What the noble philosophers have said about the world is also true of Shakespeare: What we call evil is only the other side of good; it is
necessary
for the existence of the good and belongs to the whole just as the Torrid Zone must burn and Lapland must freeze so that there may be a temperate zone.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Where would we be if everybody despaired?
" And the other says: "The time for 'in spite of is over.
"
Some have been trying for a long time to bring their psychoanalysis to a close, and others have been asking themselves for a long time if they can justify not yet having begun analysis. But you also have to think about what it costs and how much the insurance pays, and whether afterward you can still get on as well as you think, in the middle of your misery,
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
you should be able to get on, because you are not sure at the beginning whether you want to go on as you did before. Oh, and another thing: It turns out that good cooking is not a betrayal and that this stupid stuff about consumption and having a car is not really so . . .
In such a time of open secrets, where a crazy small-scale economy splits think- ing, where so-called society dissolves into hundreds of thousands of strands of planning and improvisation that mutually ignore one another but are related through all kinds of absurdities --in such a time it cannot do enlightenment, or what is left of it, any harm to reflect critically on its foundations. There have been impressive examples of such critical reflection for a long time. For a long time, the "public sphere" was one of the strongest themes of a renewed enlightenment, especially in connection with the word "experience" and even more so with "life context" (Lebenszusammenhang), which was so pleasant to write because you got the feeling that somehow or other life forms contexts, and context is like a prom- ise of meaning. However, in the meantime, the intellectual hunting fever for the "life context" has faded because this life context represents a being at least as rare as the Wolper- tinger, a hare with antlers that lives in Bavaria and that Bavarian practical jokers used to hunt when vacationers from Prussia had become much too cocky and needed to be taught a lesson. But now that the Prussians stay away and build their
6own "life context" behind self-activating shooting devices, hunting for Wolper- tinger, the special enlightenment for sly Prussians, has slackened off just as much as
enlightenment in general and enlightenment for non-Prussians.
What next? In the fifth preliminary reflection, which introduces the actual in- vestigation of the foundations of cynical reason, I want to try to name a source ? f enlightenment in which the secret of its vitality is hidden: cheekiness {Freeh- 100 D AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
heit, a word whose meaning lies somewhere between cheekiness and impu- dence-Trans. )-
Notes
1. "It is misspent effort to try to enlighten humankind. One has to be content with being wise one- self, if one can, but leave the mob to error and strive only to keep it from crimes that disturb the social order" (Frederick II of Prussia in a letter to dAlembert, 1770).
2. Said less ceremoniously, in the great pell-mell, in the ambivalence of the factual.
3. Besides this I discuss the historical discrediting of the Marxist alternative ("Marxist Elegy," this chapter) and the clouding over of the sociopsychological atmosphere as a whole (chapter 5, sec- tion entitled "Unashamed Happiness"). 4. See also Peter Jirak, "Zukunft als Provinz," Frankfurter Hefte, vol. 33 (April 4, 1978).
5. [The "Spontis" were the advocates of spontaneity in the West German student move- ment. -Trans. ]
6. [Prussia lies in present-day East Germany. --Trans. 1
Chapter 5
"In Search of Lost Cheekiness"
A timid arse seldom lets go with a joyful fart.
Lutheran saying
The objection, the side leap, light-hearted mistrust,
the pleasure in mockery are signs of health: Everything that is unqualified belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
They have laid their hands on my entire life; so let it stand up and confront them. . .
Danton, before sentence is passed on him
Greek Philosophy of Cheekiness: Kynicism
Ancient kynicism, at least in its Greek origins, is in principle cheeky. In its cheek- iness lies a method worthy of discovery. This first really "dialectical material- ism," which was also an existentialism, is viewed unjustly, beside the great sys- tems in Greek philosophy --Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoa--as a mere game of satyrs, as a half-jovial, half-dirty episode, and is passed over. In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with. Is it not crude and grotesque to pick one's nose while Socrates exorcises his demon and speaks of the divine soul? Can it be called anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic the- ory of ideas-or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his medi- tation on the genesis of the cosmos? And what is it supposed to mean when this philosophizing town bum answers Plato's subtle theory of eros by masturbating in public?
To understand these apparently irrelevantly provocative gestures, it is worth reflecting on a principle that called into being the doctrines of wisdom and that was regarded by the ancient world as a truism, before modern developments
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eradicated it. For the philosopher, the human being who exemplifies the love of truth and conscious living, life and doctrine must be in harmony. The core of ev- ery doctrine is what its followers embody of it. This can be misunderstood in an idealistic way as if it were philosophy's innermost aim to get people to chase after unattainable ideals. But if philosophers are called on to live what they say, their
101
102 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS'
task in a critical sense is much more: to say what they live. Since time im- memorial, every ideality must be materialized and every materiality idealized in order to be real for us, as beings in the middle. A separation of person and thing, theory and praxis at this elementary level cannot be taken into consideration at all-except perhaps as a sign of a corruption of truth. To embody a doctrine means to make oneself into its medium. This is the opposite of what is demanded in the moralistic plea for behavior guided strictly by ideals. By paying attention to what can be embodied, we remain protected from moral demagogy and from the terror of radical abstractions that cannot be lived out. (The question is not what is virtue without terror but what is terror other than consistent idealism. )
The appearance of Diogenes marks the most dramatic moment in the process of truth of early European philosophy: Whereas "high theory" from Plato on ir- revocably cuts off the threads to material embodiment in order instead to draw the threads of argumentation all the more tightly together into a logical fabric, there emerges a subversive variant of low theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to an extreme. The process of truth splits into a discursive phalanx of grand theory and a satirical-literary troupe of skirmishers. With Diogenes, the resistance against the rigged game of "discourse" begins in European philosophy. Desperately funny, he resists the "linguistifica- tion" of the cosmic universalism that called the philosopher to this occupation. Whether monologic or dialogic "theory," in both, Diogenes smells the swindle of idealistic abstractions and the schizoid staleness of a thinking limited to the head. Thus he creates, as the last archaic Sophist and the first in the tradition of satirical resistance, an uncivil enlightenment. He starts the non-Platonic dia- logue. Here, Apollo, the god of illumination, shows his other face, which escaped Nietzsche: as thinking satyr, oppressor, comedian. The deadly arrows of truth rain down on the places where lies lull themselves into security behind authori- ties. "Low theory" here for the first time seals a pact with poverty and satire.
From this perspective, the significance of cheekiness is easily shown. Since philosophy can only hypocritically live out what it says, it takes cheek to say what is lived. In a culture in which hardened idealisms make lies into a form of living, the process of truth depends on whether people can be found who are aggressive and free ("shameless") enough to speak the truth. Those who rule lose their real self-confidence to the fools, clowns, and kynics; for this reason, an anecdote has Alexander the Great say that he would like to be Diogenes if he were not Alex- ander. If he were not the fool of his political ambition, he would have to play the fool in order to speak the truth to people, and to himself. (And when the powerful begin, for their part, to think kynically, when they know the truth about them- selves and, in spite of this, "go on as before," then they completely fulfill the mod- ern definition of cynicism. )
By the way, only in the last few centuries has the word "cheeky" (frech) gained a negative connotation. Initially, as for example in Old High German, it meant
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 103
a productive aggressivity, letting fly at the enemy: "brave, bold, lively, plucky, untamed, ardent. " The devitalization of a culture is mirrored in the history of this word. Those who are still cheeky today were not affected by the cooling off of the materialist heat as much as those who are inconvenienced by brazen people would like. The prototype of the cheeky is the Jewish David, who teases Goliath, "Come here, so I can hit you better. " He shows that the head has not only ears to hear and obey but also a brow with which to menacingly defy the stronger: re- bellion, affront, effrontery.
Greek kynicism discovers the animal body in the human and its gestures as ar- guments; it develops a pantomimic materialism. Diogenes refutes the language of philosophers with that of the clown: "When Plato put forward the definition of the human as a featherless biped and was applauded for it, he tore the feathers from a rooster and brought it into Plato's school saying, 'That is Plato's human'; as a result, the phrase was added: 'with flattened nails' " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 40). That--and not Aristotelianism --is the real-philosophical antithesis to Socrates and Plato. Plato and Aristotle are both master-thinkers, even if a spark of Socrates' plebeian street philosophy is still present in the Platonic ironies and dialectic mannerisms. Diogenes and his followers countered this with an essen- tially plebeian reflection. Only the theory of this cheekiness can open up access to a political history of combative reflections. This makes the history of philoso- phy possible as dialectical social history: It is the history of the embodiment and the splitting of consciousness.
