By “postironic” I don’t mean “earnest.”

Innocence lost cannot be reclaimed so simply.

This is more than a simple backlash.

Our culture has become so saturated with ironic doubt that it’s beginning to doubt its own mode of doubting.

[...]

Postironists create their own sets of serviceable realities and live in them independent of any facets of the outside world that they choose to ignore.

Ironic advertising is becoming irrelevant because in the new postironic mind‐set irony itself is the base condition; it is beside the point.

Practitioners of postironic consciousness blur the boundaries between irony and earnestness in ways we traditional ironists can barely understand, creating a state of consciousness wherein critical and uncritical responses are indistinguishable.

Postirony seeks not to demystify but to befuddle, not to synthesize opposites but to suspend them, keeping open all possibilities at once...

Postirony is ironic earnestness.

[Alex Shakar, The Savage Girl (2001); podkr. moje – n.]