Acid Horizon David Foster Wallace & Mark Fisher: Irony, Sincerity, and Late Capitalism
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Apr 29, 2026 Hannah Smart, fiction writer and critic and author of Meat Puppets, joins to trace David Foster Wallace and Mark Fisher's cultural diagnoses. They dissect irony vs sincerity, how TV and TikTok shape performative selfhood, the death of boredom, and whether creativity or solitude can escape late capitalism’s attention traps.
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Wallace's Diagnosis Of Irony And Sincerity
- David Foster Wallace diagnosed contemporary culture as dominated by ironic detachment that hollowed out meaningful values and made sincerity difficult.
- Hannah Smart explains Wallace urged moving beyond satire to instantiate positive values after postmodernism burned down modernist narratives.
Hannah's Nine Reads Of Infinite Jest
- Hannah Smart recounts discovering Infinite Jest in college and reading nearly all of Wallace's work within six months, rereading Infinite Jest nine times.
- She notes later readings reveal characters and subtext that reshape the book's meaning.
Postmodernism's Self Defeating Irony
- Wallace saw postmodernism's problem as perpetual irony: once you debunk grand narratives, you must create new positive values or be stuck in endless negation.
- Hannah: anyone advocating positive values is immediately subject to the same ironic critique.