Since, however, kynicism has made speaking the truth dependent on the fac- tors of courage, cheekiness, and risk, the process of truth gets caught in a previ- ously unknown moral tension; I call it the dialectic of disinhibition. Those who take the liberty of confronting prevailing lies provoke a climate of satirical loosening up in which the powerful, together
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with their ideologists of domination, let go affectively --precisely under the onslaught of the critical affront by kynics. But while kynics support their "cheekiness" with a life of ascetic integrity, they are answered, from the side of the attacked, by an idealism with a disinhibition that is disguised as outrage and that, in the most extreme case, can go as far as extermination. An essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes.
Pissing Against the Idealist Wind
nas m
eekiness > principle, two positions, namely, above and below,
egemonic power and oppositional power, expressed in the language of the Mid-
ements" from the opposition, carried by the power that comes from below. The yi'c farts, shits, pisses, masturbates on the street, before the eyes of the Athe- lan
Ages: master and serf. Ancient kynicism begins the process of "naked argu- market. He shows contempt for fame, ridicules the architecture, refuses re- 104 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
spect, parodies the stories of gods and heroes, eats raw meat and vegetables, lies in the sun, fools around with the whores and says to Alexander the Great that he
1should get out of his sun. What is this supposed to mean?
Kynicism is a first reply to Athenian hegemonic idealism that goes beyond the- oretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it. Di- ogenes may well be a figure whose public appearance can be understood in terms of the competition with Socrates; his bizarre behavior possibly signifies attempts to outdo the cunning dialectician with comedy. But this is not enough: kynicism gives a new twist to the question of how to say the truth.
The academic conversation among philosophers does not concede the materi-
alist position a fitting place --indeed, it cannot because the conversation itself
presupposes something like an idealist agreement. An existential materialist feels
misunderstood from the start in a place where people only talk. In the dialogue
of heads, only head theories will ever come up, and a head dialectics will easily
rise above the clash of an idealism with a head materialism. Socrates copes quite
well with the Sophists and the theoretical materialists if he can entice them into
a conversation in which he, as a master of refutation, is undefeatable. However,
neither Socrates nor Plato can deal with Diogenes -- for he talks with them "differ-
ently too," in a dialogue of flesh and blood. Thus, for Plato there remained no
alternative but to slander his weird and unwieldy opponent. He called him a "So-
crates gone mad" (Socrates mainoumenos). The phrase is intended as an annihila-
tion, but it is the highest recognition. Against his will, Plato places the rival on
the same level as Socrates, the greatest dialectician. Plato's hint is valuable. It
makes it clear that with Diogenes something unsettling but compelling had hap-
pened with philosophy. In the dog philosophy of the kynic (kyon, dog in
Greek; -- Trans. ), a materialist position appears that is clearly a match for the ide-
alist dialectic. It possesses the wisdom of original philosophy, the realism of a
fundamental materialist stance, and the serenity of an ironic religiosity. For all
his crassness, Diogenes is not cramped in opposition or fixated on contradiction.
His life is marked by a humorous self-certainty characteristic only of great
2spirits.
In idealism, which justifies social and world orders, the ideas stand at the top
and gleam in the light of attentiveness; matter is below, a mere reflection of the idea, a shadow, an impurity. How can living matter defend itself against this degradation? It is excluded from academic dialogue, admitted there only as theme, not as an existent. What can be done? The material, the alert body, begins to actively demonstrate its sovereignty. The excluded lower element goes to the marketplace and demonstratively challenges the higher element. Feces, urine, sperm! "Vegetate" like a dog, but live, laugh, and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection.
Now, it could be objected that these animal matters are everyday private ex- periences with the body and do not warrant
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a public spectacle. That may be, but
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 105
? ? BUSH JBI ]iimm;mim.
? . i,. . .
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Hercules pissing.
it misses the point. This "dirty" materialism is an answer not only to an exagger- ated idealism of power that undervalues the rights of the concrete. The animalities are for the kynic a part of his way of presenting himself, as well as a form of ar- gumentation. Its core is existentialism. The kynic, as a dialectical materialist, has to challenge the public sphere because it is the only space in which the overcom- ing of idealist arrogance can be meaningfully demonstrated. Spirited materialism is not satisfied with words but proceeds to a material argumentation that rehabili- tates the body. Certainly, ideas are enthroned in the academy, and urine drips dis- creetly into the latrine. But urine in the academy! That would be the total dialecti- cal tension, the art of pissing against the idealist wind.
To take what is base, separated, and private out onto the street is subversive.
106 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
This is also, as we will see, the cultural strategy of the bourgeoisie, which
achieved cultural hegemony not only through the development of commodity
economy, science, and technology, but also through a publicizing of the
private--secretly inspired by materialism--of its inner world of love, feeling,
body, with all their sensual and moral complications. For over two hundred years
we have been observing a permanent, though always contested, movement of the
private into the public sphere. Sexual experiences play a key role in this because
the dialectic of the splitting off into privacy and the return to the public realm is
forced on them with exemplary violence. Bourgeois culture, oriented toward
reality, cannot help taking up the thread of the Icynical cultural revolution. Today
we are beginning to understand that again. Willy Hochkeppel has recently
sketched the parallels between ancient kynicism and the modern hippie and alter-
3native movement. Neokynical elements have influenced bourgeois conscious-
ness of private life and existence since at least the eighteenth century. In them, a reserve of the bourgeois feeling toward life is articulated against politics-as an abstract form of life forced into false heights. For politics --of yesteryear, and more than ever, of today -- is just as the kynics of the degenerating Greek city- states experienced it: a threatening coercive relation between human beings, a sphere of dubious careers and questionable ambitions, a mechanism of alienation, the level of war and social injustice--in brief, a hell that imposes on us the exis- tence of Others above us who are capable of violence.
The public sphere of the Athenian market was electrified by the kynical offen-
sive. Although Diogenes did not accept pupils in the usual sense, his didactic im-
4pulse, even if it was subliminal, became one of the most powerful in the history
of spirit.
When Diogenes urinates and masturbates in the marketplace, he does both-
because he does them publicly --in a model situation. To publicize something im- plies the unified act of showing and generalizing (the semantic system of art is
5based on this).
rights to an unashamed experience of the corporeal that does well to defy all dis- crimination. Ethical living may be good, but naturalness is good too. That is all kynical scandal says. Because the teaching explicates life, the kynic had to take oppressed sensuality out into the market. Look, how this wise man, before whom Alexander the Great stood in admiration, enjoys himself with his own organ! And he shits in front of everybody. So that can't be all that bad. Here begins a laughter containing philosophical truth, which we must call to mind again if only because today everything is bent on making us forget how to laugh.
Later philosophies, at first the Christian, the post-Christian still more, suspend the rule of embodiment step by step. Finally, intellectuals expressly confessed the "nonidentity" of life and insight, most pointedly Adorno, who categorically dis- tinguished the validity of intellectual-spiritual (geistig) structures from the notori- ous "wretchedness" of the bearers of "spirit. " That the destruction of the principle
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The philosopher thus gives the small man in the market the same
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 107
0f embodiment is an achievement of Christian-bourgeois-capitalist schizophre- nias does not have to be demonstrated at length. The principle of embodiment cannot be upheld anymore by modern intellectuals, for reasons of cultural consti- tution. An intelligentsia that has its social role to play must become, whether it is conscious of it or not, a pilot group for existential strife. Modern philosophers, insofar as they still lay claim to this name, have transformed themselves into schizoid brain-animals --even when they turn their theoretical attention toward negativity, the excluded, the downtrodden, and the conquered.
Bourgeois Neokynicism: The Arts
That the impulse toward sensual embodiment has not been fully eradicated is es- sentially an achievement of bourgeois art (in part also of social rebellion, which, however, does not concern us here). The bourgeois arts have a philosophical sig- nificance in that they call a neokynical current to life, although not under this name. Nevertheless, when they speak of "Nature" and genius, truth, life, expres- sion, etc. , that is the kynical impulse at play. It exploits the license provided by art to express the demand for existential undividedness. The Prometheus of the effusive young Goethe could be the new guiding symbol of the impulse. Like him, art tries to create human beings in the image of whole, embodied beings who laugh and cry, enjoy themselves and are glad, and who don't give a damn about gods and laws. The young Goethe, more than any other, sensed the vital secret of bourgeois neokynicism and lived it out as art. Nature, Nature! is the battle cry of sensual enlightenment that Goethe sounded in his fascinatingly moody, aggres- sive, and-in the truest sense of the word-cheeky speech on Shakespeare Day, 1771.
Give me air, so that I can speak!
And how does our century have the cheek to judge nature. How
could we know her, we who, from our youth, feel in ourselves and see in others everything laced up and affected? And now in conclusion, al- though I have not yet begun!
