The kynics have little philosophical
training
and they did not manage to construct a system, a science.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
As the "unconscious" it was on the whole neutralized and excused, and as sexuality it was, on top of everything else, the most fascinating thing around.
Under this banner, the cognitive kynicism of psychoanalysis could breach social consciousness --at first through a small opening, but later there was scarcely anything left of the wall.
Then it came out: "Everything you always wanted to know about sex.
" Kynics could not possibly fulfill their task more ele- gantly than Freud did.
In immaculate prose and dressed in the best English tweed, the Old Master of analysis managed, while maintaining the highest respect, to talk about almost everything that one does not talk about.
That in itself is already an Eulenspiegel action without parallel in the history of culture, and it could proba- bly succeed only because Freud personally did not underline the subversive, satir- ical, and rebellious side of his undertaking but on the contrary did his utmost to
Or it sees in history a victory route on
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 295
give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects-- the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self- conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world. That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
296 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith"
(mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 297
most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
298 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 299
7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte- Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14. Schlegel's sentence also contains the germ of a theory not only of political but also of economic and religious cynicism and the cynicism of knowledge (see the remaining cardinal cynicisms as well as the secondary cynicisms). The unabridged quotation reads: "If the essence of cynicism consists in giving nature priority over art and virtue over beauty and science; without paying regard to the letter, to which the Stoic strictly sticks, but to pay heed only to the spirit, to unconditionally show contempt for all economic value and political glamour, and to bravely maintain the rights of autonomous ca- price: then Christianism would be nothing other than universal cynicism. " Athenaeum. Eine Zeit- schrift von A. W. und Fr. Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt Griitzmacher (Hamburg, 1969), p. 102.
15. In detailed studies, these coarse classifications prove problematic; e. g. , up until 1918, the Ger- man state, because of its feudal components, etc. , cannot be designated as wholly bourgeois.
16. Aside: I began writing down these notes on cynicism--that a critique of cynical reason would come of it, I did not know at the time--shortly after seeing an interview with the Jewish philosopher and political scientist, Hannah Arendt, which Giinther Gaus had made with her many years before and which was broadcast again on the fifth anniversary of her death in 1980. This conversation, a prime example of relaxed chatting and philosophizing in front of an audience and one of the few exam- ples of intelligence in television, reached its climax when Arendt told of her activity at the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Eichmann. One must have heard with one's own ears how this woman aver- red that in studying the many thousands of pages of the transcript of the proceedings, she repeatedly broke out into loud laughter about the peculiar stupidity that had exercised control over innumerable lives. In Arendt's self-aware confession there was something frivolous and kynical in the most precise sense of the word that, after an initial consternation, proved itself to be a liberating and sovereign expression of truth. When Arendt then, as an encore, even made the remark that she often had fun in exile, for she was young and improvising in uncertainty has its own attractions, then I also had to laugh, and with that, this book began to "write itself. "
17. In the People's Democracies, incidentally, we encounter a complementary swindle.
18. I have decided to place money cynicism under the secondary cynicisms. Exchange cynicism, which is treated in chapter 9, appears to me to be an excrescence of the coercions of power.
19. Mature-immature: These are not value judgments but scales of measurement for objective conditions for socialism. If socialism is defined as the liberation of social productivity from capitalist fetters, then late-capitalist relations must first be created that can then be superseded.
300 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
20. See chapter 11. There I attempt to establish a rational dialectics under the concept of universal polemic. At the same time, I provide a critique of the Marxist use of dialectics.
21. This is not a plea for a "productivistic" ideology. Productivity is a multidimensional concept. Incidentally, the newer consciousness of political ecology presupposes the culmination of produc- tivism.
22. Dialectic--as dialectic of obstruction. That is the realistic basis of Adorno's Negative Di- alectics.
23. Kurt Keiler drew my attention to the story of the mouse's indirect suicide. It is contained in the final chapter of Boris Vian's novel, L'Ecume des jours (1946). Here I have changed it around some- what to fit Goliath's tale.
24. Dialectic of perfection: In what is perfect, there is still a flaw; the perfection of the beginning must therefore be excelled by that of the end --by passing through a disorder. This constitutes a basic figure of dialectical fantasies of movement: A first, "lost" summit is regained in the ascent to a second, higher summit.
25. The motif appears not only in the European tradition but also in Hindu and Buddhist legends.
26. Epiphanius is conspicuous as one of the first priests with an obsession about Mary. See The- odor Reik's interpretation, "Der heilige Epiphanius verschreibt sich. (Eine Fehlleistung vor sechzehn Jahrhunderten. )," in Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott. Zur Psychoanalyse der religiosen Ent- wicklung (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 37-56.
27. It is disturbing to only hint at this theme, which would be a book in itself. I hope to be able to write more comprehensively and convincingly on this topic in a later work.
28. This will displease many a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who is intent on joining in the dance around the golden calf of "language, discourse, and signifier. " The structuralist fetishism of the sig- nifier (signifiant) is no more clever
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
than the "logocentric" fetishism of the signified (signifie).
29. See Sartre, L'Etre et le neant (1943), p. 84: "Through the lie, consciousness affirms that it exists by its nature as something hidden to the other, it exploits the ontological duality of ego and alien ego for its own advantage. It is different with mauvaise foi, if, as we have said, it is a lie to one- self. . . . That is, the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist here. " The God of Cain would accordingly appear as the partner of a self-consciousness that can still deceive itself. Hence only God in genesis.
30. Nietzsche's neokynical "revaluing of all values" extends also to science by taking its objects more cheerfully "than they deserve. "
31. Is not critical rationalism a la Popper an offshoot of satirical fallibilism, mistakenly taken to be respectable?
32. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks with regard to the "Kynical School": "There is nothing much to say about it.
The kynics have little philosophical training and they did not manage to construct a system, a science. " As in most cases, here Hegel hits the nail deftly on the head, so that we only have to put it on its feet.
33. Accordingly, "respectable critique," critique that is an instrument and a methodology of the "dominant" theories, is from the start a contradiction in terms. Critique serves subversion, not con- struction. For this reason, fun in using one's intelligence can be generally destroyed in a surefire way. as happens today, by educating students "critically" by force. Then, what could have been their chance appears to them as their enemy.
34. It seems that Marx found his kynical-existential critic in H. Heine --hence the frictions be- tween them; hence also the curse "dog," which plays a striking role in their quarrels.
35. See Heine, Vorrede zu Salon / (1833), in Heine, Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 10.
36. Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung (1833), in Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 21. Chapter 9
The Secondary Cynicisms
Minima Amoralia: Confession, Joke, Crime
/ am equipped with an armor that has been welded together entirely out of mistakes.
Pierre Reverdy
If the six cardinal cynicisms also set up the stages on which idealisms and realisms as well as powers and oppositional powers wrestle with one another, the task is not completed by a first description of them. In reality, what we have separated for the sake of clarity is inextricably entangled. A precise consciousness of reality can only be one that does not fail to note how war and power exist with sexuality and medicine as well as with religion and knowledge in deep reciprocal inter- penetrations and amalgams. But this is only another way of saying that life cannot be grasped through morals and cannot be rationalized with moral explanations. We therefore call someone a moralist who has doubts about the human ability to act "morally. " The main fields described here, on which the kynical-cynical ten- sions inherent in the things themselves develop, mesh and, at the same time, repel one another--in such a way that the values, norms, and views of each individual area are caught up in increasingly entangled relations to those of the other areas. Even the norms of the military and the state often become tangled and contradict one another although these two realities, relatively speaking, understand one an- other best of all. But what will happen when the norms of the military and the state get mixed up and ensnared with those of science and religion, of sexuality and medicine? Due to the complexity and contradictoriness of value systems, a critical measure of cynicism must already become an accompanying shadow of any morality.
