For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on
cynicism
talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
.
As antisemantics, Dadaism systematically disrupts-not metaphysics but the talk about it: The metaphysical domain is laid bare as a festival ground; there,
formulas
398 Q DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
everything is allowed, except "opinions. " The "irony of life" (Hausmann) is sup- posed to be captured by Dadaist irony. Even Dadaism as style would already be a step backward--and precisely in this sense art history has appropriated it and ordered it into the museum of stylistic schools. Foreseeing this, Hausmann said he is actually speaking an anti-Dadaist. Because Dada is a procedure, it cannot "sit on a chair"; every style is a chair. In this sense, Dada understands itself even as an "exact technique"; it says No, methodically and without fail, when a "mean- ing of the world" emerges that does not concede that it is nonsense. All opining, every idealization is sublated in intellectual movement-montage and demontage, improvisation and revocation.
The sharpest honing was given to Dadaist semantic cynicism by Walter Serner, the writer whom Lessing called a "German Maupassant. " The fact that he has been rediscovered in our day shows that in West Germany, too, a public has been formed in which the sense for cynicism has grown and that can read this author because, in his polished immoralism, a sense for highly conscious, "unfor- tunately necessary" malice, all too well understandable today, betrays itself. Forty pages of incomparable prose, Letzte Lockerung {Final Slackening), origi- nate from Serner, written in the last year of the First World War, published in 1920 by Paul Stegemann in Hannover in the collection, Die Silbergaule (The sil- ver nags), a series of philosophical-poetic miniatures, composed of cultural cri- tique and cyanide. Nowhere else can the meaning of sublation (Aufhebung) be studied with such sharpness-a violent and simultaneously playful bursting of all cultural semantics, of positing meaning, philosophies, and exercises in art. Bru- tally and elegantly, this prose strikes out on all sides. Serner presents a theory
of language games beside which Wittgenstein's theory looks like finger exercises for respectable Ph. D. candi-dates (Habili-Tanten, p. 4).
In this "slackening," the disinhibition of a certain suicidal tendency also betrays itself. Intellectual aggressivity is directed not only outwardly and brings about not only a spectacular repulsive reaction by civilization critique. Serner, the most reflective of the Dadaists, provided himself with an account of the fact that the Dadaist hatred of culture is logically directed inwardly, against the culture-in-me I once "possessed" and that now is good for nothing.
Favorable proposal: Before going to sleep, one imagines with the most pronounced clarity the final stage of a suicide who, by means of the bullet, wants to finally weld self-consciousness into himself, (p. 8)
Where no content counts anymore, only a moment of desperate intensity re- mains, a suicide's self-consciousness that is "through" with everything. Existence as being unto death. After this, there is no longer any question that Dadaism and Heideggerian existential ontology nurture a subterranean community of inspira- tion with each other.
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 399
At the zero point of meaning, only a pathetic contempt for meaning still stirs itself--an all-penetrating nausea about "positivity": "Weltanschauungen are word
7
mixtures" (p. 5).
there words and sentences that afford no connection. He projects this disconnect- edness onto the world, which, accordingly, can no longer be a "cosmos. " Dadaist antisemantics proceeds consistently to an anticosmology. From now on, it keeps a sharp eye on people as they paste together worldviews and conceptions of order. In the beginning was the chaos into which people, in their debility and hunger for meaning, dream a cosmos.
Set a redeeming heaven down on top of this chaos of smut and riddle! ! Scent human dung with order! ! ! I thank . . . Therefore . . . philoso- phies and novels are sweated over, pictures smeared down, sculptures tinkered with, symphonies etched out and religions started! What a shattering ambition--especially because these vain donkey tricks have all thoroughly (particularly in German regions) missed the mark. It's all balderdash! ! ! " (pp. 5-6)
Here, one of the naivetes of the older positivism comes to light, namely, that it conceives of the world as a confusion of "facts" that whirl about together just like the sentences in the heads of the logical positivists. However--in contrast to Serner, who tries to outdo the unbearable through affirmation--they cannot bear this chaos of uncoordinated sentences. Therefore, they put formal-logical corsets on their "facts. " In their approach, they are all chaotologists. They all assume the precedence of the unordered, the hypercomplex, the meaningless, and that which demands too much of us. Cynical semantics (up to Luhmann) can do nothing other than to charge order to the account of cultural caprice or the coercion toward a system.
With Serner, we see how the otherwise playful dadasophy turns into a humor- less, cold romantics. It is a romantics of utter unnai'vete. In it, the anxiety of being taken by surprise by a naive gesture or a surrender is at work. That drives malevo- lent reflection into its own hardened flesh. No search for a better life is counter- posed to the universal unhappiness. Rather, the attempt is made to counter the given unhappiness with self-intended "high" misery like a sovereign trump card. This is the way a consciousness behaves that is not only despairing but also ele- vates the wish to be hard as the point of departure for its self-modeling. In his unholy self-reflection, Serner practices the art of piling up and outdoing every "positive" thought with objections, detachments, and condescending commen- taries in a distrustful and furious manner. Self-experience and self-destruction be- come one and the same. Everything is rage that, to be sure, expresses itself but does not discharge itself in a liberating way.
In true positivist manner, Serner looks into his head and finds
Rage is thus life itself? To be sure: rage contains most of all upright-
400 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
ness; to be sure: all other states can only be suffered in that the rage re- mains hidden or in that the master dissimulates. . . . However: sense- lessness, at its highest point is rage, rage, rage, and is far from being meaning, (p. 42)
In this sense, a subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century --from Dada to the punk movement and the necrophilic robot gestics of New Wave. Here, a mannerism of rage makes itself felt that gives the great dead ego a pedestal from which the nauseous, incomprehensible world can be despised.
It is urgent that these reflective spaces of modern unhappy consciousness be described because they are the spaces in which the phenomenon of fascism, too, insofar as it is militant nihilism, consolidates. Even in the obvious stupidity of Nazi ideology, a certain "artful dimension" was hidden in the structure. Insofar as Dada presented a cynical show, it led a struggle of unhappy consciousness for sovereignty in spite of the feeling of meaninglessness for grand poses in spite of inner hollowness. Semantic cynicism is accompanied not only by suicidal inclina- tions but also by the risk of hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through the paradoxical "sensuousness" of fascism, which brought a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle that covered up the long-felt nothing- ness. In the hysteria a will to break through the self-controls of the lifeless every- day ego expresses itself. The hysteria is driven, according to Lacan's malicious aphorism, by the search for a master to tyrannize. To the extent that a spark of political hysteria was effective in Dadaism, this hysteria still had a strong realist component. For the master Dada sought in order to beat him up also existed, out- side Dada consciousness in reality, and as warlord in this imperialist-bourgeois world war he was objectively worse than any hoax, no matter how malicious. Fascist hysteria, by contrast, even invented the master it wanted to tyrannize, and itself conjured up a Jewish world conspiracy in order to eradicate a people whose existence was, to be sure, no mere figment of the imagination.
Serner's Final Slackening thus remained a penultimate slackening. As far as we know, his whole life long, he did not let the mask of the gentleman fall. True, he saw the world as having "gone to the dogs," but he himself shrank back from "going before the dogs" (Kastner). Even his sophisticated dog-eat-dog crime sto- ries maintain a style that has more of the master in it than the dog.
The dadasopher, Raoul Hausmann, kept closer to the secret of the kynical pleasure in disputation, which can attack without falling into self-destruction. He consciously oriented himself toward the sounder forms of symbolic destructive- ness, toward the "alertness of laughter, irony and the useless," toward the "jubila- tion of Orphic nonsense" (p. 50). That is the way Diogenes' dogs bark. "This
damned Christ said: See the lilies in the field. I say: See the dogs in the street"
(Sublitterel [1919], p. 53).