What the noble philosophers have said about the world is also true of Shakespeare: What we call evil is only the other side of good; it is necessary for the existence of the good and belongs to the whole just as the Torrid Zone must burn and Lapland must freeze so that there may be a temperate zone. He leads us through the whole world, but we coddled and inexperienced human beings scream every time we see a grasshopper: Lord, he's going to eat us!
Gentlemen, rise up! Trumpet all the noble souls out of the Elysium of so-called good taste where they, drowsy and in dull twilight, are half there and half not; they have passions in the heart but no marrow in the bone. And because they are not tired enough to rest and yet are too
108 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
lazy to be active, their shadow life lazes and yawns away between myr- tle and laurel bushes.
In the Sturm und Drang of early bourgeois art, human beings not of the nobility announce --probably for the first time since antiquity --their claim to a full life, to the embodiment of their sensuousness, to undividedness. A stormy, aesthetic kynicism vents itself. It is a young, twenty-two-year-old man who attacks in an annihilatingly joyful way the rococo culture with its limp charm of inauthenticity, its cunning schizophrenias, and its moribund, manneristic theater. Goethe's speech reads like a manifesto for bourgeois neokynicism. It explodes everything that is mere morality by referring to the grand amoralism of nature; in nature, so-called evil also plays a positive role. (In chapter 7, "The Cabinet of Cynics," I will interpret Goethe's Mephistopheles in a new light--as a perplexed figure created from the substance of kynical- cynical experience. )
Bourgeois art was, of course, condemned to represent sensuous totality in fiction, if at all. Because of this weakness, bourgeois antibourgeois repeatedly re- newed the attack of neokynicism against the splitting of and the defamation of the sensual. They wanted to embody the rights to existence of the excluded low ele- ments with body and soul --beyond the boundaries of illusion. That is one of the reasons why art has its eye on "life" so much; it is its kynical impulse that wants to jump out of fiction into reality. Aesthetic amoralism is only a prelude to life demanding its sensual rights practically. We can conclude that in a sensually balanced culture, art as a whole would be "less important," less lofty, and less laden with philosophical motifs. Perhaps we are on the way to this kind of art.
During their great period, bourgeois arts were influenced by an enormous hun- ger for negativity, not least of all because the secret of vitality pulsates in this negativity. Again and again, liberating negativisms have broken through the propensity for harmonious stylization. A sensual realism rose up repeatedly against the demand for harmony. It marks the philosophical significance of bour- geois art; it makes this art into a vehicle for the Great Dialectic. Heights that are not measured against great depths are shallow; the sublime that is not brought down to earth by the comical becomes cramped. The philosophically significant bourgeois schools of art--apart from a few classicistic-harmonious and aes- theticistic, "cold" tendencies --are schools of negation, universalisms, realisms, naturalisms, expressionisms, schools of
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nakedness, of the scream, and of ex- posure. The sensual verity of the arts has offered refuge to the "whole truth. " The arts have remained a sphere where, in principle, one could "know both" --as Pas- cal had demanded of insight into the condition humaine that it know both, the great and the small, the angelic and the satanic, the high and the low. Great art sought a whole made of extremes and not a tensionless midpoint.
The limits of art, bourgeois as well as socialist, consist in the bounds set to its "realization. " It is entangled from the start in the schizoid process of civiliza-
Ur a
IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 109
tion. Society thus cultivates an ambivalent relation to the arts; they fulfill needs, it is true, but they should not "go too far. " The principle of harmony has tried since time immemorial to keep kynicism in check. The truths of art have to be fenced in if they are not to become damaging to the mentality of "useful members of soci- ety. " In these restrictions it is difficult to say what is conscious politics and what is spontaneous regulation of the relation between art and society. The fact is, however, that the boundary between art and life is almost never significantly obliterated. The Bohemians, a recent social phenomenon apart from all this, al- ways remained a minimal group even if at certain times they enjoyed a maximum of attention.
Two speculative rules of social art-ecology thus can be formulated: the genu- ine, the lively, which exists as "original," is limited by its rarity; the impulses these originals (works and individuals) emit to the masses become restricted through fictionalization. What is genuine remains rare; imitations as well as mere "curiosities" are innocuous anyway and are released for a mass market.
Art cries for life as soon as the kynical impulse is at play within it. Wherever aesthetic techniques are involved, in the press as well as the electronic media, in advertising as well as commodity aesthetics, this call is brought to the masses in its fictionally restricted form. Here art still appears as something pleasant, here there is still something beautiful at low prices. By contrast, for more than a hun- dred years, "high art" has been retreating into the difficult, the artistic, and the painful, into refined ugliness, artful brutalities, and calculated incomprehensibil- ity, into the tragically complex and the bewilderingly capricious.
Aesthetic modernity gives us an art of poisoned confectionery. It can perhaps be viewed in aroused, cold connoisseurship but it cannot be consumed without risking an upset stomach. So much fresh negativity is spewed out by the modern arts that the thought of an "enjoyment of art" vanishes. Only in snobbery, for the elite of connoisseurs and for fetishists, does the pleasure in unenjoyability flour- ish, which goes back to the dandyism of the nineteenth century and which today reemerges in the self-stylizations of cliques of youth as chic and revolting.
Whatever wants to live demands more than beautiful illusion. Ironically, of
all people, Adorno, one of the greatest theoreticians of modern aesthetics, fell
rP ey to the neokynical impulse. Does the reader remember the episode in the lec- ture hall described in the Preface? The disturbance of the lecture and the female students' naked breasts? Now, their baring was no run-of-the-mill erotic-cheeky argument with female skin. They were, almost in the ancient sense, kynically
ar
? eives, independently of the private motives of the demonstrators, was an an-
itneoretical action. In some sort of confused sense, they may have understood
eir
act as a "praxis of social change," in any case, as something more than lec- es and philosophical seminars. Adorno, in a tragic but understandable way, d slipped into the position of the idealistic Socrates, and the women into the
ed bodies, bodies as arguments, bodies as weapons. Their showing them-
110 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS'
position of the unruly Diogenes. Against the most insightful theory these-it is to be hoped --intelligent bodies willfully positioned themselves.
Cynicism as Cheekiness That Has Changed Sides
Cheekiness from below is effective when it expresses real energies as it advances. It must consciously embody its power and alertly create a reality that can at most be resisted but not denied. When the dissatisfied "serf'jokingly picks up his mas- ter in his arms, he gives a foretaste of the violence his revolt would have. A cheeky neckline, which reveals naked female skin, plays with the power that the rare exerts over the commonplace. In the old sexual economy, the strength of the weaker sex lay in the deficiency that it involuntarily-voluntarily imposed on the needs of the "stronger" sex. Finally, religious cheekiness, blasphemy, causes pi- ous seriousness to collapse when the physiologically irresistible energy of
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laugh- ter attacks it.
Certain small phrases irrefutably advance cheeky realism from below against the "law," two sets of two words, each of which deflates false pretensions: So What? and Why Not? With a persistent So What? many young people have driven their incorrigible parents enlighteningly to frustration. Children's play groups are often good schools for enlightenment because they train the saying of So What? incidentally in a natural way. That would be nothing other than the practice the
6fully socialized find so difficult: to say No always at the right moment. The fully
developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom being to take form.
That which has power can take liberties. Power, however, is above and below, of course, in distorted proportions; the serf is not nothing and the masters are not everything; subjugation is just as real as domination. The power of the underdog comes into its own individually as that cheekiness that constitutes the core of power in kynicism. With it, those who are disadvantaged can anticipate their own sovereignty. A second level on which the underdogs try out possibilities of will- fulness is subversion, willful praxis in the sense of semiliberties that stretch the law. We probably only seldomly make clear to ourselves how immense the factor of subversion in our society can be--a world in shadows, full of secretive cheeki- ness and realisms of all kinds, full of resistances, discharges, machinations, and a sense for one's own advantage. Half of normality consists of microscopic devia- tions from the norms. This field of willfulness, of the little tricks in life, and of black morality is almost just as unresearched as, on the other side, the expansion of corruption. Both are, in the nature of things, scarcely accessible. We know about them but do not speak about them.
The freedom of the hegemonic powers is also a double freedom. In the first place, it comprises the privileges and liberties of masters that are connected with hegemonic power itself. There is no cheekiness involved in taking such liberties
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D i l l
? Cynicism as rulers' joke: "Condemned! "
BEBEL: The teacher asked the small boy why he wanted to go to heaven, and what
was the answer? There I wouldn't be hungry anymore! Is there anything more outrageous, is there anything that incites more against today's social order than the statement of this child?
LORD v. ARNIM: Perhaps the father had drunk everything! (Stormy boos from the Social Democrats. )
BEBEL: That is an infamy! The gentleman laughs, that is a coarseness of tempera- ment! (Stormy approval to the left. Noise to the right. )
but there is tact in not being ostentatious in enjoying them. Most of the old seig- neurs, for example, did not exercise the right of sexual feudalism, the "right to the first night" with the brides of serfs, and the high life of today's superrich is discreetly concealed behind middle-class facades, or in closed milieus.
