The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, ’then’ what do we do?

Wallace is pressing on a dilemma he saw in late-20th-century “postmodern” aesthetics: irony and rule-breaking can be powerful tools for exposing hypocrisy, sentimentality, and the hidden coercions of culture. But once art has successfully dismantled inherited forms and “debunked” conventions, mere exposure is no longer enough. The question “then what do we do?” demands a constructive next step—new forms of sincerity, ethical commitment, or meaning-making that can survive self-awareness without collapsing into naïveté. The quote encapsulates Wallace’s broader concern that endless irony becomes sterile: diagnosis without prescription, critique without the risk of belief.