8
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 401
Excursus 1. Bluff Twilight
/ know exactly what the people want: the world is motley, senseless, pretentious and intellectually inflated. They want to despise, show up, deny, destroy that. One can surely talk about that. . . . Those who hate fervently must have once loved deeply. Those who want to deny the world must have embraced what they now set on fire.
Kurt Tucholsky, Dada, 20 July 1920
In Tucholsky the Dadaists found their first apparently well-meaning psychologist. He tried, as popular explicator, to extract the good contained in the bad in order to simultaneously justify and belittle it. Tucholsky translates the Dadaist dissolu- tion back into a serious language --he calls this understanding "these people. " They are, like all of us, those who have been disappointed by the bad world, who only let off steam more forcefully than our kind. The Berlin Dada phenomena be- ing spoken about here are interpreted by Tucholsky as symptoms of a great loss of love through which Yes has been turned into No and love into hate. Through the explanation of its psychic mechanism, the matter seems to have been brought into order again. If the negative is really only the inversion of the positive, we must know this and then "we can surely talk about it. " In this way, the psy- chologizing journalist determines how negativity is to be dealt with. To be sure, he himself knows irony all too well, but his way of lessening the gravity of things is through melancholy. He does not really consider an aggressive irony. It thus must happen that with his "understanding," he pensively belittles the thing to be explained: "When we subtract what is bluff in this association, not a terrible lot remains" (p. 125). But who said that we should "subtract" the bluff? With this for- mula, Tucholsky gets caught in his respectable misunderstanding. For the Dada procedure, bluff is indeed fundamental. Bluff and bewilderment (Verbluffung) be- long together and produce a provocative wake-up effect. Dada builds in a certain way on a bluff realism and demonstrates a technique of deception (Tduschung), exposure (Enttduschung), and self-exposure (Selbstenttauschung). As a method- ology of bluff (of pretense and disruption of meaning), Dada shows ironically how modern ideology functions: to establish values and act as if one believed in them, and then to show that one has not the slightest intention of believing in them. With this self-dissolution (Selbstaufliebung) of weltanshauung ("word mix- ture"), Dada betrays the modus operandi of modern consciousness with all its notorious meaning swindles. Tucholsky cannot, or rather, does not want to see this. He himself still postulates objective "meaning. " For this reason he does not come up to the level of the object he wanted to explain. He does not see that the methods of advertising, political propaganda, activist and neoconservative welt- anschauungen, of the hit parade and entertainment industry, etc. , have here been
402 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
laid out like a toolbox, or better, like a grammar before our understanding. For Dada contains a bluff theory in action. Without a theory of bluff, of show, seduc- tion, and deception, modern structures of consciousness cannot be explained at all properly. It may give cause for reflection that Tucholsky, up to just before the seizure of power, views the ascendant nazism still from the viewpoint of "respect- able irony" and is full of contempt for the stupidity, crampedness, bluff, posing, bigmouthedness, etc. , of the Nazis. To the last, this remains the tenor of Tucholsky's anti-Fascist feuilletons that otherwise leave nothing to be desired regarding sharpness. But the sharpness of real understanding is missing. Like all other defenders of melancholy seriousness, he is unable to develop a penetrant relation to "reflexive ideology" and to the phenomena of bluff and disingenuous opinion. (In this regard, he was completely different from Brecht, who from the ground up was in a position to think in the opponent's thought forms: to "tack," to weave, to let oneself go, and at the same time, to control oneself. )
Tucholsky's political moralism is expressed most clearly in his notes on the Dada trial before the Second District Court in Berlin in 1921. At that time, the case before the court concerned a plea by members of the army (Reichswehr) against George Grosz's drawings "God is with us"--"in which grimacing faces (of soldiers) of . . . unheard of brutality were to be seen" (Dada, p. 127). The five accused--Baader, Grosz, Herzfelde, Schlichter, and Burchardt (the gallery owner)-disappointed the expectations of the left-wing trial observers. Instead of confessing, they tried to get off by belittling themselves.
Five living beings on the bench for the accused, among them one man: Wieland Herzfelde. He was the only one who said here what was necessary and did not shrink back. . . . None of the boys was the one who had smashed the window pane. . . . As far as Grosz is con- cerned, I do not know whether the laxity of his defense can be traced to the fact that he cannot speak. . . . His plea saved Grosz's neck and was annihilating for him and his friends. "So that's your defense! Did you intend it to be so? " (Ibid. , pp. 128-29)
Is Tucholsky here not following an outmoded moral psychology? Consistency
right up to jail and full-blooded political character? More "identity," more confes-
sion, longer sentences? Does he not see that the ruling ideology wants precisely
the same thing, namely, to isolate culprits with political persuasions? Does the
man of conviction not have an advertising function for the political opponent? In
any case, it remains remarkable that Tucholsky's demand for "character" related
to people who were just more or less in the process of consciously developing
9
an ironic strategy. Instead of profiting from the new art of "sublation,"
Tucholsky relied on melancholic lethargy. Here, he missed an experience that would have saved him from certain surprises in 1933. Those who treat
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 403
phenomena of bluff as something one should "disregard" must remain blind to fas- cism, even if in other ways they are the bravest anti-Fascists in the world.
Klaus Mann grasped the problematic of bluff from a somewhat clearer per- spective. But he, too, sees the matter somewhat defensively.
We want to distinguish ourselves from the Nazis, for whom everything, from their "nationalism" up to their "socialism," is mere tactics (that is, bluff, trick and swindle), above all through the fact that we are serious about what we say; that we really mean the words and ideas with which we try to draw support for our cause. (Heimsuchung des europaischen Geistes, Essays [Munich, 1973], p. 49).
Klaus Mann was one of the first to view the cynical component of Fascist "ideology" clearly. He developed nothing less than the relatedness of the actor with the Fascist politician out of the spirit of bluff (see the novel Mephisto). How- ever, it remains questionable whether he, for his part, can really be serious about the antithesis to it: "to mean it seriously. " What is an antifascism and an antini- hilism that itself is essentially based on the fact that one, more sure than one can be, erects "opposed values" and behaves respectably only so as not to be cynical like the others? Is antinihilism itself not simply an obstructed nihilism?
Grosz, who had worked off the hate within himself in his early work, much later described the connection between nihilism and commitment (as antinihilism) as follows:
We demanded more. We did not quite know how to say what that more was; but many of my friends and I did not find any solution in the merely negative, in the rage at having been deceived and in the denial of all previous values. And so we were driven as a matter of course more and more to the Left. --
Soon I was head over heels in political currents. I gave speeches, not because of some conviction or other, but because everywhere at any hour people hung around disputing and because I had not yet learned anything from my experiences. My speeches were a stupid, parroted enlightenment babble, but when it dripped out of the mouth like honey, you could pretend that you were deeply moved. And often, your own twaddle really moved you, purely through the noise, sishing, twittering and bellowing that came out of you! (p. 115)
I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in certain political theories (Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein [Hamburg, 1974], p. Ill)
It must be said, however, that this is a different Grosz talking, a Grosz who, in exile in America, has sat down, inwardly and outwardly, in Dadaist language, "on the chair. " What remains significant about this testimony is that it originates
404 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
from someone who ran the entire gamut of negativism, political commitment, and withdrawal and could document it as a survivor. When Grosz wrote his memoirs, the two critics of bluff, Tucholsky and Mann, had long since killed themselves.
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic
In everyone, the ice dogs bark. Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! )
(1927)
A thought-provoking coincidence: When nazism came to power, on January 30,
1933, the January-February issue of the journal Psychoanalytische Bewegung
10
(Psychoanalytic movement) appeared in which, for the first time,
Freud's addressed extensively the phenomenon of cynicism (Edmund Bergler, Zur Psychoanalyse des Zynikers I; the second part followed in the next issue).
Next to this remarkable temporal constellation, another rather piquant obser- vation is to be noted: Here, an author has something to say about a topic that stands in a thoroughly explosive relation to his profession.