But also for the powerful there is something that amounts to semiliberties. As a rule, they allow themselves such liberties only under pressure because, in so doing, they betray themselves to opposing consciousness. The consciousness of the master knows its own specific cheekiness: master cynicism in the modern sense of the word, as distinct from the kynical offensive. Ancient kynicism, pri- mary and pugnacious kynicism, was a plebeian antithesis to idealism. Modern cynicism, by contrast, is the masters' antithesis to their own idealism as ideology and as masquerade. The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adver- sary, and suppresses him. C'est la vie. Noblesse oblige. Order must prevail. The force of circumstances often exceeds the insight of those concerned, is that not so? Coercion by power, the compulsion of "things"! In its cynicisms hegemonic Power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-self-enlightenment, and tells all.
7Master cynicism is a cheekiness that has changed sides. Now it is not David who
challenges Goliath, but the Goliaths of all times --from the arrogant Assyrian
112 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
? Thomas Theodor Heine. Through Darkest Germany, 2. An Execution, 1899 (Sim- plicissimus No. 35, title page). "Now, be calm, my good fellow. Be glad that you aren't a Social Democrat; then things would get even nastier for you. " ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military kings to modern bureaucracy --who show the brave but doomed David who is on top and who is on the bottom. Cynicism in public service. The wittiness of those who are in any case on top assumes some strange forms. When Marie Antoinette inquired about the reasons for the unrest among the people, she was told: "The people are starving, Your Majesty, they have no bread. " Her reply: "If the people have no bread, why don't they eat cake? " (Conversely, F. J. Strauss says, "In life we cannot eat Black Forest cake every day. ")
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As soon as master consciousness has unmasked itself even slightly with its cynicisms, it betrays itself to the oppositional power. But what if there is no such power? In societies where there is no effective moral alternative and where poten- tial oppositional powers are to a large extent entangled in the apparatuses of power, there is no longer anybody in a position to become outraged about the cynicisms of hegemonic power. The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation. "Basic values" and excuses merge imperceptibly. The
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 113
bearers of hegemonic power in the political and economic scene become hollow, schizoid, unconvincing. We live under the management of respectable players. If, earlier, great politicians were those who were "free" enough to become cynics so that they could play coolly with means and ends, today every functionary and backbencher is as experienced in this regard as Talleyrand, Metternich, and Bis- marck put together.
Jiirgen Habermas, with his theory of the crisis of legitimation, has undoubt- edly struck the nerve of nerves in modern political systems. The question re- mains, Who can be the subject of knowledge about the legitimation crisis? Who enlightens, and who is the enlightened? Cynicism proceeds by way of a diffusion of the subject of knowledge, so that the present-day servant of the system can very well do with the right hand what the left hand never allowed. By day, colonizer, at night, colonized; by occupation, valorizer and administrator, during leisure time, valorized and administered; officially a cynical functionary, privately a sen- sitive soul; at the office a giver of orders, ideologically a discussant; outwardly a follower of the reality principle, inwardly a subject oriented toward pleasure; functionally an agent of capital, intentionally a democrat; with respect to the sys- tem a functionary of reification, with respect to the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), some- one who achieves self-realization; objectively a strategist of destruction, subjec- tively a pacifist; basically someone who triggers catastrophes, in one's own view, innocence personified. With schizoids anything is possible, and enlightenment and reaction do not make much difference. With the enlightened integrated person --in this world of clever, instinctive conformists--the body says no to the compulsions of the head, and the head says no to the way in which the body pro- cures its comfortable self-preservation. This mixture is our moral status quo. Theory of the Double Agent
It is time to speak of a phenomenon that seemingly manages to survive only on the margins of political systems; in fact, however, it touches on the existential core of societies: the phenomenon of secret agents. The psychology of agents, especially of the double agent, would be the most important chapter in present- day political psychology. Incredible stories are told of conspiratorial groups in Switzerland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where an im- penetrable snarl of czarist, anticzarist, Communist, anarchist, and Western Euro- pean groups of agents had arisen. They all kept their eyes on each other, and their calculations and consciousnesses reflected on and into one another. In the heads of the conspiratorial party cells as well as in the secret police planted among them, fantastically convoluted tactics and metatactics were spun out. One has heard of double and triple agents who themselves in the end no longer exactly knew for whom they were really working and what they were seeking for themselves in this double and triple role playing. They were initally committed to one side, were
114 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
then bought off, and were finally enticed back by their own original party, etc. There was basically no longer any self that would have been able to "self- seekingly obtain advantages from all sides. What is self-interest in someone who no longer knows where his "self is?
But much the same thing can be said, I believe, for anyone who takes a place in the body politic (Staatskorper) or in corporations or institutions and knows roughly in which direction the state is heading. Between loyalties and insights an ever-widening gulf is opening that makes it difficult to know where one stands. On which side do our loyalties lie? Are we agents of the state and of institutions? Or agents of enlightenment? Or agents of monopoly capital? Or agents of our own vital interests that secretly cooperate in constantly changing double binds with the state, institutions, enlightenment, counterenlightenment, monopoly capital, so- cialism, etc. , and, in so doing, we forget more and more what we our"selves" sought in the whole business?
It was no accident that it was Walter Benjamin, that great expert in polyvalent meaning who built secret bridges between Judaism and sociology, Marxism and messianism, art and critique, who introduced the agent motif into the human sciences --recall, for example, his famous and cunning interpretation of Baudelaire in which he characterized the poet as a secret agent of his class. The multiple-agent activity of the intelligentsia is characteristic of modernity-- a fact that has always seemed threatening to those simplifiers who were determined to do battle and to those who think in terms of friend and foe. (Was Stalinism not, among other things, an attempt to break out of the ineluctable multiple binds of every intelligentsia by means of a paranoic simplification of the fronts so that once again everything would become simple enough for even Stalin to comprehend? This could be called, somewhat more elegantly, "the reduction
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of complexity. ")
Who is subjectively, objectively, implicitly, and explicitly whose agent, func- tionary of which link in the system, helper of which tendency? In Stalinist think- ing, to this day, one uses the word "objective" when one wants to dissolve double binds and ambivalences by force. Those who deny complex realities like to pre- tend to be "objective" and accuse those who are conscious of problems of fleeing from reality and daydreaming. Not even with the seemingly most unambiguous and most decisive figures can it be "objectively" determined which tendency they have ultimately signed themselves up for, especially when one considers that his- tory, in spite of all plans, obeys the rules of a game that escapes our grasp. The parties and groups that present themselves to the public with decisive programs are themselves masks of tendencies that reach beyond them and about whose final results one can say little in advance. Marxists like to fantasize in this twilight about a great, secret demiurge, a supercynical trickster who sits in the association of German industrialists, or who even has a ministerial post without portfolio in the chancellor's office and makes the state dance to the tune of the large industries. This projective strategy of simplification is as innocently naive as it is innocently
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 115
artful. It has a grand history - right up to Balzac with his mysterious thirteen who, behind the scenes, held the strings in their hands like a cosa nostra of capital.
The most devastating of such fantasies was an invention from the world of Rus- sian secret agents before the turn of the century: the fantasy of the "wise men of Zion," an anti-Semitic fabrication in which an originally Enlightenment satire (by M. Joly) wandered by way of the mind of a cynical chief of the secret service in Paris, who forged the alleged "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," into the mind of a confused Russian philosopher of religion. From there the "Protocols" made the return journey to Europe, where they became the main document of anti-Semitic paranoia and had an impact on Hitler and from there to Auschwitz. That was a subterfuge in the simplifications of German fascism that projected the anonymous effects of the system onto demonic "intentions" so that even confused simple citizens did not lose the "overview. "
Cheeky Social History
The history of cheekiness is not a discipline of historiography, and I do not know whether it would do the matter a favor if it were to become one. History is always a secondary force that must be preceded by an impulse of the moment. As far as cynicism is concerned, the impulse should be obvious; with respect to kynicism and cheekiness, the impulse will probably be sought in vain.
Since antiquity, the role of the city in the genesis of satirical consciousness is sociohistorically uncontroversial. However, in Germany after the decline of the cities during the Thirty Years' War, there was for a long time no city with a metropolitan character. As late as 1831, Heinrich Heine had to emigrate to Paris-the principal city of the nineteenth century-in order to breathe liberating city air. "I went because I had to.
Some have been trying for a long time to bring their psychoanalysis to a close, and others have been asking themselves for a long time if they can justify not yet having begun analysis. But you also have to think about what it costs and how much the insurance pays, and whether afterward you can still get on as well as you think, in the middle of your misery,
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you should be able to get on, because you are not sure at the beginning whether you want to go on as you did before. Oh, and another thing: It turns out that good cooking is not a betrayal and that this stupid stuff about consumption and having a car is not really so . . .
