Even his
sophisticated
dog-eat-dog crime sto- ries maintain a style that has more of the master in it than the dog.
Sloterdijk -Critique of Cynical Reason
Dada demanded from exis- tence (Dasein) an absolute simultaneity with the tendencies of its own time-- existential avant-garde.
Only what was most advanced lived with Dada on one time line: war as mobilization and self-disinhibition; the most advanced destruc- tive procedures even into the arts; an tipsy chology, antibourgeoisie.
It is the pa- thos of truth in this current to have the times in one's nerves and to think and to
2We can hear a philosophical echo here; namely, Dada anticipates motifs of Heidegger's existential ontology, which, for its part, criticizes the lie of the sub- ject in the European philosophy of domination on the highest conceptual plane. The ego is not the master of the world but lives in it under the sign of thrownness (Geworfenheit); we make at most "projections" (Entwurfe), but these too are in turn "projected projects" (geworfene Entwurfe), so that primarily a passive struc-
ture toward being holds true. Next door we hear:
To be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to be against every formation of a sediment, to have sat for a moment on the chair means: to have brought life into danger.
dadaistisches manifest (leaflet, 1918)
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
The idea could occur to us that existential ontology is an academic catching up to "Dada philosophy" or "Dadaology"-- whereby Martin Heidegger would have contested the status of head Dada held by the master, Johannes Baader, with enormous success. The secret of Heidegger's success touches the point that con- stitutes the "failure" of Dada: respectability. Instead of the unrespectably glitter- ing productions of Dadaist "projected" artists of life and politicking satyrs, projectedness in its respectable variant won out.
The Dada attack has both a kynical and a cynical aspect. The atmosphere of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 395
the first is playful and productive, childish and childlike, wise, generous, ironi- cal, sovereign, unassailably realistic; the second aspect reveals strong destructive tensions, hate and haughty defensive reactions against the internalized fetish of the citizen, considerable projection, and a dynamic of affects of contempt and dis- appointment, self-hardening and loss of irony. It is not easy to separate these two aspects. They make the Dada phenomenon as a whole into a scintillating complex that evades simple evaluations and uncomplicated emotional responses. Dada also behaves ambiguously toward fascism: With its kynical elements, Dada be- longs definitely to antifascism and to the logic and "aesthetic of resistance. " With its cynical elements, by contrast, it leans toward the prefascist aesthetics of anni- hilation that wants to enjoy the intoxication of demolition to the full. Dada tends to struggle against the "bloody earnestness"--which, however, with its aggressive aspects, lies deep within Dada itself. The Dadaists by no means succeeded in treating their own motives ironically: In their ironic poses, much unfree destruc- tiveness remained stuck and in their way of letting themselves go, a lot of resis- tance and self-hardening could be demonstrated.
"Dadasophy" develops here and there mystically ironic visions that celebrate life in its undivided fullness, but these are despairingly exaggerated in tone, as in the proclamation of the chief Dada, Johannes Baader.
"A Dadaist is someone who loves life in all its limitless shapes and who knows and says: Not only here, but also there, there, there, (da, da, da) is life! The genuine Dadaist thus also masters(? ) the whole regis- ter(! ) of human expressions of life, starting with grotesque self- persiflage up to the most holy word of the church service on the ball, called earth, which has become mature and which belongs to all people.
Even in such megalomaniac hymns of the sect's chieftain, Baader, who proclaimed himself president of the universe, the typical attempts of a more en- compassing affirmation appear, in which Dada irony fits well with the kynical as- pect of religion (see the works on mysticism by Dadaists, especially Hugo Ball).
In Dadaism, a provisional philosophy of Yes is attempted that refers, above all, to the concrete, momentary, droll, and creative energy of the Dada in- dividual. The Yes holds for the state of the world, which it treats ironically, but even more for the lived moment, in which the miracle of an eternal, fleeting pres- ent and the existentialist paradox of the inner "duration," simultaneously per-
3meated and untouched by the turbulence in the world, are realized. superstructure must be annihilated so that this vital- dynamic element can step into the foreground. The Dadaists thus often see even in expressionism only the con- tinuation of German idealism: "nauseous mystification of things, called expres- sionism. "
The first expressionist, a person who invented "inner freedom," was a
The cultural
396 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
gluttonous and sodden Saxon, Martin Luther. He effected the protesting turn of the German to an inexplicable "inwardness" amounting to men- dacity, a juggling with imagined sufferings, abyss of the "soul" and its power beside a servile malleability toward official power. He is the fa- ther of Kant, Schopenhauer and today's idiocy in art, which stares past the world and thereby thinks it has overcome it.
Hausmann, Riickkehr zur Gegenstdndlichkeit in der Kunst
Nietzsche's kynical realism echos here --with the same anti-Protestant compo- nent of hate. The Dadaist Yes to reality and to realization does not concern itself with the opinion of experts, connoisseurs, snobs, and critics. One may understand Dadaism as a prelude to an emancipation of dilettantes that assumes that the joy in creating is more important than the successful result. Ability is only an embel- lishment of genuineness. It is not the lasting works that count, but the moment of their intensive realization.
A further Nietzschean motif--the recurrence of the Same --can be found in Dadasophy. In a brilliant sketch, It Was Done by Dada: A Trialogue between Hu- man Beings, broad historical dimensions are skimmed through.
There has always been Dada, in old Egypt just as much as in Europe or Mexico. The Dadaist, my dear Doctor Smartney, is independent of time. . . .
. . . it is continually reborn, it is handed down through the chain of generations; Dada is an eminently metaphysical matter. . . .
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
. . . Dada is the great scrutinizer and catcher of moralists. . . .
You regard it as the religious worldview of an ancient Egyptian
sect --but Dada also appeared in India. The Sivaites of the left hand cul- tivated it. In the Gilgamesh epic of the old Assyrians you will find references that Dada is identical with the birth of the world. In the Di- onysus mysteries Dada is to be found just as much as in the oracular sayings of the priests of Dodona. . . .
Dada is the greatest irony. It appears as a tendency but is no ten- dency. . . .
The sexual criminal Alton was a Dadaist when he wrote in his diary: Killed a young girl today, it was fine and hot . . . Manolescu was a Dadaist when he appeared as a prince and took lodgings in the emperor's court without knowing how we would pay the bill. Dada is the American side of Buddhism . . .
Dadaist documents are always forged, (pp. 110-13)
That Dadaist thinking cannot be summarized and reduced to a formula lies in its structure based on instantaneity. It moves entirely within processes, leaps, points that in their very essence cannot be abbreviated. The thing itself is its exe- cution (a theme that, by the way, dominates reflection philosophy, particularly in Fichte and Hegel). To talk "about" Dada consciousness means almost automati-
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 397
cally to place oneself beneath its plane. If we nevertheless try to say something general about it, we do this with the express remark that the object is not the Dada documents but the Dada method.