For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on cynicism talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis. In 1933, an analyst could actually have found himself ex- posed to the charge of reinforcing a pornographic and cynical picture of humanity (two expressions that could easily be fused with the epithet "Jewish" in a fatal way). Here, then, a psychologist has ventured into the lion's den. He tries to put the "cynicism" of analysis out of action through an analysis of cynicism. At one point, Bergler himself even betrays a powerful kynical bite, precisely when he defends himself against the charge that psychoanalysis, with its exposure of psy- chic mechanisms, could be suspected of cynicism. Psychoanalysis is none-the- less, he notes, a "respectable science" and science is no "life insurance for illu- sions" (p. 141). For the rest, Bergler's interest centers on personalities in whom cynical tendencies are striking, as his depth-psychological studies of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Grabbe, and others demonstrate. It is obvious that his reflections are motivated by current events - as shown not least of all by the fact that as examples he brings in texts and events of the most recent times, for example, Erich Kast-
11
ner's novel Fabian from 1931.
some examples, that he believes he has found traits of cynicism in some patients that, as a rule, manifest themselves in the form of aggressions against him, the analyst. To that extent, we are justified in saying that this psychoanalytic state- ment on cynicism arose in a thick mesh of current motives and stimuli that tie the text precisely to the historical moment (1932-33) and to the author's professional situation. He defends his profession against the charge of cynicism; he diagnoses some patients who attack him as having traits of cynicism ("moral insanity").
Finally, Bergler's study reveals, with the use of
a pupil of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 405
There is thus no question that here we are in the middle of things --even when they are spoken about matter-of-factly.
What strikes us is the extraordinary emphasis with which the analyst proclaims cynicism, or better, the "cynical mechanisms" to be a manifestation of the uncon- scious and of the persisting infantile component in the adult. With a grand gesture the whole domain of cynical phenomena is pocketed for psychoanalysis. Bergler allows only four of the sixty-four listed forms and variants of cynicism to count as "conscious," and even behind these, insofar as they are not disqualified from the beginning as "shallow" and "worthless," he conjectures that there are "grave neuroses. "
Cynicism, says Bergler, is one of the forms in which people with extremely strong emotional ambivalences (hates-loves; respects-contempts, etc. ) create a psychic possibility for discharge. Cynical "discharge" accordingly stands on the same level as classic neurotic mechanisms such as the hysterical, melancholic, compulsive, paranoid, and criminal(! ) defenses. In cynicism, the negative, ag- gressive side of the ambivalence can be expressed. However, this side alone does not characterize "cynical discharge. " In addition, an extremely strong "uncon- scious need to be punished" must be present--masochistic and exhibitionist ten- dencies (although male verbal cynics are often said to be strikingly prone to shame regarding their bodies). In cynical speech, a psychodynamic related to the compulsion to confess (Reik) is said to be at work-to know that one violates the commandments of the strict "super ego," but that one cannot refrain from the in- fringements, and so, to settle the inner conflict thus created, one resorts to truth that is now aggressively revealed. The cynic attacks the outer world in trying to overcome an "inner conflict. " "He beats the others; he wants to beat his con- science" (p. 36).
But through its aggressive, comical side cynicism is also a method of gaining pleasure, and this in a sevenfold way: (1) because cynics become temporarily free of guilt by means of an apposite remark; (2) because the rage of others amuses them (this thesis is reflected in the blurb from J. Drews [ed. ], Zynisches Worter- buch [Zurich, 1978]); (3) because they can enjoy their own exhibitionistic tenden- cies; (4) because cynicism is a method of distancing; (5) because narcissistic plea- sure can occur insofar as clever statements are admired; (6) because jokes are simply funny; (7) last of all, because thereby cynics can live out their infantile tendencies --by which are meant early infantile fantasies of grandeur, "anal" ten- dencies, and early sexual-cynical rage against the whore in the mother, said more generally, the scars of old Oedipus conflicts.
The crux of this interpretation of cynicism is the older psychoanalytic su- perego theory that sees the human being as a creature that continually cowers un- der the commands and threats of a lofty, strict, "heavenly" superego. However, it is curious that the analyst who deals with the cultural relativity of the so-called superego (which is expressed in cynicism) does not venture to think through this
406 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
? From Neue Jugend (June 1917, Malik-Verlag).
concept of the superego --as if his intellect cowered and crouched under the authority of the superfather, Freud. This is curious because Bergler comments on phenomena in which obviously the superego does not succeed in confirming itself in the cynic's behavior. Should the superego too not be something more than it once was?
It seems that Bergler begins, against his will, to give an account of this. Cyni- cism is after all a phenomenon that belongs to the "dialectic of culture," and inso- far as psychoanalysis as a theory of psychic processes is inevitably a theory of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 407
culture, in the long run, it cannot pretend that cultural phenomena such as cyni- cism can be treated merely psychodynamically. In fact, this is precisely the topic through which psychoanalysis sublates itself. The individual psyche has to be grasped just as much from the cultural aspect as the latter has to be grasped from the psychic aspect. The universal, transtemporal, strict superego is a superseded analytic fiction. In most of Bergler's examples --there are some very nice ones among them, and they alone make the reading rewarding --we can say that the mechanisms of the cynics' statements were hidden to them only if we do violence to these examples. They know what they say and they say it not so much on the basis of "unconscious" mechanisms but because they have become conscious of real contradictions. Thus they often express a contradiction kynically, or they ex- press one of the many forms of mauvaise foi cynically. The unconscious scarcely has to make an effort. The conscious participation of the ego is objective immoral- isms and the obvious fragmentation of morals explain the matter much more effectively than does the depth-psychological theory. Only at one point does the analyst widen his field of view.
The flooding of the entire culture with fear of one's conscience (Gewis- sensangst) leads to the circumstance that even there, where persons seek to rid themselves of their fetters in thought, as in cynicism, noth- ing other(! ) than a compromise with the superego comes about. One is thus not very far removed from reality when one says that cynicisms are profoundly also a bowing before the superego and compromises with the inner voice of conscience. "Not all those are free who mock their chains," taught a poet-philosopher. But that even in this mockery people pay tribute to the superego is grotesque, (p. 166)
It cannot be better said: "One is thus not very far removed from real- ity . . . ," but still pretty far away. Bergler understands that many forms of cynicism are efforts to strip oft fetters--consequently, that cynicism belongs to the dynamic of cultural liberation struggles and the social dialectic of values and that it is one of the most important methods of working through ambivalences in a culture. The expression "compromise" indeed hints in this direction. With something that stood "above" me, no compromises could be concluded; then it would just be a matter of obeying.
The compromise is concluded with an authority that has no penetrating imper- ative force --with a weak superego and a conscience that only pricks but can no longer give orders. Bergler shows involuntarily that analysts and cynics are in a way the last real moralists. They let themselves be reminded now and again of the commandments of conscience and morality, even if only when a conflict arises between reality and morality. For the rest of the world, morality is always and everywhere not broken with such matter-of-factness, but split, so that one no longer even feels the "inner conflict" with it. With its theory of the superego, psy-
408 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
choanalysis gives the "moralists of the last days" a medium in which they can ex- press themselves. However, the collective decomposition of the superego is al- ways a step further along than the moralists think. Objective cynicism has a head start on subjective cynicism which can never be made good. When cynics make malicious jokes, when they give morality the cold shoulder, when they demon- strate an icy coldness with which they anaesthetize themselves against the amoral- ism of the world, indeed when they even want to outdo its amoralism --then the subjective coldness toward morality reflects a general social freezing over. The
joke that comes out of the cold at least reminds us in its aggressivity of a more vital living. The "ice dogs" still have the energy to bark and still possess enough bite to want to make things clear. Psychoanalysis, which is "precisely not life in- surance for illusions," also has it in its better half. The scientific embalming can- not erase the fact that enlightenment, as Kant and many others emphasized, is just as much, if not more, a matter of courage as of intellect and that those who want to say the truth will not be able to avoid conflicts.
