cynical reason

Music: Classix Nouveaux: The Very Best of Classix Nouveaux (1997)

This post is about last night's debate. It will take me a bit to get there.

A friend in town some days ago asked about the "companion essay" to my and Shaun's essay, "Zombie Trouble." It was odd that he should ask because that day I had started working on my half of the essay. In the companion essay we extend the conceptual work in the previous essay to an analysis of the film 28 Days Later vis-à-vis race. To this end we're injecting a discussion of Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason because of the prescient way Sloterdijk predicted what would happen in the United States a decade early. Sloterdijk's understanding of "cynical reason" tracks, we think, the way in which the genre of zombie film has cannibalized it's own social critiques---that is, zombie films have themselves become cynical of their own critiques of very social harms and ills they decry.

Cynical reason is the basically the idea that we have become so "enlightened" that ideology critique has become superfluous (and for Sloterdijk, this means the body has been ejected from the scene too, especially in respect to social movements). I think about this in relation to the absence of work in my field (rhetorical studies) that announces itself as an ideology critique. Here's Sloterdijk's opening statement:

The discontent in our culture [Germany circa 1980] has assumed a new quality: It appears as a universal, diffuse cynicism. The traditional critique of ideology stands at a loss before this cynicism. It does not know what button to push in this cynically keen consciousness to get enlightenment going. Modern cynicism presents itself as that state of consciousness that follows after naive ideologies and their enlightenment. In it, the obvious exhaustion of ideology critique has real ground. This critique has remained more naive than the consciousness it wanted to expose; in its well-mannered rationality, it did not keep up with the twists and turns of modern consciousness to a cunning multiple realism. The formal sequence of false consciousness up to now---lies, errors, ideology---is incomplete; the current mentality requires the addition of a fourth structure: the phenomenon of cynicism. To speak of cynicism means trying to enter the old building of ideology critique through a new entrance.

Sloterdijk's thesis was so powerful it became a best-seller in Germany in the early 1980s. Zizek's career-inspiring first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology is, in my opinion, written largely in response to Critique of Cynical Reason. "The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: 'they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.'" Zizek continues by arguing cynical reason is no longer naïve, but he nevertheless agrees that "the traditional critique of ideology no longer works." His solution is the concept of ideology as fantasy (and here is where my own work in psychoanalysis is rooted).

Zizek is not so much interested in Sloterdijk's solution, but I find it fascinating: Diogenes masturbating in the marketplace. Diogenes practiced kynismos, a form of public argumentation and a positive type of cynicism that deliberately works to offend others, not simply for the giggles but also to break through the cynical haze and inspire critical thought. Identified with the plebian position (those who do not speak institutional power), the trick of kynicism is to oppose, contradict, and offend those who speak institutional power with the rhetoric of irony. This is a sort of ceaseless posture that might, one senses, lead once again to a politics of the body---swarms of protest, not in earnest, but in humor and carnival.

Some of my own work takes Sloterdijk to heart (e.g., "ShitText," "Size Matters") in the domain of critique and criticism, and I want to pursue it to at least a trilogy: I've got shit and cum covered, onward to the idiom of piss. Alright, but: there is the domain of the body, that domain which has been best grappled within/despite the academy by my colleagues in performance studies. And then there is that domain of the political outside the institution of the academy: how to be kynical in that domain?

I was thinking about these questions as I sort-of watched the debate between Obama and Clinton last evening ("sort-of" because I was streaming it online and my friggin' connection kept dropping; I HATE AT&T DSL!). It occurred to me we might refer to Clinton's rhetoric as classically cynical: she claims that only she has the experience and technical know-how to navigate the second most powerful institution in the country. She speaks from a position of institutional power, Obama does not. Obama's response has been to counter Clinton's cynical reasoning with "hope" and symbolic idealism; while I, too, get caught up in this appeal---he is not speaking from a position of institutional power, but he has the technical know-how to speak it if we elect him, and he will install something different---I throw up in my mouth a little when the appeal tips too far into gross sentimentality. Why? Andreas Huyssen's remarks in the forward to Critique of Cynical Reason says it better than I can:

While Sloterdijk's analysis is rooted in his perceptions of German culture, it seems fairly clear that the German case of political disillusionment, cynicism, and an atrophied trust in the future has parallels in other Western countries today. In a certain sense, the growth of cynicism during the 1970s actually provided the cultural soil for the revival of ideological conservatism of the 1980s, which has filled the void left by the post-1960s disillusionment with a simulacrum of homey old values.

In the devastating wake of the Bush II administration, and certainly in light of the profound sense of disillusionment represented by the politics of Clintonian Compromise, in what sense is the Obama phenomenon itself a "simulacrum of homey old values?" And what, perhaps, would be the better kynical strategy?

This is the point in my blog where I do my thing: I frame a problem then say, "I don't know." The answer should not involve Ralph Nader and must involve poop, I know that for sure. But then what?