I want to call it a procedure of "reflected negation"--in other words, a tech- nique of disordering meaning, a nonsense procedure. Wherever firm "values," higher meanings, and deeper significance emerge, Dada attempts a disordering of meaning. Dada provides an explicit technique in the disappointment of meaning --and thereby stands in a broader spectrum of semantic cynicisms with which the demythologization of the world and of metaphysical consciousness
4 reachesaradicalfinalstage. Dadaismandlogicalpositivism arepartsofaproc-
5ess that pulls the ground out from under all faith in universal concepts,
for the world and totalizations. They both work like a garbage disposal in the de- praved European superstructure of ideas. The Dadaists indeed were all descended from a generation that a short time before had still genuflected with insuperable awe before everything called art, work of art, culture, and genius. For them the first task was a grand cleaning up in one's own head, of one's own past. They ne- gate, as apostates of an earlier faith in art, their previous way of living and the tradition in which they can no longer "stand": bestowing meaning through art and the elevation of the ordinary to the significant. In the backlash against this declin- ing way of living, Dada finds acidic words, particularly with regard to the "last" tendency in art, expressionism:
No, gentlemen, art is not in danger --for art no longer exists. It is dead. It was the development of all things, it still enveloped the bulbous nose and the swinish lips of Sebastian Miiller with beauty, it was a beautiful illusion proceeding from a sunny serene feeling toward life(! ) --and now nothing elevates us any longer, nothing at all! . . . The absolute in- capability . . . this is expressionism . . . The writing or painting petit-bourgeois could regard himself as solidly sacred; he finally grew somehow beyond himself into an indeterminate, universal world drowsiness --Oh expressionism, you turning point in the world of romantic falsehood.
Hausmann, Der deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
It is no accident that this posture that storms against art had its day once more around 1968 when the Dada of the New Left was "reborn" in activism, happen- ings, go-ins, love-ins, shit-ins--all the body Dadaisms of a renovated kynical consciousness.
6Dada does not revolt against bourgeois "institution art. " Dada turns against
art as a technique of bestowing meaning. Dada is antisemantics. It rejects "style" as pretense of meaning just as much as the deceitful "beautifying" of things ? . . As antisemantics, Dadaism systematically disrupts-not metaphysics but the talk about it: The metaphysical domain is laid bare as a festival ground; there,
formulas
398 Q DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
everything is allowed, except "opinions. " The "irony of life" (Hausmann) is sup- posed to be captured by Dadaist irony. Even Dadaism as style would already be a step backward--and precisely in this sense art history has appropriated it and ordered it into the museum of stylistic schools. Foreseeing this, Hausmann said he is actually speaking an anti-Dadaist. Because Dada is a procedure, it cannot "sit on a chair"; every style is a chair. In this sense, Dada understands itself even as an "exact technique"; it says No, methodically and without fail, when a "mean- ing of the world" emerges that does not concede that it is nonsense. All opining, every idealization is sublated in intellectual movement-montage and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
demontage, improvisation and revocation.
The sharpest honing was given to Dadaist semantic cynicism by Walter Serner, the writer whom Lessing called a "German Maupassant. " The fact that he has been rediscovered in our day shows that in West Germany, too, a public has been formed in which the sense for cynicism has grown and that can read this author because, in his polished immoralism, a sense for highly conscious, "unfor- tunately necessary" malice, all too well understandable today, betrays itself. Forty pages of incomparable prose, Letzte Lockerung {Final Slackening), origi- nate from Serner, written in the last year of the First World War, published in 1920 by Paul Stegemann in Hannover in the collection, Die Silbergaule (The sil- ver nags), a series of philosophical-poetic miniatures, composed of cultural cri- tique and cyanide. Nowhere else can the meaning of sublation (Aufhebung) be studied with such sharpness-a violent and simultaneously playful bursting of all cultural semantics, of positing meaning, philosophies, and exercises in art. Bru- tally and elegantly, this prose strikes out on all sides. Serner presents a theory
of language games beside which Wittgenstein's theory looks like finger exercises for respectable Ph. D. candi-dates (Habili-Tanten, p. 4).
In this "slackening," the disinhibition of a certain suicidal tendency also betrays itself. Intellectual aggressivity is directed not only outwardly and brings about not only a spectacular repulsive reaction by civilization critique. Serner, the most reflective of the Dadaists, provided himself with an account of the fact that the Dadaist hatred of culture is logically directed inwardly, against the culture-in-me I once "possessed" and that now is good for nothing.
Favorable proposal: Before going to sleep, one imagines with the most pronounced clarity the final stage of a suicide who, by means of the bullet, wants to finally weld self-consciousness into himself, (p. 8)
Where no content counts anymore, only a moment of desperate intensity re- mains, a suicide's self-consciousness that is "through" with everything. Existence as being unto death. After this, there is no longer any question that Dadaism and Heideggerian existential ontology nurture a subterranean community of inspira- tion with each other.
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 399
At the zero point of meaning, only a pathetic contempt for meaning still stirs itself--an all-penetrating nausea about "positivity": "Weltanschauungen are word
7mixtures" (p. 5).
there words and sentences that afford no connection. He projects this disconnect- edness onto the world, which, accordingly, can no longer be a "cosmos. " Dadaist antisemantics proceeds consistently to an anticosmology. From now on, it keeps a sharp eye on people as they paste together worldviews and conceptions of order. In the beginning was the chaos into which people, in their debility and hunger for meaning, dream a cosmos.
Set a redeeming heaven down on top of this chaos of smut and riddle! ! Scent human dung with order! ! ! I thank . . . Therefore . . . philoso- phies and novels are sweated over, pictures smeared down, sculptures tinkered with, symphonies etched out and religions started! What a shattering ambition--especially because these vain donkey tricks have all thoroughly (particularly in German regions) missed the mark. It's all balderdash! ! ! " (pp. 5-6)
Here, one of the naivetes of the older positivism comes to light, namely, that it conceives of the world as a confusion of "facts" that whirl about together just like the sentences in the heads of the logical positivists. However--in contrast to Serner, who tries to outdo the unbearable through affirmation--they cannot bear this chaos of uncoordinated sentences. Therefore, they put formal-logical corsets on their "facts. " In their approach, they are all chaotologists. They all assume the precedence of the unordered, the hypercomplex, the meaningless, and that which demands too much of us. Cynical semantics (up to Luhmann) can do nothing other than to charge order to the account of cultural caprice or the coercion toward a system.
With Serner, we see how the otherwise playful dadasophy turns into a humor- less, cold romantics. It is a romantics of utter unnai'vete. In it, the anxiety of being taken by surprise by a naive gesture or a surrender is at work. That drives malevo- lent reflection into its own hardened flesh. No search for a better life is counter- posed to the universal unhappiness. Rather, the attempt is made to counter the given unhappiness with self-intended "high" misery like a sovereign trump card. This is the way a consciousness behaves that is not only despairing but also ele- vates the wish to be hard as the point of departure for its self-modeling. In his unholy self-reflection, Serner practices the art of piling up and outdoing every "positive" thought with objections, detachments, and condescending commen- taries in a distrustful and furious manner. Self-experience and self-destruction be- come one and the same. Everything is rage that, to be sure, expresses itself but does not discharge itself in a liberating way.
In true positivist manner, Serner looks into his head and finds
Rage is thus life itself? To be sure: rage contains most of all upright-
400 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ness; to be sure: all other states can only be suffered in that the rage re- mains hidden or in that the master dissimulates. . . . However: sense- lessness, at its highest point is rage, rage, rage, and is far from being meaning, (p. 42)
In this sense, a subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century --from Dada to the punk movement and the necrophilic robot gestics of New Wave. Here, a mannerism of rage makes itself felt that gives the great dead ego a pedestal from which the nauseous, incomprehensible world can be despised.