The date is January 1933. Psychoanalysis reflects on cynicism. Soon it will have to emigrate. It is done with the analytic explanation of cynicism. It becomes evident that what was supposed to have been the solution has been overwhelmed by the problem.
Notes
1. Otto Flake (1923): "Dada is the same thing as was earlier the famous, little understood roman- tic irony --a dissolution. The seriousness, not only of life, is dissolved. " Das Logbuch (Giitersloh, 1970), p. 295.
2. This seems to be a basic factor of Left morality. See G. Regler's statement: "Those who did not participate in their times were poor-hearted. This became an unwritten law, then a pressure, and finally moral blackmail. " Das Ohr des Malchus (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 161.
3. Dada could be understood essentially as a school of "subjective" positivism, in contrast to the "objective" positivism of logical empiricism. Both positivisms intersect in their radical semantic cyni- cism. Dada speaks of nonsense in an existential regard; the logical positivists speak of senselessness with regard to (e. g. , metaphysical) statements.
4. They constitute the most prominent phenomena in the area of semantic cynicism; see also Car- nap's Scheinprobleme; Theodor Lessing's Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen; Mauthner's Sprachkritik: Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
5. If M. Rutschky could write in his essay about the seventies, Erfahrungshunger (Cologne, 1980), that it was a time in which the "utopia of universal concepts" melted away, then he designates something common to the German Federal Republic and the Weimar Republic. In the former, of course, it was a matter of Left sociological universal concepts; Weimar struggled more against ethical
ghosts. Both stressed subjective positivism, sensousness instead of sense.
6. This refers to Peter Burger's much discussed Theorie der Avantgarde. In my opinion, he ap-
proaches the problem wrongly, namely, from the sociological side. However, this cannot be debated here. For the Dadaists, art is not an "institution. " Art is a meaning machine-it should be disturbed or destroyed in its functioning. Hence semantic cynicism. Art is a superego sector, a piece of authority: That should disappear. Hence the anarchistic gestures. The urge toward life, toward subla- tion in realization, by contrast, is an old inheritance: neokynicism of the eighteenth century. In this
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 409
sense, significant bourgeois art is "avant-garde" for as long as it has existed: pioneer of truth, of vital- ity in modern society.
7. Weimar/FRG: In Peter Handke's development, we can observe the stages subjective positiv- ism can run through: language critique, language-game actions, logical treatment of nausea; then from senselessness to faint-hearted sensuousness, to new narration; circling around the first "true feel- ing"; labor of recollection. Nausea and meaning cannot coexist in the long run. In understanding this, Handke is on the way to becoming a significant writer.
8. All Dada quotes that are not cited more explicitly are from the easily accessible Reclam selec- tion, Dada Berlin. Texte Manifeste Aktionen, ed. H. Bergius and Karl Riha (Stuttgart, 1977).
9. One should write a history of ideology on the struggle between irony and identity, talent and character (see Heinrich Heine's trouble with the German public of characters. See also Excursus 8. Actors and Character. )
10. With the exception of some remarks of Freud, Reik, and others.
11. See here chapter 22, "Bright Hour," where I quote the same passage Bergler cites as an exam- ple of a "cynic who revels in his own shabbiness" (K. Kraus).
Chapter 14
The Republic-as-If. Political Cynicisms I: The Struggle Goes On
Swindle! Concocted swindles! They all have their national colors. They will take care not to hoist the colors. They wouldn't even dream of it. Pay attention to what comes after-
1 ward! I'll tell you . . . Then come Wilson's fourteen points!
Fourteen times fourteen, they won't give a damn about us. Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (1928), p. 372
George Grosz has just provided the slogan of the epoch: "the rage at having been deceived. " Disappointment, disillusionment, resolutions not to let oneself be de- ceived again: These are the psychopolitical fundamental motifs of the Weimar Republic. They intensify the reflectively cynical disposition of society into mani- fest aggression.
Everywhere the bitter feeling of having been deceived hung in the air of the new beginning. The war was over, but the state did not manage a demobilization. The Weimar peace became a continuation of war through other means.
Today's research is in agreement that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 represents the earth-shattering diplomatic mistake of the century. In it, it became clear for the first time that under modern capitalist-imperialist premises, the rela- tion of war and peace had become something different from what it previously had been in (European) history. If the First World War had already introduced a new quality of international warfare, then, in the Treaty of Versailles a "harsher" quality of peace was hinted at. The victors had already won in principle a "total war," without, however, demonstrating their success through a "total vic- tory" (invasion, occupation, foreign administration, etc. ). The German capitula- tion came a little before the collapse of the Western Front and the invasion of Ger- many by the Allies. Thus, the Allies' victory was indeed unambiguous, but not fought out to the last military consequence. The German capitulation happened, as we know from numerous sources, to a large extent in the expectation of a bearable peace --an expectation that burst in the early summer of 1919 as the con- ditions of the Treaty of Versailles became known. Here it was demonstrated that
410
THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I D 411
the victors did not have in mind any chivalrous gestures of honor toward the con-
quered and that they thought of transforming the total war into a total victory as
well through diplomatic means. From this moment on, the despondency of the
losers, who by that time for the most part had become thoughtful and were
2
prepared todiscussasensiblenewbeginning,begantodissolveintoanoutraged
refusal. The Versailles treaty had the same effect on the losers as if the victors had broken the "real" truce. From now on, the dull impulses to deny what had happened received their external seed for crystallization. From then on, an out- break into aggressive defiance became objectively possible.
In Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925), we find passages in which the dynamic of such denial can be grasped in crystalline form. Hitler describes how he, as loser, would have liked to dictate to the victors the conditions under which he would rather have lost the war, in any case, not this way.
Does a military defeat have to lead to a total collapse of a nation or a state? Since when is this the result of an unhappy war? (Edition of 1937, 275,000th-276,000th copies, p. 250)
Hitler proceeds from historical experiences in which the phenomenon of such total war and total defeat was not yet known. Hitler now wants to reduce this historical innovation to a well-known magnitude. He speculates that the great "collapse" is attributable to two factors: military defeat and "inner" betrayal. The first factor alone, he thinks, would have been withstood:
For, if the front as such had really failed and if, through its misfortune, the fate of the Fatherland had been put on the agenda, then the German people would have taken the defeat upon itself in quite a different way. We would have then borne the subsequent misfortune with clenched teeth. . . . Even the capitulation would have been signed only with the head while the heart would have already sounded the coming uprising. (P- 251)
And now, the myth of "inner putrefaction" follows.
Unfortunately, the military defeat of the German people is not an un- deserved catastrophe but a well-earned disciplining of an eternal retri- bution. We have more than deserved this defeat, (p. 250)
Hitler translates the political-military debacle of Wilhelminianism and the fall of German feudal capitalism into the moral language of blame and sin. For noth- ing has happened for which we ourselves were not to blame. Our offense con- sisted in not having hindered the strengthening of socialist, pacifist, liberal, democratic, and "Jewish" elements in society. The collapse, according to Hitler, was a "consequence of an ethical and moral poisoning, of a lessening of the drive for self-preservation" (p. 152). Only thus could it have come to mutinies of
412 ? THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I
troops, strikes in munitions factories, etc. , toward the end of the war. The battle front was intact [sic]; only the home front had let us down and betrayed "those out there. " In this way, Hitler pushes the front inward: Outwardly, the war may be at an end; here in the interior, it goes on --as a campaign against the democrats, pacifists, and others who needed the military defeat for the victory of their con- victions.
With this, Hitler outlines unmistakably a situation of civil war: On the oppos- ing side, he sees the Jews and their "Marxist organ of struggle" as well as the en- tire horde of democrats, socialists, and company.