Just as war brings about a great inversion of moral consciousness by substitut- ing for Thou shalt not kill, the commandment Thou shalt kill as many as possible. It also turns the other "regional" and sectoral ethics systematically on their heads
301
302 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
? Olaf Gulbransson, Child-like Question. "Grandmother, tell me, after the war, will the Ten Commandments hold again? ", 1918.
and makes the senseless sensible and the reasonable absurd. In order to save a lot of words, I want to refer the reader to Robert Altman's film on the Korean War, M. A. S. H. (1969), a masterpiece of contemporary cynical-satirical con- sciousness. The way in which, with a well thought out and hard-hitting joke tech- nique, military, medical, religious, and sexual cynicism are played into each other raises this film to the status of a document on the history of ideas. In Hegel's words, it achieves what philosophy for a long time has not been able to achieve: It is "its time, grasped in (scenic) thoughts," a satirical meditation on the struc- tures and procedures of the cynical joke, offensive and reflective, pointed and true. Indescribable, this blasphemous "Last Supper" satire, where the field doc- tors take leave (like the Apostles) of a colleague who is weary of life because, after experiencing an erection disorder, he fixes on the idea that
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
he must be gay and cannot imagine how he can admit this to his three girlfriends. Also indescrib- able are the horrifying and horridly funny operation scenes, where the surgeons tell their brutal jokes over soldiers who have half bled to death, think of the nurses' tits, and imagine they are at a baseball game or even on the way home. In the ethos-confusion of the field hospital, something of the latent moral chaos in our so-called everyday reality becomes visible. Because here the various do- mains overlap in a brutally clear way, the one domain knocks the morality of the other out of its hands. It becomes almost a principle of survival there to hack up one's own moral substance so as not to be tempted to believe in some sort of "one's own cause. " Survival as cynical understatement.
The plurality of pronounced, quasi-autonomous domains of reality and the
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 303
corresponding multitude of morals and moral roots are the reason moral everyday life lives on essentially in a moderate amorality and is normally satisfied when things remain by this moderation. This is simultaneously the reason why people with a fairly solid and just feeling for reality are against harshness in matters of punishment. They know that the punishment, in its strict moralism, can be more immoral than the actions of those who are to be punished. (Hence, even with Cic- ero: summum ius, summa iniuria. ) Moral feeling, which self-critically mediates itself with life, means the art of moving through the twilight worlds and contradic- tions of autonomous and counterposed domains of values with the least amount of real evil and human damage. As Karl Markus Michel has shown in his praise of casuistry (i. e. , the normative exegesis of individual "cases"), a halfway living morality tells us which sins we should commit in order to avoid graver ones; the moralist who does not judge as the fool of a superego is someone who, in distin- guishing good and evil, also knows how to appreciate the "virtue of sin" (see Kurs- buch No. 60 [1980]). Morality functions as the capacity to orient oneself toward the relatively better alternative within the universal motliness of given relations.
Only in this sense is the need for a "new" ethics and New Values, which today haunts the decaying superstructure, justified. No one should believe in New Values. Those who do can only become neoconservative shopkeepers. If we have already in large measure overstrained ourselves with the old high-cultural ethics, the "new" ethics can only make us look completely ridiculous. A new conscious- ness of values can only come out of a progressive making-conscious of the fact that (and why) for us there can be no "innocence" except when we suspend every kind of judgment. Wherever it is a matter of values, cynicism is always also in the picture. Anyone who radically defends one scale of values automatically be- comes a cynic, expressly or not, on other scales of values. Whoever you happen to be, you always trample on some norms, and if you live in times that make it impossible to be naive about such trampling, then it can happen at any time that you also say it aloud.
The confession is for us, therefore, besides "theory," the most important form in which the truth is said. From Augustine to Francois Villon, from Rousseau to Freud, from Heine to current autobiographical literature, we hear decisive truths in the form of admission and confession. Moreover, those narrative communities that ultimately develop out of all depth- psychological practices constitute, in es- sence, confessional communities that have been morally neutralized through ther- apy. In motley reality, all talking about oneself necessarily ends up in the vicinity of a blackguard's confession or a criminal's testament, a sick report or a story of suffering, a witness's statement or a confession. That is the condition of authentic- ity in a situation of the unavoidable ethical overtaxing of oneself. Only bastards always have one more excuse, one more white vest to change into, one more spine, and one more good conscience. Those who really say what they are and
304 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
what they have done always and unavoidably, nolens volens, provide a rogue's novel, a certification of poverty, a story of a young scamp, an image of a fool a book of twists and turns.
What Erich Fromm calls his "ethics of being," if one views it properly, aims ultimately at such an upright bearing regarding one's own life, thinking, planning and failure. Without doubt, all that also belongs to "being," of which, according to certain value systems, we would have to be ashamed. An "ethics of being," therefore, if it (and because it) should be a conscious bearing, must lead to a point at which, for the sake of uprightness, all shame also has an end and at which we confess to everything we "are," right or wrong. The ethics of being seeks the truth in authenticity. It therefore demands and encourages confession and honest talking-about-oneself as the cardinal virtue per se. Before this ethics all other morals are suspended, even if the various sectoral ethics do not already contradict each other. Those who want the truth cannot simply build "theories" and see through masks; they must also create relations among people in which every con- fession becomes possible. Only when we have understanding for everything, give everything its due, place everything beyond good and evil, and, in the end, view everything in such a way that nothing human is foreign to us-only then will this ethics of being become possible because it puts an end to the hostility toward other
ways of being. Being as such knows nothing and is nothing of which it would have to be ashamed, apart from conscious crookedness, dishonesty, and self- deceptions. Everything can be "forgiven," not merely what tradition calls "sins
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
against the Holy Spirit" and what we today call a lack of authenticity (genuine- ness, honesty). That consciousness is inauthentic that consciously does not go "into itself because it still banks strategically on the advantage gained through lying.
An ethics of being would be the ethics of a society in which people help each other with love and criticism so that in every ego the will to truth can become stronger than the will to power and to come out on top. The ethics of being passes over the sphere of polemical pretense. Only pathological cynics and vengeful negativists admit their mistakes with the intention of committing them again. They even abuse the form of confession in order to struggle and to lie. And not always is seen in this the coquetry with which Zarah Leander, as the notorious Miss Jane, once sang, "I am so and I'll stay so /1 am so in my whole body / Yes sir! "
One will have noticed that the series of cardinal cynicisms represents simul- taneously a list of the elementary satirical themes and most important genres ot jokes. They represent the main battlefields of elevations and humiliations, ideali- zations and realistic disillusionments. Here, vices and insults, ironies and mock-
n eries have their largest playing fields. Here, the most frivolous sideswipes of h "
guistic liberalism still have a morally regulative sense. The military with its
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 305
tensions between hero ethics and cowards' realism, between officers and subor- dinates, front and rear echelons, war and peace, command and obedience, is just as much an inexhaustible generator of soldiers'jokes as politics, with its ideolo- gies, state actions, its great words and small deeds, which provides an infinite source of pranks and parodies. It is no different with sexuality, which, with the juxtaposition of the covered and the naked, the forbidden and the permitted, con- stitutes a vast field for jokes, obscenities, and comedies, regardless of whether it is flirtation, marriage, coitus, or bedroom battles. Likewise, the medical do- main, with all its possibilities for sarcasm about health and sickness, madness and normality, the living and the dead. And all the more so with the entire domain of religion, which is more serviceable for swearing and joke telling than almost any other theme. For, wherever there is so much sacredness, a large profane shadow arises, and the more saints are honored, the more comical saints can be found among them. Finally, there is also the area of knowledge, which is criss- crossed by tensions between intelligence and stupidity, joke and citizens' duty, reason and madness, science and absurdity. All these "cardinal jokes" function in collective consciousness like a drainage system--regulating, balancing, equilibrating --as a universally accepted regulative mini- amoralism that cleverly assumes that it is healthy to poke fun at what exceeds our capacities to become outraged. For this reason, those who still struggle reject coarse jokes about their own cause. Only when the joke goes inward and one's own consciousness, admit- tedly from on high but not too ungraciously, inspects itself, does there arise a serenity that reveals not a kynical laughter, nor a cynical smile, but a humor that has ceased to struggle.
