship is complex -- see Hegel's writings on the dialects of the master/slave relationship if you don't believe me -- but the problem is still simple: criticism and irony relegate our role and our voice to that of a parasite. While criticizing the culture we are wed to it; we have no autonomy, we are dependent, we are a sub-culture.

Irony is also problematic because it sets up boundaries. There are those who are in-the-know and "get it," and those who aren't and don't. This, of course, is the reason we adopted it in the first place, but this exclusivity also complements a tendency in our generation's dissident sub-cultures to move towards smaller and smaller in-groups of readers or participants -- a will toward smallness -- in the hopes that we will be too insignificant a morsel for the rapacious jaws of marketing to gobble up. Besides being self-destructive and in the end futile, this will toward smallness puts us again in a reactive position vis a vis the "mainstream." They dictate our form . . . And as long as we are defined solely by our negation of the dominant culture, we're simply another part of its free-wheeling, psuedo-plurlistic, multi-faceted, nelf-negating totality.