Did they not in some circles express downright joy at the Fatherland's tragedy? (p. 250)
Hitler even claims to have observed contemporaries who at the end of the war had "laughed and danced, who extolled their own cowardice" and had "glorified the defeat"(see also the Pasewalk infirmary anecdote, discussed later). With this, Hitler projects his own catastrophile structure onto the opponent.
formulas
398 Q DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
everything is allowed, except "opinions. " The "irony of life" (Hausmann) is sup- posed to be captured by Dadaist irony. Even Dadaism as style would already be a step backward--and precisely in this sense art history has appropriated it and ordered it into the museum of stylistic schools. Foreseeing this, Hausmann said he is actually speaking an anti-Dadaist. Because Dada is a procedure, it cannot "sit on a chair"; every style is a chair. In this sense, Dada understands itself even as an "exact technique"; it says No, methodically and without fail, when a "mean- ing of the world" emerges that does not concede that it is nonsense. All opining, every idealization is sublated in intellectual movement-montage and demontage, improvisation and revocation.
The sharpest honing was given to Dadaist semantic cynicism by Walter Serner, the writer whom Lessing called a "German Maupassant. " The fact that he has been rediscovered in our day shows that in West Germany, too, a public has been formed in which the sense for cynicism has grown and that can read this author because, in his polished immoralism, a sense for highly conscious, "unfor- tunately necessary" malice, all too well understandable today, betrays itself. Forty pages of incomparable prose, Letzte Lockerung {Final Slackening), origi- nate from Serner, written in the last year of the First World War, published in 1920 by Paul Stegemann in Hannover in the collection, Die Silbergaule (The sil- ver nags), a series of philosophical-poetic miniatures, composed of cultural cri- tique and cyanide. Nowhere else can the meaning of sublation (Aufhebung) be studied with such sharpness-a violent and simultaneously playful bursting of all cultural semantics, of positing meaning, philosophies, and exercises in art. Bru- tally and elegantly, this prose strikes out on all sides. Serner presents a theory
of language games beside which Wittgenstein's theory looks like finger exercises for respectable Ph. D. candi-dates (Habili-Tanten, p. 4).
In this "slackening," the disinhibition of a certain suicidal tendency also betrays itself. Intellectual aggressivity is directed not only outwardly and brings about not only a spectacular repulsive reaction by civilization critique. Serner, the most reflective of the Dadaists, provided himself with an account of the fact that the Dadaist hatred of culture is logically directed inwardly, against the culture-in-me I once "possessed" and that now is good for nothing.
Favorable proposal: Before going to sleep, one imagines with the most pronounced clarity the final stage of a suicide who, by means of the bullet, wants to finally weld self-consciousness into himself, (p. 8)
Where no content counts anymore, only a moment of desperate intensity re- mains, a suicide's self-consciousness that is "through" with everything. Existence as being unto death. After this, there is no longer any question that Dadaism and Heideggerian existential ontology nurture a subterranean community of inspira- tion with each other.
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 399
At the zero point of meaning, only a pathetic contempt for meaning still stirs itself--an all-penetrating nausea about "positivity": "Weltanschauungen are word
7
mixtures" (p. 5).
there words and sentences that afford no connection. He projects this disconnect- edness onto the world, which, accordingly, can no longer be a "cosmos. " Dadaist antisemantics proceeds consistently to an anticosmology. From now on, it keeps a sharp eye on people as they paste together worldviews and conceptions of order. In the beginning was the chaos into which people, in their debility and hunger for meaning, dream a cosmos.
Set a redeeming heaven down on top of this chaos of smut and riddle! ! Scent human dung with order! ! ! I thank . . . Therefore . . . philoso- phies and novels are sweated over, pictures smeared down, sculptures tinkered with, symphonies etched out and religions started! What a shattering ambition--especially because these vain donkey tricks have all thoroughly (particularly in German regions) missed the mark. It's all balderdash! ! ! " (pp. 5-6)
Here, one of the naivetes of the older positivism comes to light, namely, that it conceives of the world as a confusion of "facts" that whirl about together just like the sentences in the heads of the logical positivists. However--in contrast to Serner, who tries to outdo the unbearable through affirmation--they cannot bear this chaos of uncoordinated sentences. Therefore, they put formal-logical corsets on their "facts. " In their approach, they are all chaotologists. They all assume the precedence of the unordered, the hypercomplex, the meaningless, and that which demands too much of us. Cynical semantics (up to Luhmann) can do nothing other than to charge order to the account of cultural caprice or the coercion toward a system.
With Serner, we see how the otherwise playful dadasophy turns into a humor- less, cold romantics. It is a romantics of utter unnai'vete. In it, the anxiety of being taken by surprise by a naive gesture or a surrender is at work. That drives malevo- lent reflection into its own hardened flesh. No search for a better life is counter- posed to the universal unhappiness. Rather, the attempt is made to counter the given unhappiness with self-intended "high" misery like a sovereign trump card. This is the way a consciousness behaves that is not only despairing but also ele- vates the wish to be hard as the point of departure for its self-modeling. In his unholy self-reflection, Serner practices the art of piling up and outdoing every "positive" thought with objections, detachments, and condescending commen- taries in a distrustful and furious manner. Self-experience and self-destruction be- come one and the same. Everything is rage that, to be sure, expresses itself but does not discharge itself in a liberating way.
In true positivist manner, Serner looks into his head and finds
Rage is thus life itself? To be sure: rage contains most of all upright-
400 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
ness; to be sure: all other states can only be suffered in that the rage re- mains hidden or in that the master dissimulates. . . . However: sense- lessness, at its highest point is rage, rage, rage, and is far from being meaning, (p. 42)
In this sense, a subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century --from Dada to the punk movement and the necrophilic robot gestics of New Wave. Here, a mannerism of rage makes itself felt that gives the great dead ego a pedestal from which the nauseous, incomprehensible world can be despised.
It is urgent that these reflective spaces of modern unhappy consciousness be described because they are the spaces in which the phenomenon of fascism, too, insofar as it is militant nihilism, consolidates. Even in the obvious stupidity of Nazi ideology, a certain "artful dimension" was hidden in the structure. Insofar as Dada presented a cynical show, it led a struggle of unhappy consciousness for sovereignty in spite of the feeling of meaninglessness for grand poses in spite of inner hollowness. Semantic cynicism is accompanied not only by suicidal inclina- tions but also by the risk of hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through the paradoxical "sensuousness" of fascism, which brought a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle that covered up the long-felt nothing- ness. In the hysteria a will to break through the self-controls of the lifeless every- day ego expresses itself. The hysteria is driven, according to Lacan's malicious aphorism, by the search for a master to tyrannize. To the extent that a spark of political hysteria was effective in Dadaism, this hysteria still had a strong realist component. For the master Dada sought in order to beat him up also existed, out- side Dada consciousness in reality, and as warlord in this imperialist-bourgeois world war he was objectively worse than any hoax, no matter how malicious. Fascist hysteria, by contrast, even invented the master it wanted to tyrannize, and itself conjured up a Jewish world conspiracy in order to eradicate a people whose existence was, to be sure, no mere figment of the imagination.
Serner's Final Slackening thus remained a penultimate slackening. As far as we know, his whole life long, he did not let the mask of the gentleman fall. True, he saw the world as having "gone to the dogs," but he himself shrank back from "going before the dogs" (Kastner). Even his sophisticated dog-eat-dog crime sto- ries maintain a style that has more of the master in it than the dog.
The dadasopher, Raoul Hausmann, kept closer to the secret of the kynical pleasure in disputation, which can attack without falling into self-destruction. He consciously oriented himself toward the sounder forms of symbolic destructive- ness, toward the "alertness of laughter, irony and the useless," toward the "jubila- tion of Orphic nonsense" (p. 50). That is the way Diogenes' dogs bark. "This
damned Christ said: See the lilies in the field. I say: See the dogs in the street"
(Sublitterel [1919], p. 53).
8
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 401
Excursus 1. Bluff Twilight
/ know exactly what the people want: the world is motley, senseless, pretentious and intellectually inflated. They want to despise, show up, deny, destroy that. One can surely talk about that. . . . Those who hate fervently must have once loved deeply. Those who want to deny the world must have embraced what they now set on fire.