In such a time of open secrets, where a crazy small-scale economy splits think- ing, where so-called society dissolves into hundreds of thousands of strands of planning and improvisation that mutually ignore one another but are related through all kinds of absurdities --in such a time it cannot do enlightenment, or what is left of it, any harm to reflect critically on its foundations. There have been impressive examples of such critical reflection for a long time. For a long time, the "public sphere" was one of the strongest themes of a renewed enlightenment, especially in connection with the word "experience" and even more so with "life context" (Lebenszusammenhang), which was so pleasant to write because you got the feeling that somehow or other life forms contexts, and context is like a prom- ise of meaning. However, in the meantime, the intellectual hunting fever for the "life context" has faded because this life context represents a being at least as rare as the Wolper- tinger, a hare with antlers that lives in Bavaria and that Bavarian practical jokers used to hunt when vacationers from Prussia had become much too cocky and needed to be taught a lesson. But now that the Prussians stay away and build their
6own "life context" behind self-activating shooting devices, hunting for Wolper- tinger, the special enlightenment for sly Prussians, has slackened off just as much as
enlightenment in general and enlightenment for non-Prussians.
What next? In the fifth preliminary reflection, which introduces the actual in- vestigation of the foundations of cynical reason, I want to try to name a source ? f enlightenment in which the secret of its vitality is hidden: cheekiness {Freeh- 100 D AFTER THE UNMASKINGS: CYNICAL TWILIGHT
heit, a word whose meaning lies somewhere between cheekiness and impu- dence-Trans. )-
Notes
1. "It is misspent effort to try to enlighten humankind. One has to be content with being wise one- self, if one can, but leave the mob to error and strive only to keep it from crimes that disturb the social order" (Frederick II of Prussia in a letter to dAlembert, 1770).
2. Said less ceremoniously, in the great pell-mell, in the ambivalence of the factual.
3. Besides this I discuss the historical discrediting of the Marxist alternative ("Marxist Elegy," this chapter) and the clouding over of the sociopsychological atmosphere as a whole (chapter 5, sec- tion entitled "Unashamed Happiness"). 4. See also Peter Jirak, "Zukunft als Provinz," Frankfurter Hefte, vol. 33 (April 4, 1978).
5. [The "Spontis" were the advocates of spontaneity in the West German student move- ment. -Trans. ]
6. [Prussia lies in present-day East Germany. --Trans. 1
Chapter 5
"In Search of Lost Cheekiness"
A timid arse seldom lets go with a joyful fart.
Lutheran saying
The objection, the side leap, light-hearted mistrust,
the pleasure in mockery are signs of health: Everything that is unqualified belongs to pathology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
They have laid their hands on my entire life; so let it stand up and confront them. . .
Danton, before sentence is passed on him
Greek Philosophy of Cheekiness: Kynicism
Ancient kynicism, at least in its Greek origins, is in principle cheeky. In its cheek- iness lies a method worthy of discovery. This first really "dialectical material- ism," which was also an existentialism, is viewed unjustly, beside the great sys- tems in Greek philosophy --Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoa--as a mere game of satyrs, as a half-jovial, half-dirty episode, and is passed over. In kynismos a kind of argumentation was discovered that, to the present day, respectable thinking does not know how to deal with. Is it not crude and grotesque to pick one's nose while Socrates exorcises his demon and speaks of the divine soul? Can it be called anything other than vulgar when Diogenes lets a fart fly against the Platonic the- ory of ideas-or is fartiness itself one of the ideas God discharged from his medi- tation on the genesis of the cosmos? And what is it supposed to mean when this philosophizing town bum answers Plato's subtle theory of eros by masturbating in public?
To understand these apparently irrelevantly provocative gestures, it is worth reflecting on a principle that called into being the doctrines of wisdom and that was regarded by the ancient world as a truism, before modern developments
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eradicated it. For the philosopher, the human being who exemplifies the love of truth and conscious living, life and doctrine must be in harmony. The core of ev- ery doctrine is what its followers embody of it. This can be misunderstood in an idealistic way as if it were philosophy's innermost aim to get people to chase after unattainable ideals. But if philosophers are called on to live what they say, their
101
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task in a critical sense is much more: to say what they live. Since time im- memorial, every ideality must be materialized and every materiality idealized in order to be real for us, as beings in the middle. A separation of person and thing, theory and praxis at this elementary level cannot be taken into consideration at all-except perhaps as a sign of a corruption of truth. To embody a doctrine means to make oneself into its medium. This is the opposite of what is demanded in the moralistic plea for behavior guided strictly by ideals. By paying attention to what can be embodied, we remain protected from moral demagogy and from the terror of radical abstractions that cannot be lived out. (The question is not what is virtue without terror but what is terror other than consistent idealism. )
The appearance of Diogenes marks the most dramatic moment in the process of truth of early European philosophy: Whereas "high theory" from Plato on ir- revocably cuts off the threads to material embodiment in order instead to draw the threads of argumentation all the more tightly together into a logical fabric, there emerges a subversive variant of low theory that pantomimically and grotesquely carries practical embodiment to an extreme. The process of truth splits into a discursive phalanx of grand theory and a satirical-literary troupe of skirmishers. With Diogenes, the resistance against the rigged game of "discourse" begins in European philosophy. Desperately funny, he resists the "linguistifica- tion" of the cosmic universalism that called the philosopher to this occupation. Whether monologic or dialogic "theory," in both, Diogenes smells the swindle of idealistic abstractions and the schizoid staleness of a thinking limited to the head. Thus he creates, as the last archaic Sophist and the first in the tradition of satirical resistance, an uncivil enlightenment. He starts the non-Platonic dia- logue. Here, Apollo, the god of illumination, shows his other face, which escaped Nietzsche: as thinking satyr, oppressor, comedian. The deadly arrows of truth rain down on the places where lies lull themselves into security behind authori- ties. "Low theory" here for the first time seals a pact with poverty and satire.
From this perspective, the significance of cheekiness is easily shown. Since philosophy can only hypocritically live out what it says, it takes cheek to say what is lived. In a culture in which hardened idealisms make lies into a form of living, the process of truth depends on whether people can be found who are aggressive and free ("shameless") enough to speak the truth. Those who rule lose their real self-confidence to the fools, clowns, and kynics; for this reason, an anecdote has Alexander the Great say that he would like to be Diogenes if he were not Alex- ander. If he were not the fool of his political ambition, he would have to play the fool in order to speak the truth to people, and to himself. (And when the powerful begin, for their part, to think kynically, when they know the truth about them- selves and, in spite of this, "go on as before," then they completely fulfill the mod- ern definition of cynicism. )
By the way, only in the last few centuries has the word "cheeky" (frech) gained a negative connotation. Initially, as for example in Old High German, it meant
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 103
a productive aggressivity, letting fly at the enemy: "brave, bold, lively, plucky, untamed, ardent. " The devitalization of a culture is mirrored in the history of this word. Those who are still cheeky today were not affected by the cooling off of the materialist heat as much as those who are inconvenienced by brazen people would like. The prototype of the cheeky is the Jewish David, who teases Goliath, "Come here, so I can hit you better. " He shows that the head has not only ears to hear and obey but also a brow with which to menacingly defy the stronger: re- bellion, affront, effrontery.
Greek kynicism discovers the animal body in the human and its gestures as ar- guments; it develops a pantomimic materialism. Diogenes refutes the language of philosophers with that of the clown: "When Plato put forward the definition of the human as a featherless biped and was applauded for it, he tore the feathers from a rooster and brought it into Plato's school saying, 'That is Plato's human'; as a result, the phrase was added: 'with flattened nails' " (Diogenes Laertius, vol. VI, p. 40). That--and not Aristotelianism --is the real-philosophical antithesis to Socrates and Plato. Plato and Aristotle are both master-thinkers, even if a spark of Socrates' plebeian street philosophy is still present in the Platonic ironies and dialectic mannerisms. Diogenes and his followers countered this with an essen- tially plebeian reflection. Only the theory of this cheekiness can open up access to a political history of combative reflections. This makes the history of philoso- phy possible as dialectical social history: It is the history of the embodiment and the splitting of consciousness.
Since, however, kynicism has made speaking the truth dependent on the fac- tors of courage, cheekiness, and risk, the process of truth gets caught in a previ- ously unknown moral tension; I call it the dialectic of disinhibition. Those who take the liberty of confronting prevailing lies provoke a climate of satirical loosening up in which the powerful, together
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with their ideologists of domination, let go affectively --precisely under the onslaught of the critical affront by kynics. But while kynics support their "cheekiness" with a life of ascetic integrity, they are answered, from the side of the attacked, by an idealism with a disinhibition that is disguised as outrage and that, in the most extreme case, can go as far as extermination. An essential aspect of power is that it only likes to laugh at its own jokes.