It is urgent that these reflective spaces of modern unhappy consciousness be described because they are the spaces in which the phenomenon of fascism, too, insofar as it is militant nihilism, consolidates. Even in the obvious stupidity of Nazi ideology, a certain "artful dimension" was hidden in the structure. Insofar as Dada presented a cynical show, it led a struggle of unhappy consciousness for sovereignty in spite of the feeling of meaninglessness for grand poses in spite of inner hollowness. Semantic cynicism is accompanied not only by suicidal inclina- tions but also by the risk of hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through the paradoxical "sensuousness" of fascism, which brought a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle that covered up the long-felt nothing- ness. In the hysteria a will to break through the self-controls of the lifeless every- day ego expresses itself. The hysteria is driven, according to Lacan's malicious aphorism, by the search for a master to tyrannize. To the extent that a spark of political hysteria was effective in Dadaism, this hysteria still had a strong realist component. For the master Dada sought in order to beat him up also existed, out- side Dada consciousness in reality, and as warlord in this imperialist-bourgeois world war he was objectively worse than any hoax, no matter how malicious. Fascist hysteria, by contrast, even invented the master it wanted to tyrannize, and itself conjured up a Jewish world conspiracy in order to eradicate a people whose existence was, to be sure, no mere figment of the imagination.
Serner's Final Slackening thus remained a penultimate slackening. As far as we know, his whole life long, he did not let the mask of the gentleman fall. True, he saw the world as having "gone to the dogs," but he himself shrank back from "going before the dogs" (Kastner).
Even his sophisticated dog-eat-dog crime sto- ries maintain a style that has more of the master in it than the dog.
The dadasopher, Raoul Hausmann, kept closer to the secret of the kynical pleasure in disputation, which can attack without falling into self-destruction. He consciously oriented himself toward the sounder forms of symbolic destructive- ness, toward the "alertness of laughter, irony and the useless," toward the "jubila- tion of Orphic nonsense" (p. 50). That is the way Diogenes' dogs bark. "This
damned Christ said: See the lilies in the field. I say: See the dogs in the street"
(Sublitterel [1919], p. 53).
8DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 401
Excursus 1. Bluff Twilight
/ know exactly what the people want: the world is motley, senseless, pretentious and intellectually inflated. They want to despise, show up, deny, destroy that. One can surely talk about that. . . . Those who hate fervently must have once loved deeply. Those who want to deny the world must have embraced what they now set on fire.
Kurt Tucholsky, Dada, 20 July 1920
In Tucholsky the Dadaists found their first apparently well-meaning psychologist. He tried, as popular explicator, to extract the good contained in the bad in order to simultaneously justify and belittle it. Tucholsky translates the Dadaist dissolu- tion back into a serious language --he calls this understanding "these people. " They are, like all of us, those who have been disappointed by the bad world, who only let off steam more forcefully than our kind. The Berlin Dada phenomena be- ing spoken about here are interpreted by Tucholsky as symptoms of a great loss of love through which Yes has been turned into No and love into hate. Through the explanation of its psychic mechanism, the matter seems to have been brought into order again. If the negative is really only the inversion of the positive, we must know this and then "we can surely talk about it. " In this way, the psy- chologizing journalist determines how negativity is to be dealt with. To be sure, he himself knows irony all too well, but his way of lessening the gravity of things is through melancholy. He does not really consider an aggressive irony. It thus must happen that with his "understanding," he pensively belittles the thing to be explained: "When we subtract what is bluff in this association, not a terrible lot remains" (p. 125). But who said that we should "subtract" the bluff? With this for- mula, Tucholsky gets caught in his respectable misunderstanding. For the Dada procedure, bluff is indeed fundamental. Bluff and bewilderment (Verbluffung) be- long together and produce a provocative wake-up effect. Dada builds in a certain way on a bluff realism and demonstrates a technique of deception (Tduschung), exposure (Enttduschung), and self-exposure (Selbstenttauschung). As a method- ology of bluff (of pretense and disruption of meaning), Dada shows ironically how modern ideology functions: to establish values and act as if one believed in them, and then to show that one has not the slightest intention of believing in them. With this self-dissolution (Selbstaufliebung) of weltanshauung ("word mix-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ture"), Dada betrays the modus operandi of modern consciousness with all its notorious meaning swindles. Tucholsky cannot, or rather, does not want to see this. He himself still postulates objective "meaning. " For this reason he does not come up to the level of the object he wanted to explain. He does not see that the methods of advertising, political propaganda, activist and neoconservative welt- anschauungen, of the hit parade and entertainment industry, etc. , have here been
402 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
laid out like a toolbox, or better, like a grammar before our understanding. For Dada contains a bluff theory in action. Without a theory of bluff, of show, seduc- tion, and deception, modern structures of consciousness cannot be explained at all properly. It may give cause for reflection that Tucholsky, up to just before the seizure of power, views the ascendant nazism still from the viewpoint of "respect- able irony" and is full of contempt for the stupidity, crampedness, bluff, posing, bigmouthedness, etc. , of the Nazis. To the last, this remains the tenor of Tucholsky's anti-Fascist feuilletons that otherwise leave nothing to be desired regarding sharpness. But the sharpness of real understanding is missing. Like all other defenders of melancholy seriousness, he is unable to develop a penetrant relation to "reflexive ideology" and to the phenomena of bluff and disingenuous opinion. (In this regard, he was completely different from Brecht, who from the ground up was in a position to think in the opponent's thought forms: to "tack," to weave, to let oneself go, and at the same time, to control oneself. )
Tucholsky's political moralism is expressed most clearly in his notes on the Dada trial before the Second District Court in Berlin in 1921. At that time, the case before the court concerned a plea by members of the army (Reichswehr) against George Grosz's drawings "God is with us"--"in which grimacing faces (of soldiers) of . . . unheard of brutality were to be seen" (Dada, p. 127). The five accused--Baader, Grosz, Herzfelde, Schlichter, and Burchardt (the gallery owner)- disappointed the expectations of the left-wing trial observers. Instead of confessing, they tried to get off by belittling themselves.
Five living beings on the bench for the accused, among them one man: Wieland Herzfelde. He was the only one who said here what was necessary and did not shrink back. . . . None of the boys was the one who had smashed the window pane. . . . As far as Grosz is con- cerned, I do not know whether the laxity of his defense can be traced to the fact that he cannot speak. . . . His plea saved Grosz's neck and was annihilating for him and his friends. "So that's your defense! Did you intend it to be so? " (Ibid. , pp. 128-29)
Is Tucholsky here not following an outmoded moral psychology? Consistency
right up to jail and full-blooded political character? More "identity," more confes-
sion, longer sentences? Does he not see that the ruling ideology wants precisely
the same thing, namely, to isolate culprits with political persuasions? Does the
man of conviction not have an advertising function for the political opponent? In
any case, it remains remarkable that Tucholsky's demand for "character" related
to people who were just more or less in the process of consciously developing
9an ironic strategy. Instead of profiting from the new art of "sublation,"
Tucholsky relied on melancholic lethargy. Here, he missed an experience that would have saved him from certain surprises in 1933. Those who treat
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 403
phenomena of bluff as something one should "disregard" must remain blind to fas- cism, even if in other ways they are the bravest anti-Fascists in the world.