Kurt Tucholsky, Dada, 20 July 1920
In Tucholsky the Dadaists found their first apparently well-meaning psychologist. He tried, as popular explicator, to extract the good contained in the bad in order to simultaneously justify and belittle it. Tucholsky translates the Dadaist dissolu- tion back into a serious language --he calls this understanding "these people. " They are, like all of us, those who have been disappointed by the bad world, who only let off steam more forcefully than our kind. The Berlin Dada phenomena be- ing spoken about here are interpreted by Tucholsky as symptoms of a great loss of love through which Yes has been turned into No and love into hate. Through the explanation of its psychic mechanism, the matter seems to have been brought into order again. If the negative is really only the inversion of the positive, we must know this and then "we can surely talk about it. " In this way, the psy- chologizing journalist determines how negativity is to be dealt with. To be sure, he himself knows irony all too well, but his way of lessening the gravity of things is through melancholy. He does not really consider an aggressive irony. It thus must happen that with his "understanding," he pensively belittles the thing to be explained: "When we subtract what is bluff in this association, not a terrible lot remains" (p. 125). But who said that we should "subtract" the bluff? With this for- mula, Tucholsky gets caught in his respectable misunderstanding. For the Dada procedure, bluff is indeed fundamental. Bluff and bewilderment (Verbluffung) be- long together and produce a provocative wake-up effect. Dada builds in a certain way on a bluff realism and demonstrates a technique of deception (Tduschung), exposure (Enttduschung), and self-exposure (Selbstenttauschung). As a method- ology of bluff (of pretense and disruption of meaning), Dada shows ironically how modern ideology functions: to establish values and act as if one believed in them, and then to show that one has not the slightest intention of believing in them. With this self-dissolution (Selbstaufliebung) of weltanshauung ("word mix- ture"), Dada betrays the modus operandi of modern consciousness with all its notorious meaning swindles. Tucholsky cannot, or rather, does not want to see this. He himself still postulates objective "meaning. " For this reason he does not come up to the level of the object he wanted to explain. He does not see that the methods of advertising, political propaganda, activist and neoconservative welt- anschauungen, of the hit parade and entertainment industry, etc. , have here been
402 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
laid out like a toolbox, or better, like a grammar before our understanding. For Dada contains a bluff theory in action. Without a theory of bluff, of show, seduc- tion, and deception, modern structures of consciousness cannot be explained at all properly. It may give cause for reflection that Tucholsky, up to just before the seizure of power, views the ascendant nazism still from the viewpoint of "respect- able irony" and is full of contempt for the stupidity, crampedness, bluff, posing, bigmouthedness, etc. , of the Nazis. To the last, this remains the tenor of Tucholsky's anti-Fascist feuilletons that otherwise leave nothing to be desired regarding sharpness. But the sharpness of real understanding is missing. Like all other defenders of melancholy seriousness, he is unable to develop a penetrant relation to "reflexive ideology" and to the phenomena of bluff and disingenuous opinion. (In this regard, he was completely different from Brecht, who from the ground up was in a position to think in the opponent's thought forms: to "tack," to weave, to let oneself go, and at the same time, to control oneself. )
Tucholsky's political moralism is expressed most clearly in his notes on the Dada trial before the Second District Court in Berlin in 1921. At that time, the case before the court concerned a plea by members of the army (Reichswehr) against George Grosz's drawings "God is with us"--"in which grimacing faces (of soldiers) of . . . unheard of brutality were to be seen" (Dada, p. 127). The five accused--Baader, Grosz, Herzfelde, Schlichter, and Burchardt (the gallery owner)-disappointed the expectations of the left-wing trial observers. Instead of confessing, they tried to get off by belittling themselves.
Five living beings on the bench for the accused, among them one man: Wieland Herzfelde. He was the only one who said here what was necessary and did not shrink back. . . . None of the boys was the one who had smashed the window pane. . . . As far as Grosz is con- cerned, I do not know whether the laxity of his defense can be traced to the fact that he cannot speak. . . . His plea saved Grosz's neck and was annihilating for him and his friends. "So that's your defense! Did you intend it to be so? " (Ibid. , pp. 128-29)
Is Tucholsky here not following an outmoded moral psychology? Consistency
right up to jail and full-blooded political character? More "identity," more confes-
sion, longer sentences? Does he not see that the ruling ideology wants precisely
the same thing, namely, to isolate culprits with political persuasions? Does the
man of conviction not have an advertising function for the political opponent? In
any case, it remains remarkable that Tucholsky's demand for "character" related
to people who were just more or less in the process of consciously developing
9
an ironic strategy. Instead of profiting from the new art of "sublation,"
Tucholsky relied on melancholic lethargy. Here, he missed an experience that would have saved him from certain surprises in 1933. Those who treat
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 403
phenomena of bluff as something one should "disregard" must remain blind to fas- cism, even if in other ways they are the bravest anti-Fascists in the world.
Klaus Mann grasped the problematic of bluff from a somewhat clearer per- spective. But he, too, sees the matter somewhat defensively.
We want to distinguish ourselves from the Nazis, for whom everything, from their "nationalism" up to their "socialism," is mere tactics (that is, bluff, trick and swindle), above all through the fact that we are serious about what we say; that we really mean the words and ideas with which we try to draw support for our cause. (Heimsuchung des europaischen Geistes, Essays [Munich, 1973], p. 49).
Klaus Mann was one of the first to view the cynical component of Fascist "ideology" clearly. He developed nothing less than the relatedness of the actor with the Fascist politician out of the spirit of bluff (see the novel Mephisto). How- ever, it remains questionable whether he, for his part, can really be serious about the antithesis to it: "to mean it seriously. " What is an antifascism and an antini- hilism that itself is essentially based on the fact that one, more sure than one can be, erects "opposed values" and behaves respectably only so as not to be cynical like the others? Is antinihilism itself not simply an obstructed nihilism?
Grosz, who had worked off the hate within himself in his early work, much later described the connection between nihilism and commitment (as antinihilism) as follows:
We demanded more. We did not quite know how to say what that more was; but many of my friends and I did not find any solution in the merely negative, in the rage at having been deceived and in the denial of all previous values. And so we were driven as a matter of course more and more to the Left. --
Soon I was head over heels in political currents. I gave speeches, not because of some conviction or other, but because everywhere at any hour people hung around disputing and because I had not yet learned anything from my experiences. My speeches were a stupid, parroted enlightenment babble, but when it dripped out of the mouth like honey, you could pretend that you were deeply moved. And often, your own twaddle really moved you, purely through the noise, sishing, twittering and bellowing that came out of you! (p. 115)
I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in certain political theories (Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein [Hamburg, 1974], p. Ill)
It must be said, however, that this is a different Grosz talking, a Grosz who, in exile in America, has sat down, inwardly and outwardly, in Dadaist language, "on the chair. " What remains significant about this testimony is that it originates
404 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
from someone who ran the entire gamut of negativism, political commitment, and withdrawal and could document it as a survivor. When Grosz wrote his memoirs, the two critics of bluff, Tucholsky and Mann, had long since killed themselves.
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic
In everyone, the ice dogs bark. Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! )
(1927)
A thought-provoking coincidence: When nazism came to power, on January 30,
1933, the January-February issue of the journal Psychoanalytische Bewegung
10
(Psychoanalytic movement) appeared in which, for the first time,
Freud's addressed extensively the phenomenon of cynicism (Edmund Bergler, Zur Psychoanalyse des Zynikers I; the second part followed in the next issue).
Next to this remarkable temporal constellation, another rather piquant obser- vation is to be noted: Here, an author has something to say about a topic that stands in a thoroughly explosive relation to his profession.