The most astounding profile of our cultural-moral situation is probably the in- satiable craving of modern consciousness for detective stories. They belong like- wise, I think, to the institutions of moral airing and ventilation in a culture that is doomed to live with an excessively high degree of mixing of norms, ambigui- ties, and contrary ethics. The genre as a whole, in relation to collective ethics, appears as an institutionalized medium for confession. Every detective story is a new opportunity for experimental amoralism. Through fiction it makes "happi- ness in crime" (d'Aurevilly) accessible to everybody. In the movements of thought in modern detective stories, from Poe to the present, those movements or thought in an analysis of cynicism are already anticipated in concentrated form, ? jood crime stories, every one of them, work to reduce the gravity of the in-
ividual crime. If the detective were the representative of enlightenment, the
r'rninal would be the representative of immorality and the victim would be the
re
presentative of morality. However, this constellation regularly becomes shaky hen the investigation into guilt reaches the point where the victims --from a dra- at
'c point of view, initally the "innocent" victims --themselves lose their inno- nce, are cast in a twilight, and are separated from the culprit who assaults them y only a microscopically thin juridical line. This line distinguishes between cyni-
e306 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
cal, nonpunishable immoralisms and truly punishable offenses. In the most ex- treme case, it is the culprit who, almost like a provoked enlightener, merely exe- cutes on the victim the latter's own amorality. "The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. " (Franz Werfel). These are the films at the end of which the inspector walks down the street, deep in thought, and makes a face as if he were sorry to have solved the case.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Already in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville, in his novel Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), relates such an inversion --in a tragic setting, of course. The hero, an upright, naive-sympathetic figure of light, is systemati- cally provoked by a devilish magazine officer until he knocks the latter down in a speechless fit. The officer unfortunately falls on his head and dies with a sneer on his lips because he knows that the boy, who had to hit him because he had no other way of expressing himself, must now in turn, according to maritime law, be sentenced to death by the ship's command. The law appears here as an authority that can be used as an instrument of an absolutely evil will, as a weapon of the victim against the, in reality, "innocent" perpetrator.
The great crime novel constructions remain for a long time in an analogously critical moral schema. They draw their vividness from the moral structure of cap- italist society. In them, individual crimes often appear either as rather naive, rela- tively harmless splinters of a universal social cynicism or as reflective exaggera- tions and magnifications of behaviors that, on a scale of averages, are not yet pursued as crimes. (Hence the two types of perpetrators: here, the relatively harmless perpetrators who have "stumbled into it"; there, the cynical tricksters, grand criminals, and monsters of crime. ) The triumphant success of Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera is based on its ability to set a blackguards' cynicism into a transparent but not moralistic relation to the social whole. As in a Punch and Judy show for adults, the figures flaunt their amorality and their evil artful- ness, sing songs about their own wickedness and about the still greater evil of the world, and use cynical sayings and ways of speaking to educate the public to a mode of expression in which it, too, not completely without pleasure, could speak the truth about itself.
Certain symptoms, it seems to me, indicate that enlightenment dramatization of criminality through theater, literature, and film has reached its limit. The creativity of the various criminal schemata gives the impression of exhaustion. The dissolution and thinking through of moral-amoral multivalences become in- creasingly too pretentious, too artificial, and not binding enough for today's men- talities. The trend hints at a more brutal way out of the tension, at an inclination to breaking loose, to massacre, to explosion, to catastrophe. Preambivalent forms of thinking win--everything or nothing, fantastic or shitty, good or bad, bomb or sugar, OK or not OK. In the place of subtle investigations of cases comes, more and more frequently, Fascist artistic release. Tense situations no longer call for mediation and defusion so much as for things to be blown to smithereens.
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS D 307
The School of Arbitrariness: Information Cynicism, the Press
Whoever tells the truth will be caught doing it, sooner or later.
Oscar Wilde
For the consciousness that informs itself in all directions, everything becomes problematic and inconsequential: a man and a woman; two illustrious scoundrels; three men in a boat; four fists for one hallelujah: five principal problems of the world economy; sex in the workplace; seven threats to peace; eight deadly sins of civilized humanity; nine symphonies with Karajan; ten black pawns in the North-South dialogue-it could just as well be the Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, but here we don't have to worry about details.
I do not want to quote cliches about the notorious cynicism of journalists and press people, and not merely because it is still only a few individual reporters who go so far as to orchestrate with African mercenaries the most photogenic arrange- ment for an execution so as to be able to send home interesting film material, or who experience a conflict of conscience about whether, at a car race, to warn a driver about an accident up ahead or shoot photos when he crashes into the wrecked car. It would also be pointless to reflect on whether journalism is a better climate for cynicism than public-relations institutes, advertising agencies, com- mercial studios, film production circles, political propaganda offices, TV sta- tions, or the studios of the pornographic press. The point is to find out why cyni- cism, almost as if it were a natural necessity, belongs to the professional risks and deformations of those whose job it is to produce pictures and information about "reality. "
We have to speak of a twofold disinhibition that concerns the production of pictures and information in modern mass media-of the disinhibition of the por- trayal vis-a-vis what is portrayed, as well as of the disinhibition of the currents
1of information in relation to the consciousnesses that absorb them.
The first disinhibition is based on the systematic journalistic exploitation of others' catastrophes, in which there seems to be an unspoken contract of interests between public demand for sensations and journalistic provision of them. A con- siderable part of our press serves nothing other than the hunger for misadventure, which is the moral vitamin of our society. The use value of news is measured in large part by its stimulation value, which obviously can be raised considerably through its packaging. A journalism can hardly flourish completely without makeup. Insofar as it could be understood as simply the art of comprehensible portrayal, we could value it positively as the descendant of a rhetorical tradition for which the way something was brought to market was never a matter of in- difference. However, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
packaging of the usual cynical type rests on a twofold disingenuousness: With literary-aesthetic means, it dramatizes the innumerable world events, both large and small, and transfers them-without making the tran-
308 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
sition recognizable and with a more or less clear consciousness of deceiving --into fiction, in their form as well as their content. Second, the packaging lies with its sensationalizing style by continually restoring a long since superseded, morally primitive frame of reference in order to be able to present the sensations as some- thing that fall outside these coordinates. Only a highly paid, corrupt mentality lets itself be used over a long period of time for such games. Modern primitive con- servatism owes a great deal to a correspondingly primitive journalism that prac- tices daily cynical restoration by acting as if every day could have its sensation and as if a form of consciousness had not long since arisen in our heads, precisely through its reporting, that has learned to accept scandal as a way of life and catas- trophe as background noise: With a trumped-up, sentimental moralism, a world picture is continually concocted in which just such a sensationalism can exercise its seductive and stupefying effects.
The second disinhibition of the information industry is even more problematic. This industry floods the capacities of our consciousness in a downright anthropo- logically threatening way. One has to have been completely away from media civilization once for a long time --for months or years --in order to be so centered and concentrated when one returns that one can consciously observe in oneself the renewed distraction and deconcentration that occurs when one takes part in the modern information media. Seen psychohistorically, the urbanization and in- formatization of our consciousnesses in the media complex probably represent the aspect of modernity that cuts deepest into life. And only in such a world can the modern cynical syndrome -- diffuse, omnipresent cynicism -- unfold in the way we experience it today. We now regard it as normal that in magazines we find, almost like in an Old World theater, all regions close to one another: reports on mass starvation in the Third World next to advertisements for champagne, arti- cles on environmental catastrophes beside a discussion of the most recent automo- bile production. Our minds are trained to scan and comprehend an encyclopedi- cally broad scale of irrelevancies --in which the irrelevance of the single item comes not so much from itself but from its being arranged in the flood of informa- tion from the media. Without years blunting and training in elasticity, no human consciousness can cope with what is demanded of it in flicking through a single thick magazine. And without intensive practice, people, if they do not want to risk some form of mental disintegration, cannot bear this continual flickering of important and unimportant items, the waxing and waning of reports that in one moment demand the highest attentiveness and in the next are totally passe.
If we want to speak positively about the superfluity of information streams through our heads, we would have to praise them for the principle of boundless empiricism and the free "market. " Indeed, we could go so far as to grant to the modern mass media one function in which they are intimately linked with philoso- phy: The limitless empiricism of the media imitates philosophy to a certain extent in that they adopt the latter's perspective on the totality of being --of course, not
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 309
of a totality in concepts but a totality in episodes. An enormous simultaneity stretches itself out in our informed consciousness: Here, some are eating; there, some are dying. Here, some are being tortured: there, famous lovers separate. Here, the "second car" is being discussed; there, a nationwide, catastrophic drought. Here, there are tips on tax write-offs according to section 7b; there, the economic theory of the Chicago boys. Here, thousands go wild at a rock concert; there, a dead woman lies undiscovered for years in her flat. Here, the Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics, and peace are awarded; there, only every second person knows the name of the president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Here, Siamese twins are successfully separated; there, a train with 2,000 pas- sengers derails into a river. Here, a daughter is born to an actor couple, there, the cost estimates of a political experiment rise from half a million to two million (people). Such is life. As news, everything is at our disposal. What is foreground, what background; what important, what unimportant; what trend, what episode? Everything is ordered into a uniform line in which uniformity {Gleichformigkeit) also produces equivalence {Gleichwertigkeii) and indifference (Gleichgiiltigkeit).