Klaus Mann grasped the problematic of bluff from a somewhat clearer per- spective. But he, too, sees the matter somewhat defensively.
We want to distinguish ourselves from the Nazis, for whom everything, from their "nationalism" up to their "socialism," is mere tactics (that is, bluff, trick and swindle), above all through the fact that we are serious about what we say; that we really mean the words and ideas with which we try to draw support for our cause. (Heimsuchung des europaischen Geistes, Essays [Munich, 1973], p. 49).
Klaus Mann was one of the first to view the cynical component of Fascist "ideology" clearly. He developed nothing less than the relatedness of the actor with the Fascist politician out of the spirit of bluff (see the novel Mephisto). How- ever, it remains questionable whether he, for his part, can really be serious about the antithesis to it: "to mean it seriously. " What is an antifascism and an antini- hilism that itself is essentially based on the fact that one, more sure than one can be, erects "opposed values" and behaves respectably only so as not to be cynical like the others? Is antinihilism itself not simply an obstructed nihilism?
Grosz, who had worked off the hate within himself in his early work, much later described the connection between
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
nihilism and commitment (as antinihilism) as follows:
We demanded more. We did not quite know how to say what that more was; but many of my friends and I did not find any solution in the merely negative, in the rage at having been deceived and in the denial of all previous values. And so we were driven as a matter of course more and more to the Left. --
Soon I was head over heels in political currents. I gave speeches, not because of some conviction or other, but because everywhere at any hour people hung around disputing and because I had not yet learned anything from my experiences. My speeches were a stupid, parroted enlightenment babble, but when it dripped out of the mouth like honey, you could pretend that you were deeply moved. And often, your own twaddle really moved you, purely through the noise, sishing, twittering and bellowing that came out of you! (p. 115)
I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in certain political theories (Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein [Hamburg, 1974], p. Ill)
It must be said, however, that this is a different Grosz talking, a Grosz who, in exile in America, has sat down, inwardly and outwardly, in Dadaist language, "on the chair. " What remains significant about this testimony is that it originates 404 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
from someone who ran the entire gamut of negativism, political commitment, and withdrawal and could document it as a survivor. When Grosz wrote his memoirs, the two critics of bluff, Tucholsky and Mann, had long since killed themselves.
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic
In everyone, the ice dogs bark. Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! )
(1927)
A thought-provoking coincidence: When nazism came to power, on January 30,
1933, the January-February issue of the journal Psychoanalytische Bewegung
10
(Psychoanalytic movement) appeared in which, for the first time,
Freud's addressed extensively the phenomenon of cynicism (Edmund Bergler, Zur Psychoanalyse des Zynikers I; the second part followed in the next issue).
Next to this remarkable temporal constellation, another rather piquant obser- vation is to be noted: Here, an author has something to say about a topic that stands in a thoroughly explosive relation to his profession. For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on cynicism talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis. In 1933, an analyst could actually have found himself ex- posed to the charge of reinforcing a pornographic and cynical picture of humanity (two expressions that could easily be fused with the epithet "Jewish" in a fatal way). Here, then, a psychologist has ventured into the lion's den. He tries to put the "cynicism" of analysis out of action through an analysis of cynicism. At one point, Bergler himself even betrays a powerful kynical bite, precisely when he defends himself against the charge that psychoanalysis, with its exposure of psy- chic mechanisms, could be suspected of cynicism. Psychoanalysis is none-the- less, he notes, a "respectable science" and science is no "life insurance for illu- sions" (p. 141). For the rest, Bergler's interest centers on personalities in whom cynical tendencies are striking, as his depth- psychological studies of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Grabbe, and others demonstrate. It is obvious that his reflections are motivated by current events - as shown not least of all by the fact that as examples he brings in texts and events of the most recent times, for example, Erich Kast-
11
ner's novel Fabian from 1931.
some examples, that he believes he has found traits of cynicism in some patients that, as a rule, manifest themselves in the form of aggressions against him, the analyst. To that extent, we are justified in saying that this psychoanalytic state- ment on cynicism arose in a thick mesh of current motives and stimuli that tie the text precisely to the historical moment (1932-33) and to the author's professional situation. He defends his profession against the charge of cynicism; he diagnoses some patients who attack him as having traits of cynicism ("moral insanity").
Finally, Bergler's study reveals, with the use of
a pupil of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 405
There is thus no question that here we are in the middle of things --even when they are spoken about matter-of-factly. What strikes us is the extraordinary emphasis with which the analyst proclaims cynicism, or better, the "cynical mechanisms" to be a manifestation of the uncon- scious and of the persisting infantile component in the adult. With a grand gesture the whole domain of cynical phenomena is pocketed for psychoanalysis. Bergler allows only four of the sixty-four listed forms and variants of cynicism to count as "conscious," and even behind these, insofar as they are not
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
disqualified from the beginning as "shallow" and "worthless," he conjectures that there are "grave neuroses. "
Cynicism, says Bergler, is one of the forms in which people with extremely strong emotional ambivalences (hates-loves; respects-contempts, etc. ) create a psychic possibility for discharge. Cynical "discharge" accordingly stands on the same level as classic neurotic mechanisms such as the hysterical, melancholic, compulsive, paranoid, and criminal(! ) defenses. In cynicism, the negative, ag- gressive side of the ambivalence can be expressed. However, this side alone does not characterize "cynical discharge. " In addition, an extremely strong "uncon- scious need to be punished" must be present--masochistic and exhibitionist ten- dencies (although male verbal cynics are often said to be strikingly prone to shame regarding their bodies). In cynical speech, a psychodynamic related to the compulsion to confess (Reik) is said to be at work-to know that one violates the commandments of the strict "super ego," but that one cannot refrain from the in- fringements, and so, to settle the inner conflict thus created, one resorts to truth that is now aggressively revealed. The cynic attacks the outer world in trying to overcome an "inner conflict. " "He beats the others; he wants to beat his con- science" (p. 36).
But through its aggressive, comical side cynicism is also a method of gaining pleasure, and this in a sevenfold way: (1) because cynics become temporarily free of guilt by means of an apposite remark; (2) because the rage of others amuses them (this thesis is reflected in the blurb from J. Drews [ed. ], Zynisches Worter- buch [Zurich, 1978]); (3) because they can enjoy their own exhibitionistic tenden- cies; (4) because cynicism is a method of distancing; (5) because narcissistic plea- sure can occur insofar as clever statements are admired; (6) because jokes are simply funny; (7) last of all, because thereby cynics can live out their infantile tendencies --by which are meant early infantile fantasies of grandeur, "anal" ten- dencies, and early sexual-cynical rage against the whore in the mother, said more generally, the scars of old Oedipus conflicts.
The crux of this interpretation of cynicism is the older psychoanalytic su- perego theory that sees the human being as a creature that continually cowers un- der the commands and threats of a lofty, strict, "heavenly" superego. However, it is curious that the analyst who deals with the cultural relativity of the so-called superego (which is expressed in cynicism) does not venture to think through this
406 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
? From Neue Jugend (June 1917, Malik-Verlag).
concept of the superego --as if his intellect cowered and crouched under the authority of the superfather, Freud. This is curious because Bergler comments on phenomena in which obviously the superego does not succeed in confirming itself in the cynic's behavior. Should the superego too not be something more than it once was?