For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on cynicism talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis. In 1933, an analyst could actually have found himself ex- posed to the charge of reinforcing a pornographic and cynical picture of humanity (two expressions that could easily be fused with the epithet "Jewish" in a fatal way). Here, then, a psychologist has ventured into the lion's den. He tries to put the "cynicism" of analysis out of action through an analysis of cynicism. At one point, Bergler himself even betrays a powerful kynical bite, precisely when he defends himself against the charge that psychoanalysis, with its exposure of psy- chic mechanisms, could be suspected of cynicism. Psychoanalysis is none-the- less, he notes, a "respectable science" and science is no "life insurance for illu- sions" (p. 141). For the rest, Bergler's interest centers on personalities in whom cynical tendencies are striking, as his depth-psychological studies of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Grabbe, and others demonstrate. It is obvious that his reflections are motivated by current events - as shown not least of all by the fact that as examples he brings in texts and events of the most recent times, for example, Erich Kast-
11
ner's novel Fabian from 1931.
some examples, that he believes he has found traits of cynicism in some patients that, as a rule, manifest themselves in the form of aggressions against him, the analyst. To that extent, we are justified in saying that this psychoanalytic state- ment on cynicism arose in a thick mesh of current motives and stimuli that tie the text precisely to the historical moment (1932-33) and to the author's professional situation. He defends his profession against the charge of cynicism; he diagnoses some patients who attack him as having traits of cynicism ("moral insanity").
Finally, Bergler's study reveals, with the use of
a pupil of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 405
There is thus no question that here we are in the middle of things --even when they are spoken about matter-of-factly.
What strikes us is the extraordinary emphasis with which the analyst proclaims cynicism, or better, the "cynical mechanisms" to be a manifestation of the uncon- scious and of the persisting infantile component in the adult. With a grand gesture the whole domain of cynical phenomena is pocketed for psychoanalysis. Bergler allows only four of the sixty-four listed forms and variants of cynicism to count as "conscious," and even behind these, insofar as they are not disqualified from the beginning as "shallow" and "worthless," he conjectures that there are "grave neuroses. "
Cynicism, says Bergler, is one of the forms in which people with extremely strong emotional ambivalences (hates-loves; respects-contempts, etc. ) create a psychic possibility for discharge. Cynical "discharge" accordingly stands on the same level as classic neurotic mechanisms such as the hysterical, melancholic, compulsive, paranoid, and criminal(! ) defenses. In cynicism, the negative, ag- gressive side of the ambivalence can be expressed. However, this side alone does not characterize "cynical discharge. " In addition, an extremely strong "uncon- scious need to be punished" must be present--masochistic and exhibitionist ten- dencies (although male verbal cynics are often said to be strikingly prone to shame regarding their bodies). In cynical speech, a psychodynamic related to the compulsion to confess (Reik) is said to be at work-to know that one violates the commandments of the strict "super ego," but that one cannot refrain from the in- fringements, and so, to settle the inner conflict thus created, one resorts to truth that is now aggressively revealed. The cynic attacks the outer world in trying to overcome an "inner conflict. " "He beats the others; he wants to beat his con- science" (p. 36).
But through its aggressive, comical side cynicism is also a method of gaining pleasure, and this in a sevenfold way: (1) because cynics become temporarily free of guilt by means of an apposite remark; (2) because the rage of others amuses them (this thesis is reflected in the blurb from J. Drews [ed. ], Zynisches Worter- buch [Zurich, 1978]); (3) because they can enjoy their own exhibitionistic tenden- cies; (4) because cynicism is a method of distancing; (5) because narcissistic plea- sure can occur insofar as clever statements are admired; (6) because jokes are simply funny; (7) last of all, because thereby cynics can live out their infantile tendencies --by which are meant early infantile fantasies of grandeur, "anal" ten- dencies, and early sexual-cynical rage against the whore in the mother, said more generally, the scars of old Oedipus conflicts.
The crux of this interpretation of cynicism is the older psychoanalytic su- perego theory that sees the human being as a creature that continually cowers un- der the commands and threats of a lofty, strict, "heavenly" superego. However, it is curious that the analyst who deals with the cultural relativity of the so-called superego (which is expressed in cynicism) does not venture to think through this
406 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
? From Neue Jugend (June 1917, Malik-Verlag).
concept of the superego --as if his intellect cowered and crouched under the authority of the superfather, Freud. This is curious because Bergler comments on phenomena in which obviously the superego does not succeed in confirming itself in the cynic's behavior. Should the superego too not be something more than it once was?
It seems that Bergler begins, against his will, to give an account of this. Cyni- cism is after all a phenomenon that belongs to the "dialectic of culture," and inso- far as psychoanalysis as a theory of psychic processes is inevitably a theory of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 407
culture, in the long run, it cannot pretend that cultural phenomena such as cyni- cism can be treated merely psychodynamically. In fact, this is precisely the topic through which psychoanalysis sublates itself. The individual psyche has to be grasped just as much from the cultural aspect as the latter has to be grasped from the psychic aspect. The universal, transtemporal, strict superego is a superseded analytic fiction. In most of Bergler's examples --there are some very nice ones among them, and they alone make the reading rewarding --we can say that the mechanisms of the cynics' statements were hidden to them only if we do violence to these examples. They know what they say and they say it not so much on the basis of "unconscious" mechanisms but because they have become conscious of real contradictions. Thus they often express a contradiction kynically, or they ex- press one of the many forms of mauvaise foi cynically. The unconscious scarcely has to make an effort. The conscious participation of the ego is objective immoral- isms and the obvious fragmentation of morals explain the matter much more effectively than does the depth-psychological theory. Only at one point does the analyst widen his field of view.
The flooding of the entire culture with fear of one's conscience (Gewis- sensangst) leads to the circumstance that even there, where persons seek to rid themselves of their fetters in thought, as in cynicism, noth- ing other(! ) than a compromise with the superego comes about. One is thus not very far removed from reality when one says that cynicisms are profoundly also a bowing before the superego and compromises with the inner voice of conscience. "Not all those are free who mock their chains," taught a poet-philosopher. But that even in this mockery people pay tribute to the superego is grotesque, (p. 166)
It cannot be better said: "One is thus not very far removed from real- ity . . . ," but still pretty far away. Bergler understands that many forms of cynicism are efforts to strip oft fetters--consequently, that cynicism belongs to the dynamic of cultural liberation struggles and the social dialectic of values and that it is one of the most important methods of working through ambivalences in a culture. The expression "compromise" indeed hints in this direction. With something that stood "above" me, no compromises could be concluded; then it would just be a matter of obeying.
The compromise is concluded with an authority that has no penetrating imper- ative force --with a weak superego and a conscience that only pricks but can no longer give orders. Bergler shows involuntarily that analysts and cynics are in a way the last real moralists. They let themselves be reminded now and again of the commandments of conscience and morality, even if only when a conflict arises between reality and morality. For the rest of the world, morality is always and everywhere not broken with such matter-of-factness, but split, so that one no longer even feels the "inner conflict" with it. With its theory of the superego, psy-
408 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
choanalysis gives the "moralists of the last days" a medium in which they can ex- press themselves. However, the collective decomposition of the superego is al- ways a step further along than the moralists think. Objective cynicism has a head start on subjective cynicism which can never be made good. When cynics make malicious jokes, when they give morality the cold shoulder, when they demon- strate an icy coldness with which they anaesthetize themselves against the amoral- ism of the world, indeed when they even want to outdo its amoralism --then the subjective coldness toward morality reflects a general social freezing over. The
joke that comes out of the cold at least reminds us in its aggressivity of a more vital living. The "ice dogs" still have the energy to bark and still possess enough bite to want to make things clear. Psychoanalysis, which is "precisely not life in- surance for illusions," also has it in its better half. The scientific embalming can- not erase the fact that enlightenment, as Kant and many others emphasized, is just as much, if not more, a matter of courage as of intellect and that those who want to say the truth will not be able to avoid conflicts.
The date is January 1933. Psychoanalysis reflects on cynicism. Soon it will have to emigrate. It is done with the analytic explanation of cynicism. It becomes evident that what was supposed to have been the solution has been overwhelmed by the problem.