Where does this unleashed drive for information come from? This addiction and this compulsion to live daily in the whirr of information and to tolerate the constant bombardment of our minds with unbelievable masses of indifferent- important, sensational-unimportant news?
It seems that since the beginning of the modern era our civilization has become entangled in a peculiarly contradictory relation to novelty, to the "novella," to the case study, to the "interesting event"--in a certain way as if it had lost control over its "hunger for experience" and its thirst for news [Neu-gier, literally, craving for the new; -- Trans. ]. Enlightenment wants to turn the universe increasingly into the epitome of news and information, and it achieves this with the aid of two com- plementary media, the encyclopedia and the newspaper. With the former, our civilization undertakes the attempt to span and organize the "circle of the world" and the entire cycle of knowledge. With the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
newspaper, it produces a daily shift- ing frame of the movement and transformation of reality in its eventfulness. The encyclopedia comprises the constants, the newspaper the variables, and both are similar in their capacity to convey a maximum of "information" with a minimum of structuring. Bourgeois culture has had to live with this problem from the start, and it is worth a quick look to see how to date it has come through unscathed. The person in a relatively closed culture, with an organic information horizon and a limited curiosity about the outside, remains largely unaffected by this problem. Not so, however, with European culture, particularly in its bourgeois period, which is characterized by its laboring, researching, traveling, empirically dis- posed, experience-hungry, and reality-thirsty individuals. Through centuries of the accumulation of knowledge, they bring their civilization onto a curiosity course that, especially in the nineteenth century and even more completely in the twentieth, has been transformed with the triumph of the radio and electronic me-
310 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
dia into an overpowering, strong current that washes us forward rather than being steered by us.
All this began seemingly quite innocently, namely, with the emergence of novelists, narrators of curiosities, and entertainment artists who, in the late Mid- dle Ages, began to build up a novella-like "narrative news network" in which the accent increasingly shifted from morally exemplary, didactic stories to the anec- dotal, remarkable, special, extraordinary, piquant, and picaresque, the strange and singular, the eventful and amusing, the terrifying and that which causes one to ponder. Perhaps this is the most fascinating process of all in our culture: how, in the course of the centuries, such "singular stories of events" gain increasing acceptance over the standard stories, the fixed motifs, and the commonplace- how the new sets itself off from the old and how the news from outside works on the still narrow, traditional consciousness. Through the history of our litera- ture and discourse, therefore, even more than through the history of law, we can study the unfolding of "modern complexity. " For it is not at all self-evident that our consciousness has to be able to absorb and order information about explosions in the outer layers of the sun, about failed harvests in Tierra del Fuego, about the way of life of the Hopi Indians, about the gynecological problems of a Scan- dinavian queen, about the Peking Opera Company, about the sociological struc- ture of a village in Provence . . .
Or it sees in history a victory route on
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS ? 295
give his work the appearance of science. The miracle of psychoanalysis is how it so respectably conjures all its objects-- the oral, anal, and genital. It is as if in refined society someone burped at the dinner table and nobody found anything exceptional in it. Freud managed what would leave even Diogenes green with envy: He erected a theory that makes us all, whether we like it or not, into kynics (if not even into cynics).
It happens this way: In the beginning, everyone is a pure, natural being, born from the mother's body into a well-bred society, not knowing what is proper. We grow up as sexually polyvalent, "polymorphously perverse" subjects, and kyni- cism is universally disseminated in our nurseries which at first, in everything lives, thinks, wishes, and acts completely out of our own bodies. Freud imported a kynical phase into the life history of everyone and also found rudimentary expla- nations for why adults still tell cynical jokes or are even inclined to make cynicism their attitude toward life. In every one of us, there was once a primitive dog and a primitive swine, beside which Diogenes is a pale imitation--but we, as well- behaved people, cannot for the life of us remember anything about it. It is not enough that this human primitive animal, as the educators say, "defecates" and performs in front of everybody what we adults do there where only our con- science looks on. Not only does it piss in its diapers and against the wall; this be- ing at times even develops an interest unworthy of a human being in its own excre- ment and does not even shrink from smearing the wall with it. That Diogenes did such things not even his enemies claimed. In all superfluity, this being likes to frequently hold those parts of the body for which adults only know the Latin names and shows in everything a reckless self- conceit, as if it personally and no one else were the center of its world. That this kynical primitive animal in the end even wants to kill its father and marry its mother--or conversely --that, after all that has happened, is registered somewhat with resignation. Indeed, even when analysts maintain that the Oedipus complex is the universal law of psychic development in human beings, this is accepted like one more piece of bad news among many others. (Later it is noticed that Freud is interested only in the tragic version of the Oedipus myth, not in the kynical dedramatization of the story. ) Af- ter these psychoanalytic revelations, parenthood must unavoidably turn into a bat- tle between philosophical schools. For we have to become a Stoic, when we have the kynic physically right in our own house. If a connection between Freud's ethics and those of Epicure has often been noticed, that is because the Epicurean line was the most successful in finding a compromise between Stoicism and kyni- cism, between moral duty and self-realization, between
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
the reality principle and the pleasure principle, between "culture" and those who experience "discontent in it. " Societies in the world era of states send their members continually on those "too long marches" from which the living try to deviate by allowing themselves short cuts.
With respect to our infantile side, we have thus all arisen from kynicism. In
296 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
this point, psychoanalysis does not allow us any evasion. However, it itself be- comes evasive by taking a thoroughly ambivalent stance toward the tension be- tween the infantile and the adult. For it always knows how to arrange things so that the analyst remains respectable while the patient-child remains bestial. He makes a protege, so to speak, out of the kynical-animal side in us, to the extent that we all possess such an analyzable underground. Analysts are those "citizens" who interpret and counsel the still-effective infantile, animal, neurotic, etc. , un- citizenness of others. However, here it seems to be their greatest fear that they themselves will get caught in the undertow of their themes and be seen as just as disreputable as the oral, anal, genital phenomena of life with which they concern themselves. Perhaps, at least in part, the excessive interest in culture that is noticeable in many psychologists comes from this circumstance. They seem pres- sured to constantly prove anew their ability to be cultured --after having already compromised themselves enough through their professional occupation with the infantile and animal aspects of human beings. "Psychological literature" has be- come in the meantime a phenomenon of such dimensions that it can only be dealt with sociologically and statistically. Its primary concern is the self-assurance of modern semicynics in their cultural role. With "cultivation," with books, diplomas, titles, supplementary training and degrees, they try to preserve their rights of citizenship in "official culture" (which, by the way, in any case does not exist). At the same time, this serves the pedantic demarcation of "sicknesses. " There are more than a few psychologists in whose voices a lot of fear, contempt, superciliousness, and aggression can be heard when they use words like narcis- sism, schizophrenia, paranoia, ambivalence, neurosis, psychosis. They are words of demarcation, words for others, words on the high horse of normality. It may, however, be a good sign that today some--I want to say insightful- therapists have decided to let the mask of respectability drop and to give up the role of the respectable portrayer of reality. They have, to their own advantage and that of their patients, come over to the side of the living. For those who have been made ill by reality, the path to being able to get through life well certainly does not lead by way of an accommodation to the Freudian "medium misery" of the average adult.
In the domain of knowledge and the sciences, a number of cynical phenomena have appeared that constitute a counterpart to what, in the preceding section on religious cynicism, I have designated, after Sartre, "bad faith"
(mauvaise foi). These phenomena are the "crooked attitudes" toward truth and knowledge that make these "highest goods" into mere useful items, or even into instruments for lying. Despite all apparent lack of respect, the kynic assumes a basically serious and upright attitude toward truth and maintains a thoroughly solemn relation, sa- tirically disguised, to it. With the cynic, this relation has given way to a thorough flabbiness and agnosticism (denial of knowledge). "What is truth? " asked Pontius Pilate when he sensed that he was just about to commit a crime against it. The
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 297
most harmless among the cynicisms of knowledge is that of the examinees, who build up the most external and contemptuous relation to that which they have to learn, a relation of mere cramming, of rote learning, with the firm intention of forgetting it again after the examination. After that, already less harmless, fol- lows the cynicism of the pragmatists and politicians who, admittedly, like to see that the next generation has acquired its academic foundations, but for the rest proceed from the attitude that theory is theory and that in practice everything looks quite different. Here, all the learning and studying that precede function like pure detour and selection mechanisms, roughly according to the assumption that whoever gets through them successfully can also succeed with the other--even though, as is generally known, study and subsequent occupation often are totally unconnected. Learning is separated cynically and instrumentally from its aims and treated as a mere abstract certificate of qualifications. In some cases, the only thing that links study and occupation is salary, which is set according to the type of highest educational qualification achieved. The "substance" is degraded with cynical realism to a mere prelude, to academic chitchat. How much ethos- decimation and demoralization continually take place here is scarcely measurable --one has only to think of courses that have to do with "values": educa- tion, teacher training, the legal professions, publishing, social work, medicine, and so on. If Mephistopheles could say to Faust that all theory is gray, and green is the golden tree of life, this evidences an optimism that can be developed only by someone who has never passed from study into professional life. For here it becomes clear that theory was probably too rosy and that reality first teaches us what gray really is. But here we are not completely without hope. Course reforms work toward ensuring that the studies too will be just as gray as the prospects to be had after them.