Pissing Against the Idealist Wind
nas m
eekiness > principle, two positions, namely, above and below,
egemonic power and oppositional power, expressed in the language of the Mid-
ements" from the opposition, carried by the power that comes from below. The yi'c farts, shits, pisses, masturbates on the street, before the eyes of the Athe- lan
Ages: master and serf. Ancient kynicism begins the process of "naked argu- market. He shows contempt for fame, ridicules the architecture, refuses re- 104 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
spect, parodies the stories of gods and heroes, eats raw meat and vegetables, lies in the sun, fools around with the whores and says to Alexander the Great that he
1should get out of his sun. What is this supposed to mean?
Kynicism is a first reply to Athenian hegemonic idealism that goes beyond the- oretical repudiation. It does not speak against idealism, it lives against it. Di- ogenes may well be a figure whose public appearance can be understood in terms of the competition with Socrates; his bizarre behavior possibly signifies attempts to outdo the cunning dialectician with comedy. But this is not enough: kynicism gives a new twist to the question of how to say the truth.
The academic conversation among philosophers does not concede the materi-
alist position a fitting place --indeed, it cannot because the conversation itself
presupposes something like an idealist agreement. An existential materialist feels
misunderstood from the start in a place where people only talk. In the dialogue
of heads, only head theories will ever come up, and a head dialectics will easily
rise above the clash of an idealism with a head materialism. Socrates copes quite
well with the Sophists and the theoretical materialists if he can entice them into
a conversation in which he, as a master of refutation, is undefeatable. However,
neither Socrates nor Plato can deal with Diogenes -- for he talks with them "differ-
ently too," in a dialogue of flesh and blood. Thus, for Plato there remained no
alternative but to slander his weird and unwieldy opponent. He called him a "So-
crates gone mad" (Socrates mainoumenos). The phrase is intended as an annihila-
tion, but it is the highest recognition. Against his will, Plato places the rival on
the same level as Socrates, the greatest dialectician. Plato's hint is valuable. It
makes it clear that with Diogenes something unsettling but compelling had hap-
pened with philosophy. In the dog philosophy of the kynic (kyon, dog in
Greek; -- Trans. ), a materialist position appears that is clearly a match for the ide-
alist dialectic. It possesses the wisdom of original philosophy, the realism of a
fundamental materialist stance, and the serenity of an ironic religiosity. For all
his crassness, Diogenes is not cramped in opposition or fixated on contradiction.
His life is marked by a humorous self-certainty characteristic only of great
2spirits.
In idealism, which justifies social and world orders, the ideas stand at the top
and gleam in the light of attentiveness; matter is below, a mere reflection of the idea, a shadow, an impurity. How can living matter defend itself against this degradation? It is excluded from academic dialogue, admitted there only as theme, not as an existent. What can be done? The material, the alert body, begins to actively demonstrate its sovereignty. The excluded lower element goes to the marketplace and demonstratively challenges the higher element. Feces, urine, sperm! "Vegetate" like a dog, but live, laugh, and take care to give the impression that behind all this lies not confusion but clear reflection.
Now, it could be objected that these animal matters are everyday private ex- periences with the body and do not warrant
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a public spectacle. That may be, but
'IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 105
? ? BUSH JBI ]iimm;mim.
? . i,. . .
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Hercules pissing.
it misses the point. This "dirty" materialism is an answer not only to an exagger- ated idealism of power that undervalues the rights of the concrete. The animalities are for the kynic a part of his way of presenting himself, as well as a form of ar- gumentation. Its core is existentialism. The kynic, as a dialectical materialist, has to challenge the public sphere because it is the only space in which the overcom- ing of idealist arrogance can be meaningfully demonstrated. Spirited materialism is not satisfied with words but proceeds to a material argumentation that rehabili- tates the body. Certainly, ideas are enthroned in the academy, and urine drips dis- creetly into the latrine. But urine in the academy! That would be the total dialecti- cal tension, the art of pissing against the idealist wind.
To take what is base, separated, and private out onto the street is subversive.
106 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
This is also, as we will see, the cultural strategy of the bourgeoisie, which
achieved cultural hegemony not only through the development of commodity
economy, science, and technology, but also through a publicizing of the
private--secretly inspired by materialism--of its inner world of love, feeling,
body, with all their sensual and moral complications. For over two hundred years
we have been observing a permanent, though always contested, movement of the
private into the public sphere. Sexual experiences play a key role in this because
the dialectic of the splitting off into privacy and the return to the public realm is
forced on them with exemplary violence. Bourgeois culture, oriented toward
reality, cannot help taking up the thread of the Icynical cultural revolution. Today
we are beginning to understand that again. Willy Hochkeppel has recently
sketched the parallels between ancient kynicism and the modern hippie and alter-
3native movement. Neokynical elements have influenced bourgeois conscious-
ness of private life and existence since at least the eighteenth century. In them, a reserve of the bourgeois feeling toward life is articulated against politics-as an abstract form of life forced into false heights. For politics --of yesteryear, and more than ever, of today -- is just as the kynics of the degenerating Greek city- states experienced it: a threatening coercive relation between human beings, a sphere of dubious careers and questionable ambitions, a mechanism of alienation, the level of war and social injustice--in brief, a hell that imposes on us the exis- tence of Others above us who are capable of violence.
The public sphere of the Athenian market was electrified by the kynical offen-
sive. Although Diogenes did not accept pupils in the usual sense, his didactic im-
4pulse, even if it was subliminal, became one of the most powerful in the history
of spirit.
When Diogenes urinates and masturbates in the marketplace, he does both-
because he does them publicly --in a model situation. To publicize something im- plies the unified act of showing and generalizing (the semantic system of art is
5based on this).
rights to an unashamed experience of the corporeal that does well to defy all dis- crimination. Ethical living may be good, but naturalness is good too. That is all kynical scandal says. Because the teaching explicates life, the kynic had to take oppressed sensuality out into the market. Look, how this wise man, before whom Alexander the Great stood in admiration, enjoys himself with his own organ! And he shits in front of everybody. So that can't be all that bad. Here begins a laughter containing philosophical truth, which we must call to mind again if only because today everything is bent on making us forget how to laugh.
Later philosophies, at first the Christian, the post-Christian still more, suspend the rule of embodiment step by step. Finally, intellectuals expressly confessed the "nonidentity" of life and insight, most pointedly Adorno, who categorically dis- tinguished the validity of intellectual-spiritual (geistig) structures from the notori- ous "wretchedness" of the bearers of "spirit. " That the destruction of the principle
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The philosopher thus gives the small man in the market the same
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 107
0f embodiment is an achievement of Christian-bourgeois-capitalist schizophre- nias does not have to be demonstrated at length. The principle of embodiment cannot be upheld anymore by modern intellectuals, for reasons of cultural consti- tution. An intelligentsia that has its social role to play must become, whether it is conscious of it or not, a pilot group for existential strife. Modern philosophers, insofar as they still lay claim to this name, have transformed themselves into schizoid brain-animals --even when they turn their theoretical attention toward negativity, the excluded, the downtrodden, and the conquered.
Bourgeois Neokynicism: The Arts
That the impulse toward sensual embodiment has not been fully eradicated is es- sentially an achievement of bourgeois art (in part also of social rebellion, which, however, does not concern us here). The bourgeois arts have a philosophical sig- nificance in that they call a neokynical current to life, although not under this name. Nevertheless, when they speak of "Nature" and genius, truth, life, expres- sion, etc. , that is the kynical impulse at play. It exploits the license provided by art to express the demand for existential undividedness. The Prometheus of the effusive young Goethe could be the new guiding symbol of the impulse. Like him, art tries to create human beings in the image of whole, embodied beings who laugh and cry, enjoy themselves and are glad, and who don't give a damn about gods and laws. The young Goethe, more than any other, sensed the vital secret of bourgeois neokynicism and lived it out as art. Nature, Nature! is the battle cry of sensual enlightenment that Goethe sounded in his fascinatingly moody, aggres- sive, and-in the truest sense of the word-cheeky speech on Shakespeare Day, 1771.
Give me air, so that I can speak!
And how does our century have the cheek to judge nature. How
could we know her, we who, from our youth, feel in ourselves and see in others everything laced up and affected? And now in conclusion, al- though I have not yet begun!
What the noble philosophers have said about the world is also true of Shakespeare: What we call evil is only the other side of good; it is necessary for the existence of the good and belongs to the whole just as the Torrid Zone must burn and Lapland must freeze so that there may be a temperate zone. He leads us through the whole world, but we coddled and inexperienced human beings scream every time we see a grasshopper: Lord, he's going to eat us!