Notes
1. Otto Flake (1923): "Dada is the same thing as was earlier the famous, little understood roman- tic irony --a dissolution. The seriousness, not only of life, is dissolved. " Das Logbuch (Giitersloh, 1970), p. 295.
2. This seems to be a basic factor of Left morality. See G. Regler's statement: "Those who did not participate in their times were poor-hearted. This became an unwritten law, then a pressure, and finally moral blackmail. " Das Ohr des Malchus (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 161.
3. Dada could be understood essentially as a school of "subjective" positivism, in contrast to the "objective" positivism of logical empiricism. Both positivisms intersect in their radical semantic cyni- cism. Dada speaks of nonsense in an existential regard; the logical positivists speak of senselessness with regard to (e. g. , metaphysical) statements.
4. They constitute the most prominent phenomena in the area of semantic cynicism; see also Car- nap's Scheinprobleme; Theodor Lessing's Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen; Mauthner's Sprachkritik: Wittgenstein's Tractatus.
5. If M. Rutschky could write in his essay about the seventies, Erfahrungshunger (Cologne, 1980), that it was a time in which the "utopia of universal concepts" melted away, then he designates something common to the German Federal Republic and the Weimar Republic. In the former, of course, it was a matter of Left sociological universal concepts; Weimar struggled more against ethical
ghosts. Both stressed subjective positivism, sensousness instead of sense.
6. This refers to Peter Burger's much discussed Theorie der Avantgarde. In my opinion, he ap-
proaches the problem wrongly, namely, from the sociological side. However, this cannot be debated here. For the Dadaists, art is not an "institution. " Art is a meaning machine-it should be disturbed or destroyed in its functioning. Hence semantic cynicism. Art is a superego sector, a piece of authority: That should disappear. Hence the anarchistic gestures. The urge toward life, toward subla- tion in realization, by contrast, is an old inheritance: neokynicism of the eighteenth century. In this
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 409
sense, significant bourgeois art is "avant-garde" for as long as it has existed: pioneer of truth, of vital- ity in modern society.
7. Weimar/FRG: In Peter Handke's development, we can observe the stages subjective positiv- ism can run through: language critique, language-game actions, logical treatment of nausea; then from senselessness to faint-hearted sensuousness, to new narration; circling around the first "true feel- ing"; labor of recollection. Nausea and meaning cannot coexist in the long run. In understanding this, Handke is on the way to becoming a significant writer.
8. All Dada quotes that are not cited more explicitly are from the easily accessible Reclam selec- tion, Dada Berlin. Texte Manifeste Aktionen, ed. H. Bergius and Karl Riha (Stuttgart, 1977).
9. One should write a history of ideology on the struggle between irony and identity, talent and character (see Heinrich Heine's trouble with the German public of characters. See also Excursus 8. Actors and Character. )
10. With the exception of some remarks of Freud, Reik, and others.
11. See here chapter 22, "Bright Hour," where I quote the same passage Bergler cites as an exam- ple of a "cynic who revels in his own shabbiness" (K. Kraus).
Chapter 14
The Republic-as-If. Political Cynicisms I: The Struggle Goes On
Swindle! Concocted swindles! They all have their national colors. They will take care not to hoist the colors. They wouldn't even dream of it. Pay attention to what comes after-
1 ward! I'll tell you . . . Then come Wilson's fourteen points!
Fourteen times fourteen, they won't give a damn about us. Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (1928), p. 372
George Grosz has just provided the slogan of the epoch: "the rage at having been deceived. " Disappointment, disillusionment, resolutions not to let oneself be de- ceived again: These are the psychopolitical fundamental motifs of the Weimar Republic. They intensify the reflectively cynical disposition of society into mani- fest aggression.
Everywhere the bitter feeling of having been deceived hung in the air of the new beginning. The war was over, but the state did not manage a demobilization. The Weimar peace became a continuation of war through other means.
Today's research is in agreement that the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 represents the earth-shattering diplomatic mistake of the century. In it, it became clear for the first time that under modern capitalist-imperialist premises, the rela- tion of war and peace had become something different from what it previously had been in (European) history. If the First World War had already introduced a new quality of international warfare, then, in the Treaty of Versailles a "harsher" quality of peace was hinted at. The victors had already won in principle a "total war," without, however, demonstrating their success through a "total vic- tory" (invasion, occupation, foreign administration, etc. ). The German capitula- tion came a little before the collapse of the Western Front and the invasion of Ger- many by the Allies. Thus, the Allies' victory was indeed unambiguous, but not fought out to the last military consequence. The German capitulation happened, as we know from numerous sources, to a large extent in the expectation of a bearable peace --an expectation that burst in the early summer of 1919 as the con- ditions of the Treaty of Versailles became known. Here it was demonstrated that
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THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I D 411
the victors did not have in mind any chivalrous gestures of honor toward the con-
quered and that they thought of transforming the total war into a total victory as
well through diplomatic means. From this moment on, the despondency of the
losers, who by that time for the most part had become thoughtful and were
2
prepared todiscussasensiblenewbeginning,begantodissolveintoanoutraged
refusal. The Versailles treaty had the same effect on the losers as if the victors had broken the "real" truce. From now on, the dull impulses to deny what had happened received their external seed for crystallization. From then on, an out- break into aggressive defiance became objectively possible.
In Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925), we find passages in which the dynamic of such denial can be grasped in crystalline form. Hitler describes how he, as loser, would have liked to dictate to the victors the conditions under which he would rather have lost the war, in any case, not this way.
Does a military defeat have to lead to a total collapse of a nation or a state? Since when is this the result of an unhappy war? (Edition of 1937, 275,000th-276,000th copies, p. 250)
Hitler proceeds from historical experiences in which the phenomenon of such total war and total defeat was not yet known. Hitler now wants to reduce this historical innovation to a well-known magnitude. He speculates that the great "collapse" is attributable to two factors: military defeat and "inner" betrayal. The first factor alone, he thinks, would have been withstood:
For, if the front as such had really failed and if, through its misfortune, the fate of the Fatherland had been put on the agenda, then the German people would have taken the defeat upon itself in quite a different way. We would have then borne the subsequent misfortune with clenched teeth. . . . Even the capitulation would have been signed only with the head while the heart would have already sounded the coming uprising. (P- 251)
And now, the myth of "inner putrefaction" follows.
Unfortunately, the military defeat of the German people is not an un- deserved catastrophe but a well-earned disciplining of an eternal retri- bution. We have more than deserved this defeat, (p. 250)
Hitler translates the political-military debacle of Wilhelminianism and the fall of German feudal capitalism into the moral language of blame and sin. For noth- ing has happened for which we ourselves were not to blame. Our offense con- sisted in not having hindered the strengthening of socialist, pacifist, liberal, democratic, and "Jewish" elements in society. The collapse, according to Hitler, was a "consequence of an ethical and moral poisoning, of a lessening of the drive for self-preservation" (p. 152). Only thus could it have come to mutinies of
412 ? THE REPUBLIC-AS-IF. POLITICAL CYNICISMS I
troops, strikes in munitions factories, etc. , toward the end of the war. The battle front was intact [sic]; only the home front had let us down and betrayed "those out there. " In this way, Hitler pushes the front inward: Outwardly, the war may be at an end; here in the interior, it goes on --as a campaign against the democrats, pacifists, and others who needed the military defeat for the victory of their con- victions.
With this, Hitler outlines unmistakably a situation of civil war: On the oppos- ing side, he sees the Jews and their "Marxist organ of struggle" as well as the en- tire horde of democrats, socialists, and company.
Did they not in some circles express downright joy at the Fatherland's tragedy? (p. 250)
Hitler even claims to have observed contemporaries who at the end of the war had "laughed and danced, who extolled their own cowardice" and had "glorified the defeat"(see also the Pasewalk infirmary anecdote, discussed later). With this, Hitler projects his own catastrophile structure onto the opponent.