It seems that Bergler begins, against his will, to give an account of this. Cyni- cism is after all a phenomenon that belongs to the "dialectic of culture," and inso- far as psychoanalysis as a theory of psychic processes is inevitably a theory of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 407
culture, in the long run, it cannot pretend that cultural phenomena such as cyni- cism can be treated merely psychodynamically. In fact, this is precisely the topic through which psychoanalysis sublates itself. The individual psyche has to be grasped just as much from the cultural aspect as the latter has to be grasped from the psychic aspect. The universal, transtemporal, strict superego is a superseded analytic fiction. In most of Bergler's examples --there are some very nice ones among them, and they alone make the reading rewarding --we can say that the mechanisms of the cynics' statements were hidden to them only if we do violence to these examples. They know what they say and they say it not so much on the basis of "unconscious" mechanisms but because they have become conscious of real contradictions. Thus they often express a contradiction kynically, or they ex- press one of the many forms of mauvaise foi cynically. The unconscious scarcely has to make an effort. The conscious participation of the ego is objective immoral- isms and the obvious fragmentation of morals explain the matter much more effectively than does the depth- psychological theory. Only at one point does the analyst widen his field of view.
The flooding of the entire culture with fear of one's conscience (Gewis- sensangst) leads to the circumstance that even there, where persons seek to rid themselves of their fetters in thought, as in cynicism, noth- ing other(! ) than a compromise with the superego comes about. One is thus not very far removed from reality when one says that cynicisms are profoundly also a bowing before the superego and compromises with the inner voice of conscience. "Not all those are free who mock their chains," taught a poet-philosopher. But that even in this mockery people pay tribute to the superego is grotesque, (p. 166)
It cannot be better said: "One is thus not very far removed from real- ity . . . ," but still pretty far away. Bergler understands that many forms of cynicism are efforts to strip oft fetters--consequently, that cynicism belongs to the dynamic of cultural liberation struggles and the social dialectic of values and that it is one of the most important methods of working through ambivalences in a culture. The expression "compromise" indeed hints in this direction.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
With something that stood "above" me, no compromises could be concluded; then it would just be a matter of obeying. The compromise is concluded with an authority that has no penetrating imper- ative force --with a weak superego and a conscience that only pricks but can no longer give orders. Bergler shows involuntarily that analysts and cynics are in a way the last real moralists. They let themselves be reminded now and again of the commandments of conscience and morality, even if only when a conflict arises between reality and morality. For the rest of the world, morality is always and everywhere not broken with such matter-of-factness, but split, so that one no longer even feels the "inner conflict" with it. With its theory of the superego, psy-
408 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
choanalysis gives the "moralists of the last days" a medium in which they can ex- press themselves. However, the collective decomposition of the superego is al- ways a step further along than the moralists think. Objective cynicism has a head start on subjective cynicism which can never be made good. When cynics make malicious jokes, when they give morality the cold shoulder, when they demon- strate an icy coldness with which they anaesthetize themselves against the amoral- ism of the world, indeed when they even want to outdo its amoralism --then the subjective coldness toward morality reflects a general social freezing over. The
joke that comes out of the cold at least reminds us in its aggressivity of a more vital living. The "ice dogs" still have the energy to bark and still possess enough bite to want to make things clear. Psychoanalysis, which is "precisely not life in- surance for illusions," also has it in its better half. The scientific embalming can- not erase the fact that enlightenment, as Kant and many others emphasized, is just as much, if not more, a matter of courage as of intellect and that those who want to say the truth will not be able to avoid conflicts.
The date is January 1933. Psychoanalysis reflects on cynicism. Soon it will have to emigrate. It is done with the analytic explanation of cynicism. It becomes evident that what was supposed to have been the solution has been overwhelmed by the problem.
Notes
1. Otto Flake (1923): "Dada is the same thing as was earlier the famous, little understood roman- tic irony --a dissolution.
2We can hear a philosophical echo here; namely, Dada anticipates motifs of Heidegger's existential ontology, which, for its part, criticizes the lie of the sub- ject in the European philosophy of domination on the highest conceptual plane. The ego is not the master of the world but lives in it under the sign of thrownness (Geworfenheit); we make at most "projections" (Entwurfe), but these too are in turn "projected projects" (geworfene Entwurfe), so that primarily a passive struc-
ture toward being holds true. Next door we hear:
To be a Dadaist means to let oneself be thrown by things, to be against every formation of a sediment, to have sat for a moment on the chair means: to have brought life into danger.
dadaistisches manifest (leaflet, 1918)
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
The idea could occur to us that existential ontology is an academic catching up to "Dada philosophy" or "Dadaology"-- whereby Martin Heidegger would have contested the status of head Dada held by the master, Johannes Baader, with enormous success. The secret of Heidegger's success touches the point that con- stitutes the "failure" of Dada: respectability. Instead of the unrespectably glitter- ing productions of Dadaist "projected" artists of life and politicking satyrs, projectedness in its respectable variant won out.
The Dada attack has both a kynical and a cynical aspect. The atmosphere of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 395
the first is playful and productive, childish and childlike, wise, generous, ironi- cal, sovereign, unassailably realistic; the second aspect reveals strong destructive tensions, hate and haughty defensive reactions against the internalized fetish of the citizen, considerable projection, and a dynamic of affects of contempt and dis- appointment, self-hardening and loss of irony. It is not easy to separate these two aspects. They make the Dada phenomenon as a whole into a scintillating complex that evades simple evaluations and uncomplicated emotional responses. Dada also behaves ambiguously toward fascism: With its kynical elements, Dada be- longs definitely to antifascism and to the logic and "aesthetic of resistance. " With its cynical elements, by contrast, it leans toward the prefascist aesthetics of anni- hilation that wants to enjoy the intoxication of demolition to the full. Dada tends to struggle against the "bloody earnestness"--which, however, with its aggressive aspects, lies deep within Dada itself. The Dadaists by no means succeeded in treating their own motives ironically: In their ironic poses, much unfree destruc- tiveness remained stuck and in their way of letting themselves go, a lot of resis- tance and self-hardening could be demonstrated.
"Dadasophy" develops here and there mystically ironic visions that celebrate life in its undivided fullness, but these are despairingly exaggerated in tone, as in the proclamation of the chief Dada, Johannes Baader.
"A Dadaist is someone who loves life in all its limitless shapes and who knows and says: Not only here, but also there, there, there, (da, da, da) is life! The genuine Dadaist thus also masters(? ) the whole regis- ter(! ) of human expressions of life, starting with grotesque self- persiflage up to the most holy word of the church service on the ball, called earth, which has become mature and which belongs to all people.
Even in such megalomaniac hymns of the sect's chieftain, Baader, who proclaimed himself president of the universe, the typical attempts of a more en- compassing affirmation appear, in which Dada irony fits well with the kynical as- pect of religion (see the works on mysticism by Dadaists, especially Hugo Ball).