The actual and innermost connection between the sciences and cynicism, how- ever, concerns the structure and the procedure of modern empirical sciences per se. For just as there is a form of cynical correctness in the relations between
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
hos- tile individuals, there is also a form of cynical objectivity and methodological strictness in some sciences' and some scientists' way of treating the "facts. " I be- lieve this constitutes the core of what, since the late nineteenth century, we call "positivism. " If this word sounds critical, it is surely not because it designates a scientific mentality that stresses being logically exact and true to the facts and refraining from any sort of speculation. In this sense, positivism would have to be a title of honor rather than a dubious label. But in fact, the point of contention in the positivism debate is not scientific principles but the unprincipledness of science. For there are areas of research - and they are usually those in which the positivists do all the talking-where it does not suffice merely to behave scienti- fically "objectively" with the "facts," but where more is demanded of the scientist than merely the capacity to collect data, produce statistics, and formulate the- orems. There are "objects," in relation to which there is no scientific neutrality
298 D THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
but only partial and interest-directed forms of investigation --most clearly of all in the entire domain of the human and social sciences (this way of seeing things can be made plausible even with respect to the natural sciences; see chapter 11 "Transcendental Polemic," which indicates the connection between objectifica- tion and the process of making enemies). The dispute around positivism ignited not over its indisputable achievement in clarifying the logical form and the empir- ical basis of strict sciences but over the naive assumption of the positivists that they could open up every "arbitrary" field of research with these means and thus subject every reality to the arbitrariness of a callous researching. The positivist, however, can be suspected not so much of naivete but of cynicism, especially since the days of early, and perhaps really naive, positivism are gone and we have long since been confronted with a positivism in its third generation, which, we can safely say, has been washed in the seven seas. The short formula for the his- tory of science in this century would have to read: The path of scientism leads from positivism to theoretical cynicism (functionalism). When Critical Theory pilloried the "affirmative character" of traditional and positivistic theories, it meant by this that such theories, in their artificial objectivity, betray a cynical as- sent to social relations that, to those who suffer, who sympathize, are concerned, stink to high heaven. In the methodological doctrines of positivism and the new social functionalism, those theoreticians find their organon who, with detached brutality, indirectly and coolly defends existing systems against the individuals who come to grief in them.
Notes
1. If Hegel's Phenomenology is described as a "journey of the weltgeist through history to itself," in this formulation, none of the crucial concepts is acceptable. First, it is no journey because such a thing would have to have a beginning and a goal, which does not hold; "path" metaphors do not adequately grasp history. Second, there is no weltgeist that, simultaneously as combatant and battle follower, has been present through the turnings and struggles of history. Third, there is no world his- tory as narrative of the vicissitudes of a subject that suffered them. Fourth, there is no self that, after some kinds of journeys, histories, or struggles, could arrive at "itself; that would be a pretty ghostly being, a megalomaniac reflexive pronoun that rampages over our natural being-as-self.
2. Wilhelm Stieber, Spion des Kanzlers (The chancellor's spy) (Munich, 1981), p. 135; see also chapter 10, "Black Empiricism. " The quotation suggests a psychoanalytic theory of cynicism that in- terprets cynicism as the expression of an unconscious desire to be punished.
3. Only more recent narrative also includes the civil hero, the hero as rogue (picaro), and even the negative, passive hero.
4. The Arthurian legends discuss the problem of how a hero must constantly earn his status: Erec. His error was to become soft and to fail to expose himself to continual testing.
5. As soon as the soldiers became aware of this, they became suspicious of their leaders. The modern large armies stood and fell with the group of lower commanders and officers who "advanced with the rest. " There supposedly are even statistics from the World Wars that prove that the officers are "sufficiently well" represented among the fallen.
6. This motif will be pursued in chapter 10, ("Black Empiricism"), the final section.
THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS D 299
7. Officially sanctioned in part: As late as the war of 1870-71, there were many paid "substitute soldiers" serving in the place of conscripts.
8. Elsewhere I have tried to work out the particular emotional toning of German Fascist cynicism in an interpretation of the Beelitz anecdote from Hitler's Mein Kampf: Der Gefreite Hitler als Anti- Schweijk--Zur Psychodynamik moderner Zersetzungsangst. See Peter Sloterdijk, "Die Krise des Individuums --studiert im Medium der Literatur," in J. Schulte- Sasse (ed. ), Political Tendencies in the Literature of the Weimar Republic (Minneapolis, Minn. , 1982).
9. See chapter 22, "Bright Hour. "
10. [Translation of the French testament: I have nothing, / I have many debts, / I give the rest
to the poor. ]
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
11. See also Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture, (2nd ed.
New York, 1978), pp. 133ff.
12. See Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs (Paris, 1975), p. 44: "Tout le monde sent le tragique
de cete information: 'L'ordre est retabli. ' " To maintain order is synonymous with mounted charges, opening fire on unarmed people, and killing women and children.
13. It is no accident that Michel Foucault, who stimulated the most penetrating analyses of power, force, and "micropolitics" in our time, at the same time began with the phenomenon of disciplinary force, of punishment, execution, surveillance, and incarceration.
14. Schlegel's sentence also contains the germ of a theory not only of political but also of economic and religious cynicism and the cynicism of knowledge (see the remaining cardinal cynicisms as well as the secondary cynicisms). The unabridged quotation reads: "If the essence of cynicism consists in giving nature priority over art and virtue over beauty and science; without paying regard to the letter, to which the Stoic strictly sticks, but to pay heed only to the spirit, to unconditionally show contempt for all economic value and political glamour, and to bravely maintain the rights of autonomous ca- price: then Christianism would be nothing other than universal cynicism. " Athenaeum. Eine Zeit- schrift von A. W. und Fr. Schlegel I, selected and edited by Curt Griitzmacher (Hamburg, 1969), p. 102.
15. In detailed studies, these coarse classifications prove problematic; e. g. , up until 1918, the Ger- man state, because of its feudal components, etc. , cannot be designated as wholly bourgeois.
16. Aside: I began writing down these notes on cynicism--that a critique of cynical reason would come of it, I did not know at the time--shortly after seeing an interview with the Jewish philosopher and political scientist, Hannah Arendt, which Giinther Gaus had made with her many years before and which was broadcast again on the fifth anniversary of her death in 1980. This conversation, a prime example of relaxed chatting and philosophizing in front of an audience and one of the few exam- ples of intelligence in television, reached its climax when Arendt told of her activity at the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Eichmann. One must have heard with one's own ears how this woman aver- red that in studying the many thousands of pages of the transcript of the proceedings, she repeatedly broke out into loud laughter about the peculiar stupidity that had exercised control over innumerable lives. In Arendt's self-aware confession there was something frivolous and kynical in the most precise sense of the word that, after an initial consternation, proved itself to be a liberating and sovereign expression of truth. When Arendt then, as an encore, even made the remark that she often had fun in exile, for she was young and improvising in uncertainty has its own attractions, then I also had to laugh, and with that, this book began to "write itself. "
17. In the People's Democracies, incidentally, we encounter a complementary swindle.
18. I have decided to place money cynicism under the secondary cynicisms. Exchange cynicism, which is treated in chapter 9, appears to me to be an excrescence of the coercions of power.
19. Mature-immature: These are not value judgments but scales of measurement for objective conditions for socialism. If socialism is defined as the liberation of social productivity from capitalist fetters, then late-capitalist relations must first be created that can then be superseded.