Gentlemen, rise up! Trumpet all the noble souls out of the Elysium of so-called good taste where they, drowsy and in dull twilight, are half there and half not; they have passions in the heart but no marrow in the bone. And because they are not tired enough to rest and yet are too
108 ? "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS"
lazy to be active, their shadow life lazes and yawns away between myr- tle and laurel bushes.
In the Sturm und Drang of early bourgeois art, human beings not of the nobility announce --probably for the first time since antiquity --their claim to a full life, to the embodiment of their sensuousness, to undividedness. A stormy, aesthetic kynicism vents itself. It is a young, twenty-two-year-old man who attacks in an annihilatingly joyful way the rococo culture with its limp charm of inauthenticity, its cunning schizophrenias, and its moribund, manneristic theater. Goethe's speech reads like a manifesto for bourgeois neokynicism. It explodes everything that is mere morality by referring to the grand amoralism of nature; in nature, so-called evil also plays a positive role. (In chapter 7, "The Cabinet of Cynics," I will interpret Goethe's Mephistopheles in a new light--as a perplexed figure created from the substance of kynical- cynical experience. )
Bourgeois art was, of course, condemned to represent sensuous totality in fiction, if at all. Because of this weakness, bourgeois antibourgeois repeatedly re- newed the attack of neokynicism against the splitting of and the defamation of the sensual. They wanted to embody the rights to existence of the excluded low ele- ments with body and soul --beyond the boundaries of illusion. That is one of the reasons why art has its eye on "life" so much; it is its kynical impulse that wants to jump out of fiction into reality. Aesthetic amoralism is only a prelude to life demanding its sensual rights practically. We can conclude that in a sensually balanced culture, art as a whole would be "less important," less lofty, and less laden with philosophical motifs. Perhaps we are on the way to this kind of art.
During their great period, bourgeois arts were influenced by an enormous hun- ger for negativity, not least of all because the secret of vitality pulsates in this negativity. Again and again, liberating negativisms have broken through the propensity for harmonious stylization. A sensual realism rose up repeatedly against the demand for harmony. It marks the philosophical significance of bour- geois art; it makes this art into a vehicle for the Great Dialectic. Heights that are not measured against great depths are shallow; the sublime that is not brought down to earth by the comical becomes cramped. The philosophically significant bourgeois schools of art--apart from a few classicistic-harmonious and aes- theticistic, "cold" tendencies --are schools of negation, universalisms, realisms, naturalisms, expressionisms, schools of
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nakedness, of the scream, and of ex- posure. The sensual verity of the arts has offered refuge to the "whole truth. " The arts have remained a sphere where, in principle, one could "know both" --as Pas- cal had demanded of insight into the condition humaine that it know both, the great and the small, the angelic and the satanic, the high and the low. Great art sought a whole made of extremes and not a tensionless midpoint.
The limits of art, bourgeois as well as socialist, consist in the bounds set to its "realization. " It is entangled from the start in the schizoid process of civiliza-
Ur a
IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 109
tion. Society thus cultivates an ambivalent relation to the arts; they fulfill needs, it is true, but they should not "go too far. " The principle of harmony has tried since time immemorial to keep kynicism in check. The truths of art have to be fenced in if they are not to become damaging to the mentality of "useful members of soci- ety. " In these restrictions it is difficult to say what is conscious politics and what is spontaneous regulation of the relation between art and society. The fact is, however, that the boundary between art and life is almost never significantly obliterated. The Bohemians, a recent social phenomenon apart from all this, al- ways remained a minimal group even if at certain times they enjoyed a maximum of attention.
Two speculative rules of social art-ecology thus can be formulated: the genu- ine, the lively, which exists as "original," is limited by its rarity; the impulses these originals (works and individuals) emit to the masses become restricted through fictionalization. What is genuine remains rare; imitations as well as mere "curiosities" are innocuous anyway and are released for a mass market.
Art cries for life as soon as the kynical impulse is at play within it. Wherever aesthetic techniques are involved, in the press as well as the electronic media, in advertising as well as commodity aesthetics, this call is brought to the masses in its fictionally restricted form. Here art still appears as something pleasant, here there is still something beautiful at low prices. By contrast, for more than a hun- dred years, "high art" has been retreating into the difficult, the artistic, and the painful, into refined ugliness, artful brutalities, and calculated incomprehensibil- ity, into the tragically complex and the bewilderingly capricious.
Aesthetic modernity gives us an art of poisoned confectionery. It can perhaps be viewed in aroused, cold connoisseurship but it cannot be consumed without risking an upset stomach. So much fresh negativity is spewed out by the modern arts that the thought of an "enjoyment of art" vanishes. Only in snobbery, for the elite of connoisseurs and for fetishists, does the pleasure in unenjoyability flour- ish, which goes back to the dandyism of the nineteenth century and which today reemerges in the self-stylizations of cliques of youth as chic and revolting.
Whatever wants to live demands more than beautiful illusion. Ironically, of
all people, Adorno, one of the greatest theoreticians of modern aesthetics, fell
rP ey to the neokynical impulse. Does the reader remember the episode in the lec- ture hall described in the Preface? The disturbance of the lecture and the female students' naked breasts? Now, their baring was no run-of-the-mill erotic-cheeky argument with female skin. They were, almost in the ancient sense, kynically
ar
? eives, independently of the private motives of the demonstrators, was an an-
itneoretical action. In some sort of confused sense, they may have understood
eir
act as a "praxis of social change," in any case, as something more than lec- es and philosophical seminars. Adorno, in a tragic but understandable way, d slipped into the position of the idealistic Socrates, and the women into the
ed bodies, bodies as arguments, bodies as weapons. Their showing them-
110 D "IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS'
position of the unruly Diogenes. Against the most insightful theory these-it is to be hoped --intelligent bodies willfully positioned themselves.
Cynicism as Cheekiness That Has Changed Sides
Cheekiness from below is effective when it expresses real energies as it advances. It must consciously embody its power and alertly create a reality that can at most be resisted but not denied. When the dissatisfied "serf'jokingly picks up his mas- ter in his arms, he gives a foretaste of the violence his revolt would have. A cheeky neckline, which reveals naked female skin, plays with the power that the rare exerts over the commonplace. In the old sexual economy, the strength of the weaker sex lay in the deficiency that it involuntarily-voluntarily imposed on the needs of the "stronger" sex. Finally, religious cheekiness, blasphemy, causes pi- ous seriousness to collapse when the physiologically irresistible energy of
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laugh- ter attacks it.
Certain small phrases irrefutably advance cheeky realism from below against the "law," two sets of two words, each of which deflates false pretensions: So What? and Why Not? With a persistent So What? many young people have driven their incorrigible parents enlighteningly to frustration. Children's play groups are often good schools for enlightenment because they train the saying of So What? incidentally in a natural way. That would be nothing other than the practice the
6fully socialized find so difficult: to say No always at the right moment. The fully
developed ability to say No is also the only valid background for Yes, and only through both does real freedom being to take form.
That which has power can take liberties. Power, however, is above and below, of course, in distorted proportions; the serf is not nothing and the masters are not everything; subjugation is just as real as domination. The power of the underdog comes into its own individually as that cheekiness that constitutes the core of power in kynicism. With it, those who are disadvantaged can anticipate their own sovereignty. A second level on which the underdogs try out possibilities of will- fulness is subversion, willful praxis in the sense of semiliberties that stretch the law. We probably only seldomly make clear to ourselves how immense the factor of subversion in our society can be--a world in shadows, full of secretive cheeki- ness and realisms of all kinds, full of resistances, discharges, machinations, and a sense for one's own advantage. Half of normality consists of microscopic devia- tions from the norms. This field of willfulness, of the little tricks in life, and of black morality is almost just as unresearched as, on the other side, the expansion of corruption. Both are, in the nature of things, scarcely accessible. We know about them but do not speak about them.
The freedom of the hegemonic powers is also a double freedom. In the first place, it comprises the privileges and liberties of masters that are connected with hegemonic power itself. There is no cheekiness involved in taking such liberties
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D i l l
? Cynicism as rulers' joke: "Condemned! "
BEBEL: The teacher asked the small boy why he wanted to go to heaven, and what
was the answer? There I wouldn't be hungry anymore! Is there anything more outrageous, is there anything that incites more against today's social order than the statement of this child?
LORD v. ARNIM: Perhaps the father had drunk everything! (Stormy boos from the Social Democrats. )
BEBEL: That is an infamy! The gentleman laughs, that is a coarseness of tempera- ment! (Stormy approval to the left. Noise to the right. )
but there is tact in not being ostentatious in enjoying them. Most of the old seig- neurs, for example, did not exercise the right of sexual feudalism, the "right to the first night" with the brides of serfs, and the high life of today's superrich is discreetly concealed behind middle-class facades, or in closed milieus.