In Dadaism, a provisional philosophy of Yes is attempted that refers, above all, to the concrete, momentary, droll, and creative energy of the Dada in- dividual. The Yes holds for the state of the world, which it treats ironically, but even more for the lived moment, in which the miracle of an eternal, fleeting pres- ent and the existentialist paradox of the inner "duration," simultaneously per-
3meated and untouched by the turbulence in the world, are realized. superstructure must be annihilated so that this vital- dynamic element can step into the foreground. The Dadaists thus often see even in expressionism only the con- tinuation of German idealism: "nauseous mystification of things, called expres- sionism. "
The first expressionist, a person who invented "inner freedom," was a
The cultural
396 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
gluttonous and sodden Saxon, Martin Luther. He effected the protesting turn of the German to an inexplicable "inwardness" amounting to men- dacity, a juggling with imagined sufferings, abyss of the "soul" and its power beside a servile malleability toward official power. He is the fa- ther of Kant, Schopenhauer and today's idiocy in art, which stares past the world and thereby thinks it has overcome it.
Hausmann, Riickkehr zur Gegenstdndlichkeit in der Kunst
Nietzsche's kynical realism echos here --with the same anti-Protestant compo- nent of hate. The Dadaist Yes to reality and to realization does not concern itself with the opinion of experts, connoisseurs, snobs, and critics. One may understand Dadaism as a prelude to an emancipation of dilettantes that assumes that the joy in creating is more important than the successful result. Ability is only an embel- lishment of genuineness. It is not the lasting works that count, but the moment of their intensive realization.
A further Nietzschean motif--the recurrence of the Same --can be found in Dadasophy. In a brilliant sketch, It Was Done by Dada: A Trialogue between Hu- man Beings, broad historical dimensions are skimmed through.
There has always been Dada, in old Egypt just as much as in Europe or Mexico. The Dadaist, my dear Doctor Smartney, is independent of time. . . .
. . . it is continually reborn, it is handed down through the chain of generations; Dada is an eminently metaphysical matter. . . .
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
. . . Dada is the great scrutinizer and catcher of moralists. . . .
You regard it as the religious worldview of an ancient Egyptian
sect --but Dada also appeared in India. The Sivaites of the left hand cul- tivated it. In the Gilgamesh epic of the old Assyrians you will find references that Dada is identical with the birth of the world. In the Di- onysus mysteries Dada is to be found just as much as in the oracular sayings of the priests of Dodona. . . .
Dada is the greatest irony. It appears as a tendency but is no ten- dency. . . .
The sexual criminal Alton was a Dadaist when he wrote in his diary: Killed a young girl today, it was fine and hot . . . Manolescu was a Dadaist when he appeared as a prince and took lodgings in the emperor's court without knowing how we would pay the bill. Dada is the American side of Buddhism . . .
Dadaist documents are always forged, (pp. 110-13)
That Dadaist thinking cannot be summarized and reduced to a formula lies in its structure based on instantaneity. It moves entirely within processes, leaps, points that in their very essence cannot be abbreviated. The thing itself is its exe- cution (a theme that, by the way, dominates reflection philosophy, particularly in Fichte and Hegel). To talk "about" Dada consciousness means almost automati-
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 397
cally to place oneself beneath its plane. If we nevertheless try to say something general about it, we do this with the express remark that the object is not the Dada documents but the Dada method.
I want to call it a procedure of "reflected negation"--in other words, a tech- nique of disordering meaning, a nonsense procedure. Wherever firm "values," higher meanings, and deeper significance emerge, Dada attempts a disordering of meaning. Dada provides an explicit technique in the disappointment of meaning --and thereby stands in a broader spectrum of semantic cynicisms with which the demythologization of the world and of metaphysical consciousness
4 reachesaradicalfinalstage. Dadaismandlogicalpositivism arepartsofaproc-
5ess that pulls the ground out from under all faith in universal concepts,
for the world and totalizations. They both work like a garbage disposal in the de- praved European superstructure of ideas. The Dadaists indeed were all descended from a generation that a short time before had still genuflected with insuperable awe before everything called art, work of art, culture, and genius. For them the first task was a grand cleaning up in one's own head, of one's own past. They ne- gate, as apostates of an earlier faith in art, their previous way of living and the tradition in which they can no longer "stand": bestowing meaning through art and the elevation of the ordinary to the significant. In the backlash against this declin- ing way of living, Dada finds acidic words, particularly with regard to the "last" tendency in art, expressionism:
No, gentlemen, art is not in danger --for art no longer exists. It is dead. It was the development of all things, it still enveloped the bulbous nose and the swinish lips of Sebastian Miiller with beauty, it was a beautiful illusion proceeding from a sunny serene feeling toward life(! ) --and now nothing elevates us any longer, nothing at all! . . . The absolute in- capability . . . this is expressionism . . . The writing or painting petit-bourgeois could regard himself as solidly sacred; he finally grew somehow beyond himself into an indeterminate, universal world drowsiness --Oh expressionism, you turning point in the world of romantic falsehood.
Hausmann, Der deutsche Spiesser drgert sich
It is no accident that this posture that storms against art had its day once more around 1968 when the Dada of the New Left was "reborn" in activism, happen- ings, go-ins, love-ins, shit-ins--all the body Dadaisms of a renovated kynical consciousness.
6Dada does not revolt against bourgeois "institution art. " Dada turns against
art as a technique of bestowing meaning. Dada is antisemantics. It rejects "style" as pretense of meaning just as much as the deceitful "beautifying" of things ? . . As antisemantics, Dadaism systematically disrupts-not metaphysics but the talk about it: The metaphysical domain is laid bare as a festival ground; there,
formulas
398 Q DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
everything is allowed, except "opinions. " The "irony of life" (Hausmann) is sup- posed to be captured by Dadaist irony. Even Dadaism as style would already be a step backward--and precisely in this sense art history has appropriated it and ordered it into the museum of stylistic schools. Foreseeing this, Hausmann said he is actually speaking an anti-Dadaist. Because Dada is a procedure, it cannot "sit on a chair"; every style is a chair. In this sense, Dada understands itself even as an "exact technique"; it says No, methodically and without fail, when a "mean- ing of the world" emerges that does not concede that it is nonsense. All opining, every idealization is sublated in intellectual movement-montage and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
demontage, improvisation and revocation.
The sharpest honing was given to Dadaist semantic cynicism by Walter Serner, the writer whom Lessing called a "German Maupassant. " The fact that he has been rediscovered in our day shows that in West Germany, too, a public has been formed in which the sense for cynicism has grown and that can read this author because, in his polished immoralism, a sense for highly conscious, "unfor- tunately necessary" malice, all too well understandable today, betrays itself. Forty pages of incomparable prose, Letzte Lockerung {Final Slackening), origi- nate from Serner, written in the last year of the First World War, published in 1920 by Paul Stegemann in Hannover in the collection, Die Silbergaule (The sil- ver nags), a series of philosophical-poetic miniatures, composed of cultural cri- tique and cyanide. Nowhere else can the meaning of sublation (Aufhebung) be studied with such sharpness-a violent and simultaneously playful bursting of all cultural semantics, of positing meaning, philosophies, and exercises in art. Bru- tally and elegantly, this prose strikes out on all sides. Serner presents a theory
of language games beside which Wittgenstein's theory looks like finger exercises for respectable Ph. D. candi-dates (Habili-Tanten, p. 4).
In this "slackening," the disinhibition of a certain suicidal tendency also betrays itself. Intellectual aggressivity is directed not only outwardly and brings about not only a spectacular repulsive reaction by civilization critique. Serner, the most reflective of the Dadaists, provided himself with an account of the fact that the Dadaist hatred of culture is logically directed inwardly, against the culture-in-me I once "possessed" and that now is good for nothing.