300 ? THE CARDINAL CYNICISMS
20. See chapter 11. There I attempt to establish a rational dialectics under the concept of universal polemic. At the same time, I provide a critique of the Marxist use of dialectics.
21. This is not a plea for a "productivistic" ideology. Productivity is a multidimensional concept. Incidentally, the newer consciousness of political ecology presupposes the culmination of produc- tivism.
22. Dialectic--as dialectic of obstruction. That is the realistic basis of Adorno's Negative Di- alectics.
23. Kurt Keiler drew my attention to the story of the mouse's indirect suicide. It is contained in the final chapter of Boris Vian's novel, L'Ecume des jours (1946). Here I have changed it around some- what to fit Goliath's tale.
24. Dialectic of perfection: In what is perfect, there is still a flaw; the perfection of the beginning must therefore be excelled by that of the end --by passing through a disorder. This constitutes a basic figure of dialectical fantasies of movement: A first, "lost" summit is regained in the ascent to a second, higher summit.
25. The motif appears not only in the European tradition but also in Hindu and Buddhist legends.
26. Epiphanius is conspicuous as one of the first priests with an obsession about Mary. See The- odor Reik's interpretation, "Der heilige Epiphanius verschreibt sich. (Eine Fehlleistung vor sechzehn Jahrhunderten. )," in Reik, Der eigene und der fremde Gott. Zur Psychoanalyse der religiosen Ent- wicklung (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 37-56.
27. It is disturbing to only hint at this theme, which would be a book in itself. I hope to be able to write more comprehensively and convincingly on this topic in a later work.
28. This will displease many a dyed-in-the-wool structuralist who is intent on joining in the dance around the golden calf of "language, discourse, and signifier. " The structuralist fetishism of the sig- nifier (signifiant) is no more clever
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
than the "logocentric" fetishism of the signified (signifie).
29. See Sartre, L'Etre et le neant (1943), p. 84: "Through the lie, consciousness affirms that it exists by its nature as something hidden to the other, it exploits the ontological duality of ego and alien ego for its own advantage. It is different with mauvaise foi, if, as we have said, it is a lie to one- self. . . . That is, the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist here. " The God of Cain would accordingly appear as the partner of a self-consciousness that can still deceive itself. Hence only God in genesis.
30. Nietzsche's neokynical "revaluing of all values" extends also to science by taking its objects more cheerfully "than they deserve. "
31. Is not critical rationalism a la Popper an offshoot of satirical fallibilism, mistakenly taken to be respectable?
32. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel remarks with regard to the "Kynical School": "There is nothing much to say about it.
The kynics have little philosophical training and they did not manage to construct a system, a science. " As in most cases, here Hegel hits the nail deftly on the head, so that we only have to put it on its feet.
33. Accordingly, "respectable critique," critique that is an instrument and a methodology of the "dominant" theories, is from the start a contradiction in terms. Critique serves subversion, not con- struction. For this reason, fun in using one's intelligence can be generally destroyed in a surefire way. as happens today, by educating students "critically" by force. Then, what could have been their chance appears to them as their enemy.
34. It seems that Marx found his kynical-existential critic in H. Heine --hence the frictions be- tween them; hence also the curse "dog," which plays a striking role in their quarrels.
35. See Heine, Vorrede zu Salon / (1833), in Heine, Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 10.
36. Heine, Verschiedenartige Geschichtsauffassung (1833), in Sdmtliche Schriften, vol. 3 (Munich, 1971), p. 21. Chapter 9
The Secondary Cynicisms
Minima Amoralia: Confession, Joke, Crime
/ am equipped with an armor that has been welded together entirely out of mistakes.
Pierre Reverdy
If the six cardinal cynicisms also set up the stages on which idealisms and realisms as well as powers and oppositional powers wrestle with one another, the task is not completed by a first description of them. In reality, what we have separated for the sake of clarity is inextricably entangled. A precise consciousness of reality can only be one that does not fail to note how war and power exist with sexuality and medicine as well as with religion and knowledge in deep reciprocal inter- penetrations and amalgams. But this is only another way of saying that life cannot be grasped through morals and cannot be rationalized with moral explanations. We therefore call someone a moralist who has doubts about the human ability to act "morally. " The main fields described here, on which the kynical-cynical ten- sions inherent in the things themselves develop, mesh and, at the same time, repel one another--in such a way that the values, norms, and views of each individual area are caught up in increasingly entangled relations to those of the other areas. Even the norms of the military and the state often become tangled and contradict one another although these two realities, relatively speaking, understand one an- other best of all. But what will happen when the norms of the military and the state get mixed up and ensnared with those of science and religion, of sexuality and medicine? Due to the complexity and contradictoriness of value systems, a critical measure of cynicism must already become an accompanying shadow of any morality.
Just as war brings about a great inversion of moral consciousness by substitut- ing for Thou shalt not kill, the commandment Thou shalt kill as many as possible. It also turns the other "regional" and sectoral ethics systematically on their heads
301
302 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
? Olaf Gulbransson, Child-like Question. "Grandmother, tell me, after the war, will the Ten Commandments hold again? ", 1918.
and makes the senseless sensible and the reasonable absurd. In order to save a lot of words, I want to refer the reader to Robert Altman's film on the Korean War, M. A. S. H. (1969), a masterpiece of contemporary cynical-satirical con- sciousness. The way in which, with a well thought out and hard-hitting joke tech- nique, military, medical, religious, and sexual cynicism are played into each other raises this film to the status of a document on the history of ideas. In Hegel's words, it achieves what philosophy for a long time has not been able to achieve: It is "its time, grasped in (scenic) thoughts," a satirical meditation on the struc- tures and procedures of the cynical joke, offensive and reflective, pointed and true. Indescribable, this blasphemous "Last Supper" satire, where the field doc- tors take leave (like the Apostles) of a colleague who is weary of life because, after experiencing an erection disorder, he fixes on the idea that
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
he must be gay and cannot imagine how he can admit this to his three girlfriends. Also indescrib- able are the horrifying and horridly funny operation scenes, where the surgeons tell their brutal jokes over soldiers who have half bled to death, think of the nurses' tits, and imagine they are at a baseball game or even on the way home. In the ethos-confusion of the field hospital, something of the latent moral chaos in our so-called everyday reality becomes visible. Because here the various do- mains overlap in a brutally clear way, the one domain knocks the morality of the other out of its hands. It becomes almost a principle of survival there to hack up one's own moral substance so as not to be tempted to believe in some sort of "one's own cause. " Survival as cynical understatement.
The plurality of pronounced, quasi-autonomous domains of reality and the
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 303
corresponding multitude of morals and moral roots are the reason moral everyday life lives on essentially in a moderate amorality and is normally satisfied when things remain by this moderation. This is simultaneously the reason why people with a fairly solid and just feeling for reality are against harshness in matters of punishment. They know that the punishment, in its strict moralism, can be more immoral than the actions of those who are to be punished. (Hence, even with Cic- ero: summum ius, summa iniuria. ) Moral feeling, which self-critically mediates itself with life, means the art of moving through the twilight worlds and contradic- tions of autonomous and counterposed domains of values with the least amount of real evil and human damage. As Karl Markus Michel has shown in his praise of casuistry (i. e. , the normative exegesis of individual "cases"), a halfway living morality tells us which sins we should commit in order to avoid graver ones; the moralist who does not judge as the fool of a superego is someone who, in distin- guishing good and evil, also knows how to appreciate the "virtue of sin" (see Kurs- buch No. 60 [1980]). Morality functions as the capacity to orient oneself toward the relatively better alternative within the universal motliness of given relations.
Only in this sense is the need for a "new" ethics and New Values, which today haunts the decaying superstructure, justified. No one should believe in New Values. Those who do can only become neoconservative shopkeepers. If we have already in large measure overstrained ourselves with the old high-cultural ethics, the "new" ethics can only make us look completely ridiculous. A new conscious- ness of values can only come out of a progressive making-conscious of the fact that (and why) for us there can be no "innocence" except when we suspend every kind of judgment. Wherever it is a matter of values, cynicism is always also in the picture. Anyone who radically defends one scale of values automatically be- comes a cynic, expressly or not, on other scales of values. Whoever you happen to be, you always trample on some norms, and if you live in times that make it impossible to be naive about such trampling, then it can happen at any time that you also say it aloud.