But also for the powerful there is something that amounts to semiliberties. As a rule, they allow themselves such liberties only under pressure because, in so doing, they betray themselves to opposing consciousness. The consciousness of the master knows its own specific cheekiness: master cynicism in the modern sense of the word, as distinct from the kynical offensive. Ancient kynicism, pri- mary and pugnacious kynicism, was a plebeian antithesis to idealism. Modern cynicism, by contrast, is the masters' antithesis to their own idealism as ideology and as masquerade. The cynical master lifts the mask, smiles at his weak adver- sary, and suppresses him. C'est la vie. Noblesse oblige. Order must prevail. The force of circumstances often exceeds the insight of those concerned, is that not so? Coercion by power, the compulsion of "things"! In its cynicisms hegemonic Power airs its secrets a little, indulges in semi-self-enlightenment, and tells all.
7Master cynicism is a cheekiness that has changed sides. Now it is not David who
challenges Goliath, but the Goliaths of all times --from the arrogant Assyrian
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? Thomas Theodor Heine. Through Darkest Germany, 2. An Execution, 1899 (Sim- plicissimus No. 35, title page). "Now, be calm, my good fellow. Be glad that you aren't a Social Democrat; then things would get even nastier for you. " ((C)S. P. A. D. E. M. , Paris/V. A. G. A. , New York, 1987. )
military kings to modern bureaucracy --who show the brave but doomed David who is on top and who is on the bottom. Cynicism in public service. The wittiness of those who are in any case on top assumes some strange forms. When Marie Antoinette inquired about the reasons for the unrest among the people, she was told: "The people are starving, Your Majesty, they have no bread. " Her reply: "If the people have no bread, why don't they eat cake? " (Conversely, F. J. Strauss says, "In life we cannot eat Black Forest cake every day. ")
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As soon as master consciousness has unmasked itself even slightly with its cynicisms, it betrays itself to the oppositional power. But what if there is no such power? In societies where there is no effective moral alternative and where poten- tial oppositional powers are to a large extent entangled in the apparatuses of power, there is no longer anybody in a position to become outraged about the cynicisms of hegemonic power. The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end, it is ironical about its own legitimation. "Basic values" and excuses merge imperceptibly. The
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" D 113
bearers of hegemonic power in the political and economic scene become hollow, schizoid, unconvincing. We live under the management of respectable players. If, earlier, great politicians were those who were "free" enough to become cynics so that they could play coolly with means and ends, today every functionary and backbencher is as experienced in this regard as Talleyrand, Metternich, and Bis- marck put together.
Jiirgen Habermas, with his theory of the crisis of legitimation, has undoubt- edly struck the nerve of nerves in modern political systems. The question re- mains, Who can be the subject of knowledge about the legitimation crisis? Who enlightens, and who is the enlightened? Cynicism proceeds by way of a diffusion of the subject of knowledge, so that the present-day servant of the system can very well do with the right hand what the left hand never allowed. By day, colonizer, at night, colonized; by occupation, valorizer and administrator, during leisure time, valorized and administered; officially a cynical functionary, privately a sen- sitive soul; at the office a giver of orders, ideologically a discussant; outwardly a follower of the reality principle, inwardly a subject oriented toward pleasure; functionally an agent of capital, intentionally a democrat; with respect to the sys- tem a functionary of reification, with respect to the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), some- one who achieves self-realization; objectively a strategist of destruction, subjec- tively a pacifist; basically someone who triggers catastrophes, in one's own view, innocence personified. With schizoids anything is possible, and enlightenment and reaction do not make much difference. With the enlightened integrated person --in this world of clever, instinctive conformists--the body says no to the compulsions of the head, and the head says no to the way in which the body pro- cures its comfortable self-preservation. This mixture is our moral status quo. Theory of the Double Agent
It is time to speak of a phenomenon that seemingly manages to survive only on the margins of political systems; in fact, however, it touches on the existential core of societies: the phenomenon of secret agents. The psychology of agents, especially of the double agent, would be the most important chapter in present- day political psychology. Incredible stories are told of conspiratorial groups in Switzerland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where an im- penetrable snarl of czarist, anticzarist, Communist, anarchist, and Western Euro- pean groups of agents had arisen. They all kept their eyes on each other, and their calculations and consciousnesses reflected on and into one another. In the heads of the conspiratorial party cells as well as in the secret police planted among them, fantastically convoluted tactics and metatactics were spun out. One has heard of double and triple agents who themselves in the end no longer exactly knew for whom they were really working and what they were seeking for themselves in this double and triple role playing. They were initally committed to one side, were
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then bought off, and were finally enticed back by their own original party, etc. There was basically no longer any self that would have been able to "self- seekingly obtain advantages from all sides. What is self-interest in someone who no longer knows where his "self is?
But much the same thing can be said, I believe, for anyone who takes a place in the body politic (Staatskorper) or in corporations or institutions and knows roughly in which direction the state is heading. Between loyalties and insights an ever-widening gulf is opening that makes it difficult to know where one stands. On which side do our loyalties lie? Are we agents of the state and of institutions? Or agents of enlightenment? Or agents of monopoly capital? Or agents of our own vital interests that secretly cooperate in constantly changing double binds with the state, institutions, enlightenment, counterenlightenment, monopoly capital, so- cialism, etc. , and, in so doing, we forget more and more what we our"selves" sought in the whole business?
It was no accident that it was Walter Benjamin, that great expert in polyvalent meaning who built secret bridges between Judaism and sociology, Marxism and messianism, art and critique, who introduced the agent motif into the human sciences --recall, for example, his famous and cunning interpretation of Baudelaire in which he characterized the poet as a secret agent of his class. The multiple-agent activity of the intelligentsia is characteristic of modernity-- a fact that has always seemed threatening to those simplifiers who were determined to do battle and to those who think in terms of friend and foe. (Was Stalinism not, among other things, an attempt to break out of the ineluctable multiple binds of every intelligentsia by means of a paranoic simplification of the fronts so that once again everything would become simple enough for even Stalin to comprehend? This could be called, somewhat more elegantly, "the reduction
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of complexity. ")
Who is subjectively, objectively, implicitly, and explicitly whose agent, func- tionary of which link in the system, helper of which tendency? In Stalinist think- ing, to this day, one uses the word "objective" when one wants to dissolve double binds and ambivalences by force. Those who deny complex realities like to pre- tend to be "objective" and accuse those who are conscious of problems of fleeing from reality and daydreaming. Not even with the seemingly most unambiguous and most decisive figures can it be "objectively" determined which tendency they have ultimately signed themselves up for, especially when one considers that his- tory, in spite of all plans, obeys the rules of a game that escapes our grasp. The parties and groups that present themselves to the public with decisive programs are themselves masks of tendencies that reach beyond them and about whose final results one can say little in advance. Marxists like to fantasize in this twilight about a great, secret demiurge, a supercynical trickster who sits in the association of German industrialists, or who even has a ministerial post without portfolio in the chancellor's office and makes the state dance to the tune of the large industries. This projective strategy of simplification is as innocently naive as it is innocently
"IN SEARCH OF LOST CHEEKINESS" ? 115
artful. It has a grand history - right up to Balzac with his mysterious thirteen who, behind the scenes, held the strings in their hands like a cosa nostra of capital.
The most devastating of such fantasies was an invention from the world of Rus- sian secret agents before the turn of the century: the fantasy of the "wise men of Zion," an anti-Semitic fabrication in which an originally Enlightenment satire (by M. Joly) wandered by way of the mind of a cynical chief of the secret service in Paris, who forged the alleged "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," into the mind of a confused Russian philosopher of religion. From there the "Protocols" made the return journey to Europe, where they became the main document of anti-Semitic paranoia and had an impact on Hitler and from there to Auschwitz. That was a subterfuge in the simplifications of German fascism that projected the anonymous effects of the system onto demonic "intentions" so that even confused simple citizens did not lose the "overview. "
Cheeky Social History
The history of cheekiness is not a discipline of historiography, and I do not know whether it would do the matter a favor if it were to become one. History is always a secondary force that must be preceded by an impulse of the moment. As far as cynicism is concerned, the impulse should be obvious; with respect to kynicism and cheekiness, the impulse will probably be sought in vain.
Since antiquity, the role of the city in the genesis of satirical consciousness is sociohistorically uncontroversial. However, in Germany after the decline of the cities during the Thirty Years' War, there was for a long time no city with a metropolitan character. As late as 1831, Heinrich Heine had to emigrate to Paris-the principal city of the nineteenth century-in order to breathe liberating city air. "I went because I had to.