Favorable proposal: Before going to sleep, one imagines with the most pronounced clarity the final stage of a suicide who, by means of the bullet, wants to finally weld self-consciousness into himself, (p. 8)
Where no content counts anymore, only a moment of desperate intensity re- mains, a suicide's self-consciousness that is "through" with everything. Existence as being unto death. After this, there is no longer any question that Dadaism and Heideggerian existential ontology nurture a subterranean community of inspira- tion with each other.
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 399
At the zero point of meaning, only a pathetic contempt for meaning still stirs itself--an all-penetrating nausea about "positivity": "Weltanschauungen are word
7mixtures" (p. 5).
there words and sentences that afford no connection. He projects this disconnect- edness onto the world, which, accordingly, can no longer be a "cosmos. " Dadaist antisemantics proceeds consistently to an anticosmology. From now on, it keeps a sharp eye on people as they paste together worldviews and conceptions of order. In the beginning was the chaos into which people, in their debility and hunger for meaning, dream a cosmos.
Set a redeeming heaven down on top of this chaos of smut and riddle! ! Scent human dung with order! ! ! I thank . . . Therefore . . . philoso- phies and novels are sweated over, pictures smeared down, sculptures tinkered with, symphonies etched out and religions started! What a shattering ambition--especially because these vain donkey tricks have all thoroughly (particularly in German regions) missed the mark. It's all balderdash! ! ! " (pp. 5-6)
Here, one of the naivetes of the older positivism comes to light, namely, that it conceives of the world as a confusion of "facts" that whirl about together just like the sentences in the heads of the logical positivists. However--in contrast to Serner, who tries to outdo the unbearable through affirmation--they cannot bear this chaos of uncoordinated sentences. Therefore, they put formal-logical corsets on their "facts. " In their approach, they are all chaotologists. They all assume the precedence of the unordered, the hypercomplex, the meaningless, and that which demands too much of us. Cynical semantics (up to Luhmann) can do nothing other than to charge order to the account of cultural caprice or the coercion toward a system.
With Serner, we see how the otherwise playful dadasophy turns into a humor- less, cold romantics. It is a romantics of utter unnai'vete. In it, the anxiety of being taken by surprise by a naive gesture or a surrender is at work. That drives malevo- lent reflection into its own hardened flesh. No search for a better life is counter- posed to the universal unhappiness. Rather, the attempt is made to counter the given unhappiness with self-intended "high" misery like a sovereign trump card. This is the way a consciousness behaves that is not only despairing but also ele- vates the wish to be hard as the point of departure for its self-modeling. In his unholy self-reflection, Serner practices the art of piling up and outdoing every "positive" thought with objections, detachments, and condescending commen- taries in a distrustful and furious manner. Self-experience and self-destruction be- come one and the same. Everything is rage that, to be sure, expresses itself but does not discharge itself in a liberating way.
In true positivist manner, Serner looks into his head and finds
Rage is thus life itself? To be sure: rage contains most of all upright-
400 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ness; to be sure: all other states can only be suffered in that the rage re- mains hidden or in that the master dissimulates. . . . However: sense- lessness, at its highest point is rage, rage, rage, and is far from being meaning, (p. 42)
In this sense, a subterranean line leads through the culture of hatred in our century --from Dada to the punk movement and the necrophilic robot gestics of New Wave. Here, a mannerism of rage makes itself felt that gives the great dead ego a pedestal from which the nauseous, incomprehensible world can be despised.
It is urgent that these reflective spaces of modern unhappy consciousness be described because they are the spaces in which the phenomenon of fascism, too, insofar as it is militant nihilism, consolidates. Even in the obvious stupidity of Nazi ideology, a certain "artful dimension" was hidden in the structure. Insofar as Dada presented a cynical show, it led a struggle of unhappy consciousness for sovereignty in spite of the feeling of meaninglessness for grand poses in spite of inner hollowness. Semantic cynicism is accompanied not only by suicidal inclina- tions but also by the risk of hysterical reaction that can be demonstrated through the paradoxical "sensuousness" of fascism, which brought a resurrection of "grand meaning" in the political spectacle that covered up the long-felt nothing- ness. In the hysteria a will to break through the self-controls of the lifeless every- day ego expresses itself. The hysteria is driven, according to Lacan's malicious aphorism, by the search for a master to tyrannize. To the extent that a spark of political hysteria was effective in Dadaism, this hysteria still had a strong realist component. For the master Dada sought in order to beat him up also existed, out- side Dada consciousness in reality, and as warlord in this imperialist-bourgeois world war he was objectively worse than any hoax, no matter how malicious. Fascist hysteria, by contrast, even invented the master it wanted to tyrannize, and itself conjured up a Jewish world conspiracy in order to eradicate a people whose existence was, to be sure, no mere figment of the imagination.
Serner's Final Slackening thus remained a penultimate slackening. As far as we know, his whole life long, he did not let the mask of the gentleman fall. True, he saw the world as having "gone to the dogs," but he himself shrank back from "going before the dogs" (Kastner).
Even his sophisticated dog-eat-dog crime sto- ries maintain a style that has more of the master in it than the dog.
The dadasopher, Raoul Hausmann, kept closer to the secret of the kynical pleasure in disputation, which can attack without falling into self-destruction. He consciously oriented himself toward the sounder forms of symbolic destructive- ness, toward the "alertness of laughter, irony and the useless," toward the "jubila- tion of Orphic nonsense" (p. 50). That is the way Diogenes' dogs bark. "This
damned Christ said: See the lilies in the field. I say: See the dogs in the street"
(Sublitterel [1919], p. 53).
8DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 401
Excursus 1. Bluff Twilight
/ know exactly what the people want: the world is motley, senseless, pretentious and intellectually inflated. They want to despise, show up, deny, destroy that. One can surely talk about that. . . . Those who hate fervently must have once loved deeply. Those who want to deny the world must have embraced what they now set on fire.