The confession is for us, therefore, besides "theory," the most important form in which the truth is said. From Augustine to Francois Villon, from Rousseau to Freud, from Heine to current autobiographical literature, we hear decisive truths in the form of admission and confession. Moreover, those narrative communities that ultimately develop out of all depth- psychological practices constitute, in es- sence, confessional communities that have been morally neutralized through ther- apy. In motley reality, all talking about oneself necessarily ends up in the vicinity of a blackguard's confession or a criminal's testament, a sick report or a story of suffering, a witness's statement or a confession. That is the condition of authentic- ity in a situation of the unavoidable ethical overtaxing of oneself. Only bastards always have one more excuse, one more white vest to change into, one more spine, and one more good conscience. Those who really say what they are and
304 D THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
what they have done always and unavoidably, nolens volens, provide a rogue's novel, a certification of poverty, a story of a young scamp, an image of a fool a book of twists and turns.
What Erich Fromm calls his "ethics of being," if one views it properly, aims ultimately at such an upright bearing regarding one's own life, thinking, planning and failure. Without doubt, all that also belongs to "being," of which, according to certain value systems, we would have to be ashamed. An "ethics of being," therefore, if it (and because it) should be a conscious bearing, must lead to a point at which, for the sake of uprightness, all shame also has an end and at which we confess to everything we "are," right or wrong. The ethics of being seeks the truth in authenticity. It therefore demands and encourages confession and honest talking-about-oneself as the cardinal virtue per se. Before this ethics all other morals are suspended, even if the various sectoral ethics do not already contradict each other. Those who want the truth cannot simply build "theories" and see through masks; they must also create relations among people in which every con- fession becomes possible. Only when we have understanding for everything, give everything its due, place everything beyond good and evil, and, in the end, view everything in such a way that nothing human is foreign to us-only then will this ethics of being become possible because it puts an end to the hostility toward other
ways of being. Being as such knows nothing and is nothing of which it would have to be ashamed, apart from conscious crookedness, dishonesty, and self- deceptions. Everything can be "forgiven," not merely what tradition calls "sins
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
against the Holy Spirit" and what we today call a lack of authenticity (genuine- ness, honesty). That consciousness is inauthentic that consciously does not go "into itself because it still banks strategically on the advantage gained through lying.
An ethics of being would be the ethics of a society in which people help each other with love and criticism so that in every ego the will to truth can become stronger than the will to power and to come out on top. The ethics of being passes over the sphere of polemical pretense. Only pathological cynics and vengeful negativists admit their mistakes with the intention of committing them again. They even abuse the form of confession in order to struggle and to lie. And not always is seen in this the coquetry with which Zarah Leander, as the notorious Miss Jane, once sang, "I am so and I'll stay so /1 am so in my whole body / Yes sir! "
One will have noticed that the series of cardinal cynicisms represents simul- taneously a list of the elementary satirical themes and most important genres ot jokes. They represent the main battlefields of elevations and humiliations, ideali- zations and realistic disillusionments. Here, vices and insults, ironies and mock-
n eries have their largest playing fields. Here, the most frivolous sideswipes of h "
guistic liberalism still have a morally regulative sense. The military with its
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 305
tensions between hero ethics and cowards' realism, between officers and subor- dinates, front and rear echelons, war and peace, command and obedience, is just as much an inexhaustible generator of soldiers'jokes as politics, with its ideolo- gies, state actions, its great words and small deeds, which provides an infinite source of pranks and parodies. It is no different with sexuality, which, with the juxtaposition of the covered and the naked, the forbidden and the permitted, con- stitutes a vast field for jokes, obscenities, and comedies, regardless of whether it is flirtation, marriage, coitus, or bedroom battles. Likewise, the medical do- main, with all its possibilities for sarcasm about health and sickness, madness and normality, the living and the dead. And all the more so with the entire domain of religion, which is more serviceable for swearing and joke telling than almost any other theme. For, wherever there is so much sacredness, a large profane shadow arises, and the more saints are honored, the more comical saints can be found among them. Finally, there is also the area of knowledge, which is criss- crossed by tensions between intelligence and stupidity, joke and citizens' duty, reason and madness, science and absurdity. All these "cardinal jokes" function in collective consciousness like a drainage system--regulating, balancing, equilibrating --as a universally accepted regulative mini- amoralism that cleverly assumes that it is healthy to poke fun at what exceeds our capacities to become outraged. For this reason, those who still struggle reject coarse jokes about their own cause. Only when the joke goes inward and one's own consciousness, admit- tedly from on high but not too ungraciously, inspects itself, does there arise a serenity that reveals not a kynical laughter, nor a cynical smile, but a humor that has ceased to struggle.
The most astounding profile of our cultural-moral situation is probably the in- satiable craving of modern consciousness for detective stories. They belong like- wise, I think, to the institutions of moral airing and ventilation in a culture that is doomed to live with an excessively high degree of mixing of norms, ambigui- ties, and contrary ethics. The genre as a whole, in relation to collective ethics, appears as an institutionalized medium for confession. Every detective story is a new opportunity for experimental amoralism. Through fiction it makes "happi- ness in crime" (d'Aurevilly) accessible to everybody. In the movements of thought in modern detective stories, from Poe to the present, those movements or thought in an analysis of cynicism are already anticipated in concentrated form, ? jood crime stories, every one of them, work to reduce the gravity of the in-
ividual crime. If the detective were the representative of enlightenment, the
r'rninal would be the representative of immorality and the victim would be the
re
presentative of morality. However, this constellation regularly becomes shaky hen the investigation into guilt reaches the point where the victims --from a dra- at
'c point of view, initally the "innocent" victims --themselves lose their inno- nce, are cast in a twilight, and are separated from the culprit who assaults them y only a microscopically thin juridical line. This line distinguishes between cyni-
e306 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
cal, nonpunishable immoralisms and truly punishable offenses. In the most ex- treme case, it is the culprit who, almost like a provoked enlightener, merely exe- cutes on the victim the latter's own amorality. "The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. " (Franz Werfel). These are the films at the end of which the inspector walks down the street, deep in thought, and makes a face as if he were sorry to have solved the case.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
Already in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville, in his novel Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), relates such an inversion --in a tragic setting, of course. The hero, an upright, naive-sympathetic figure of light, is systemati- cally provoked by a devilish magazine officer until he knocks the latter down in a speechless fit. The officer unfortunately falls on his head and dies with a sneer on his lips because he knows that the boy, who had to hit him because he had no other way of expressing himself, must now in turn, according to maritime law, be sentenced to death by the ship's command. The law appears here as an authority that can be used as an instrument of an absolutely evil will, as a weapon of the victim against the, in reality, "innocent" perpetrator.
The great crime novel constructions remain for a long time in an analogously critical moral schema. They draw their vividness from the moral structure of cap- italist society. In them, individual crimes often appear either as rather naive, rela- tively harmless splinters of a universal social cynicism or as reflective exaggera- tions and magnifications of behaviors that, on a scale of averages, are not yet pursued as crimes. (Hence the two types of perpetrators: here, the relatively harmless perpetrators who have "stumbled into it"; there, the cynical tricksters, grand criminals, and monsters of crime. ) The triumphant success of Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera is based on its ability to set a blackguards' cynicism into a transparent but not moralistic relation to the social whole. As in a Punch and Judy show for adults, the figures flaunt their amorality and their evil artful- ness, sing songs about their own wickedness and about the still greater evil of the world, and use cynical sayings and ways of speaking to educate the public to a mode of expression in which it, too, not completely without pleasure, could speak the truth about itself.
Certain symptoms, it seems to me, indicate that enlightenment dramatization of criminality through theater, literature, and film has reached its limit. The creativity of the various criminal schemata gives the impression of exhaustion. The dissolution and thinking through of moral-amoral multivalences become in- creasingly too pretentious, too artificial, and not binding enough for today's men- talities. The trend hints at a more brutal way out of the tension, at an inclination to breaking loose, to massacre, to explosion, to catastrophe. Preambivalent forms of thinking win--everything or nothing, fantastic or shitty, good or bad, bomb or sugar, OK or not OK. In the place of subtle investigations of cases comes, more and more frequently, Fascist artistic release. Tense situations no longer call for mediation and defusion so much as for things to be blown to smithereens.
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS D 307
The School of Arbitrariness: Information Cynicism, the Press
Whoever tells the truth will be caught doing it, sooner or later.
Oscar Wilde
For the consciousness that informs itself in all directions, everything becomes problematic and inconsequential: a man and a woman; two illustrious scoundrels; three men in a boat; four fists for one hallelujah: five principal problems of the world economy; sex in the workplace; seven threats to peace; eight deadly sins of civilized humanity; nine symphonies with Karajan; ten black pawns in the North-South dialogue-it could just as well be the Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston, but here we don't have to worry about details.
I do not want to quote cliches about the notorious cynicism of journalists and press people, and not merely because it is still only a few individual reporters who go so far as to orchestrate with African mercenaries the most photogenic arrange- ment for an execution so as to be able to send home interesting film material, or who experience a conflict of conscience about whether, at a car race, to warn a driver about an accident up ahead or shoot photos when he crashes into the wrecked car. It would also be pointless to reflect on whether journalism is a better climate for cynicism than public-relations institutes, advertising agencies, com- mercial studios, film production circles, political propaganda offices, TV sta- tions, or the studios of the pornographic press. The point is to find out why cyni- cism, almost as if it were a natural necessity, belongs to the professional risks and deformations of those whose job it is to produce pictures and information about "reality. "
We have to speak of a twofold disinhibition that concerns the production of pictures and information in modern mass media-of the disinhibition of the por- trayal vis-a-vis what is portrayed, as well as of the disinhibition of the currents
1of information in relation to the consciousnesses that absorb them.
The first disinhibition is based on the systematic journalistic exploitation of others' catastrophes, in which there seems to be an unspoken contract of interests between public demand for sensations and journalistic provision of them. A con- siderable part of our press serves nothing other than the hunger for misadventure, which is the moral vitamin of our society. The use value of news is measured in large part by its stimulation value, which obviously can be raised considerably through its packaging. A journalism can hardly flourish completely without makeup. Insofar as it could be understood as simply the art of comprehensible portrayal, we could value it positively as the descendant of a rhetorical tradition for which the way something was brought to market was never a matter of in- difference. However, the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
packaging of the usual cynical type rests on a twofold disingenuousness: With literary-aesthetic means, it dramatizes the innumerable world events, both large and small, and transfers them-without making the tran-
308 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
sition recognizable and with a more or less clear consciousness of deceiving --into fiction, in their form as well as their content. Second, the packaging lies with its sensationalizing style by continually restoring a long since superseded, morally primitive frame of reference in order to be able to present the sensations as some- thing that fall outside these coordinates. Only a highly paid, corrupt mentality lets itself be used over a long period of time for such games. Modern primitive con- servatism owes a great deal to a correspondingly primitive journalism that prac- tices daily cynical restoration by acting as if every day could have its sensation and as if a form of consciousness had not long since arisen in our heads, precisely through its reporting, that has learned to accept scandal as a way of life and catas- trophe as background noise: With a trumped-up, sentimental moralism, a world picture is continually concocted in which just such a sensationalism can exercise its seductive and stupefying effects.
The second disinhibition of the information industry is even more problematic. This industry floods the capacities of our consciousness in a downright anthropo- logically threatening way. One has to have been completely away from media civilization once for a long time --for months or years --in order to be so centered and concentrated when one returns that one can consciously observe in oneself the renewed distraction and deconcentration that occurs when one takes part in the modern information media. Seen psychohistorically, the urbanization and in- formatization of our consciousnesses in the media complex probably represent the aspect of modernity that cuts deepest into life. And only in such a world can the modern cynical syndrome -- diffuse, omnipresent cynicism -- unfold in the way we experience it today. We now regard it as normal that in magazines we find, almost like in an Old World theater, all regions close to one another: reports on mass starvation in the Third World next to advertisements for champagne, arti- cles on environmental catastrophes beside a discussion of the most recent automo- bile production. Our minds are trained to scan and comprehend an encyclopedi- cally broad scale of irrelevancies --in which the irrelevance of the single item comes not so much from itself but from its being arranged in the flood of informa- tion from the media. Without years blunting and training in elasticity, no human consciousness can cope with what is demanded of it in flicking through a single thick magazine. And without intensive practice, people, if they do not want to risk some form of mental disintegration, cannot bear this continual flickering of important and unimportant items, the waxing and waning of reports that in one moment demand the highest attentiveness and in the next are totally passe.
If we want to speak positively about the superfluity of information streams through our heads, we would have to praise them for the principle of boundless empiricism and the free "market. " Indeed, we could go so far as to grant to the modern mass media one function in which they are intimately linked with philoso- phy: The limitless empiricism of the media imitates philosophy to a certain extent in that they adopt the latter's perspective on the totality of being --of course, not
THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS ? 309
of a totality in concepts but a totality in episodes. An enormous simultaneity stretches itself out in our informed consciousness: Here, some are eating; there, some are dying. Here, some are being tortured: there, famous lovers separate. Here, the "second car" is being discussed; there, a nationwide, catastrophic drought. Here, there are tips on tax write-offs according to section 7b; there, the economic theory of the Chicago boys. Here, thousands go wild at a rock concert; there, a dead woman lies undiscovered for years in her flat. Here, the Nobel prizes for chemistry, physics, and peace are awarded; there, only every second person knows the name of the president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Here, Siamese twins are successfully separated; there, a train with 2,000 pas- sengers derails into a river. Here, a daughter is born to an actor couple, there, the cost estimates of a political experiment rise from half a million to two million (people). Such is life. As news, everything is at our disposal. What is foreground, what background; what important, what unimportant; what trend, what episode? Everything is ordered into a uniform line in which uniformity {Gleichformigkeit) also produces equivalence {Gleichwertigkeii) and indifference (Gleichgiiltigkeit).
Where does this unleashed drive for information come from? This addiction and this compulsion to live daily in the whirr of information and to tolerate the constant bombardment of our minds with unbelievable masses of indifferent- important, sensational-unimportant news?
It seems that since the beginning of the modern era our civilization has become entangled in a peculiarly contradictory relation to novelty, to the "novella," to the case study, to the "interesting event"--in a certain way as if it had lost control over its "hunger for experience" and its thirst for news [Neu-gier, literally, craving for the new; -- Trans. ]. Enlightenment wants to turn the universe increasingly into the epitome of news and information, and it achieves this with the aid of two com- plementary media, the encyclopedia and the newspaper. With the former, our civilization undertakes the attempt to span and organize the "circle of the world" and the entire cycle of knowledge. With the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
newspaper, it produces a daily shift- ing frame of the movement and transformation of reality in its eventfulness. The encyclopedia comprises the constants, the newspaper the variables, and both are similar in their capacity to convey a maximum of "information" with a minimum of structuring. Bourgeois culture has had to live with this problem from the start, and it is worth a quick look to see how to date it has come through unscathed. The person in a relatively closed culture, with an organic information horizon and a limited curiosity about the outside, remains largely unaffected by this problem. Not so, however, with European culture, particularly in its bourgeois period, which is characterized by its laboring, researching, traveling, empirically dis- posed, experience-hungry, and reality-thirsty individuals. Through centuries of the accumulation of knowledge, they bring their civilization onto a curiosity course that, especially in the nineteenth century and even more completely in the twentieth, has been transformed with the triumph of the radio and electronic me-
310 ? THE SECONDARY CYNICISMS
dia into an overpowering, strong current that washes us forward rather than being steered by us.
All this began seemingly quite innocently, namely, with the emergence of novelists, narrators of curiosities, and entertainment artists who, in the late Mid- dle Ages, began to build up a novella-like "narrative news network" in which the accent increasingly shifted from morally exemplary, didactic stories to the anec- dotal, remarkable, special, extraordinary, piquant, and picaresque, the strange and singular, the eventful and amusing, the terrifying and that which causes one to ponder. Perhaps this is the most fascinating process of all in our culture: how, in the course of the centuries, such "singular stories of events" gain increasing acceptance over the standard stories, the fixed motifs, and the commonplace- how the new sets itself off from the old and how the news from outside works on the still narrow, traditional consciousness. Through the history of our litera- ture and discourse, therefore, even more than through the history of law, we can study the unfolding of "modern complexity. " For it is not at all self-evident that our consciousness has to be able to absorb and order information about explosions in the outer layers of the sun, about failed harvests in Tierra del Fuego, about the way of life of the Hopi Indians, about the gynecological problems of a Scan- dinavian queen, about the Peking Opera Company, about the sociological struc- ture of a village in Provence . . .