Kurt Tucholsky, Dada, 20 July 1920
In Tucholsky the Dadaists found their first apparently well-meaning psychologist. He tried, as popular explicator, to extract the good contained in the bad in order to simultaneously justify and belittle it. Tucholsky translates the Dadaist dissolu- tion back into a serious language --he calls this understanding "these people. " They are, like all of us, those who have been disappointed by the bad world, who only let off steam more forcefully than our kind. The Berlin Dada phenomena be- ing spoken about here are interpreted by Tucholsky as symptoms of a great loss of love through which Yes has been turned into No and love into hate. Through the explanation of its psychic mechanism, the matter seems to have been brought into order again. If the negative is really only the inversion of the positive, we must know this and then "we can surely talk about it. " In this way, the psy- chologizing journalist determines how negativity is to be dealt with. To be sure, he himself knows irony all too well, but his way of lessening the gravity of things is through melancholy. He does not really consider an aggressive irony. It thus must happen that with his "understanding," he pensively belittles the thing to be explained: "When we subtract what is bluff in this association, not a terrible lot remains" (p. 125). But who said that we should "subtract" the bluff? With this for- mula, Tucholsky gets caught in his respectable misunderstanding. For the Dada procedure, bluff is indeed fundamental. Bluff and bewilderment (Verbluffung) be- long together and produce a provocative wake-up effect. Dada builds in a certain way on a bluff realism and demonstrates a technique of deception (Tduschung), exposure (Enttduschung), and self-exposure (Selbstenttauschung). As a method- ology of bluff (of pretense and disruption of meaning), Dada shows ironically how modern ideology functions: to establish values and act as if one believed in them, and then to show that one has not the slightest intention of believing in them. With this self-dissolution (Selbstaufliebung) of weltanshauung ("word mix-
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
ture"), Dada betrays the modus operandi of modern consciousness with all its notorious meaning swindles. Tucholsky cannot, or rather, does not want to see this. He himself still postulates objective "meaning. " For this reason he does not come up to the level of the object he wanted to explain. He does not see that the methods of advertising, political propaganda, activist and neoconservative welt- anschauungen, of the hit parade and entertainment industry, etc. , have here been
402 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
laid out like a toolbox, or better, like a grammar before our understanding. For Dada contains a bluff theory in action. Without a theory of bluff, of show, seduc- tion, and deception, modern structures of consciousness cannot be explained at all properly. It may give cause for reflection that Tucholsky, up to just before the seizure of power, views the ascendant nazism still from the viewpoint of "respect- able irony" and is full of contempt for the stupidity, crampedness, bluff, posing, bigmouthedness, etc. , of the Nazis. To the last, this remains the tenor of Tucholsky's anti-Fascist feuilletons that otherwise leave nothing to be desired regarding sharpness. But the sharpness of real understanding is missing. Like all other defenders of melancholy seriousness, he is unable to develop a penetrant relation to "reflexive ideology" and to the phenomena of bluff and disingenuous opinion. (In this regard, he was completely different from Brecht, who from the ground up was in a position to think in the opponent's thought forms: to "tack," to weave, to let oneself go, and at the same time, to control oneself. )
Tucholsky's political moralism is expressed most clearly in his notes on the Dada trial before the Second District Court in Berlin in 1921. At that time, the case before the court concerned a plea by members of the army (Reichswehr) against George Grosz's drawings "God is with us"--"in which grimacing faces (of soldiers) of . . . unheard of brutality were to be seen" (Dada, p. 127). The five accused--Baader, Grosz, Herzfelde, Schlichter, and Burchardt (the gallery owner)- disappointed the expectations of the left-wing trial observers. Instead of confessing, they tried to get off by belittling themselves.
Five living beings on the bench for the accused, among them one man: Wieland Herzfelde. He was the only one who said here what was necessary and did not shrink back. . . . None of the boys was the one who had smashed the window pane. . . . As far as Grosz is con- cerned, I do not know whether the laxity of his defense can be traced to the fact that he cannot speak. . . . His plea saved Grosz's neck and was annihilating for him and his friends. "So that's your defense! Did you intend it to be so? " (Ibid. , pp. 128-29)
Is Tucholsky here not following an outmoded moral psychology? Consistency
right up to jail and full-blooded political character? More "identity," more confes-
sion, longer sentences? Does he not see that the ruling ideology wants precisely
the same thing, namely, to isolate culprits with political persuasions? Does the
man of conviction not have an advertising function for the political opponent? In
any case, it remains remarkable that Tucholsky's demand for "character" related
to people who were just more or less in the process of consciously developing
9an ironic strategy. Instead of profiting from the new art of "sublation,"
Tucholsky relied on melancholic lethargy. Here, he missed an experience that would have saved him from certain surprises in 1933. Those who treat
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS D 403
phenomena of bluff as something one should "disregard" must remain blind to fas- cism, even if in other ways they are the bravest anti-Fascists in the world.
Klaus Mann grasped the problematic of bluff from a somewhat clearer per- spective. But he, too, sees the matter somewhat defensively.
We want to distinguish ourselves from the Nazis, for whom everything, from their "nationalism" up to their "socialism," is mere tactics (that is, bluff, trick and swindle), above all through the fact that we are serious about what we say; that we really mean the words and ideas with which we try to draw support for our cause. (Heimsuchung des europaischen Geistes, Essays [Munich, 1973], p. 49).
Klaus Mann was one of the first to view the cynical component of Fascist "ideology" clearly. He developed nothing less than the relatedness of the actor with the Fascist politician out of the spirit of bluff (see the novel Mephisto). How- ever, it remains questionable whether he, for his part, can really be serious about the antithesis to it: "to mean it seriously. " What is an antifascism and an antini- hilism that itself is essentially based on the fact that one, more sure than one can be, erects "opposed values" and behaves respectably only so as not to be cynical like the others? Is antinihilism itself not simply an obstructed nihilism?
Grosz, who had worked off the hate within himself in his early work, much later described the connection between
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
nihilism and commitment (as antinihilism) as follows:
We demanded more. We did not quite know how to say what that more was; but many of my friends and I did not find any solution in the merely negative, in the rage at having been deceived and in the denial of all previous values. And so we were driven as a matter of course more and more to the Left. --
Soon I was head over heels in political currents. I gave speeches, not because of some conviction or other, but because everywhere at any hour people hung around disputing and because I had not yet learned anything from my experiences. My speeches were a stupid, parroted enlightenment babble, but when it dripped out of the mouth like honey, you could pretend that you were deeply moved. And often, your own twaddle really moved you, purely through the noise, sishing, twittering and bellowing that came out of you! (p. 115)
I never went along with the idolization of the masses, not even in those times when I still pretended to believe in certain political theories (Grosz, Ein kleines J a und ein grosses Nein [Hamburg, 1974], p. Ill)
It must be said, however, that this is a different Grosz talking, a Grosz who, in exile in America, has sat down, inwardly and outwardly, in Dadaist language, "on the chair. " What remains significant about this testimony is that it originates 404 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
from someone who ran the entire gamut of negativism, political commitment, and withdrawal and could document it as a survivor. When Grosz wrote his memoirs, the two critics of bluff, Tucholsky and Mann, had long since killed themselves.
Excursus 2. The Ice Dogs: On the Psychoanalysis of the Cynic
In everyone, the ice dogs bark. Ernst Toller, Hoppla, wir leben! (Hey, we're alive! )
(1927)
A thought-provoking coincidence: When nazism came to power, on January 30,
1933, the January-February issue of the journal Psychoanalytische Bewegung
10
(Psychoanalytic movement) appeared in which, for the first time,
Freud's addressed extensively the phenomenon of cynicism (Edmund Bergler, Zur Psychoanalyse des Zynikers I; the second part followed in the next issue).
Next to this remarkable temporal constellation, another rather piquant obser- vation is to be noted: Here, an author has something to say about a topic that stands in a thoroughly explosive relation to his profession. For the psychoanalyst who expresses views on cynicism talks about a topic that corresponds intimately with psychoanalysis. In 1933, an analyst could actually have found himself ex- posed to the charge of reinforcing a pornographic and cynical picture of humanity (two expressions that could easily be fused with the epithet "Jewish" in a fatal way). Here, then, a psychologist has ventured into the lion's den. He tries to put the "cynicism" of analysis out of action through an analysis of cynicism. At one point, Bergler himself even betrays a powerful kynical bite, precisely when he defends himself against the charge that psychoanalysis, with its exposure of psy- chic mechanisms, could be suspected of cynicism. Psychoanalysis is none-the- less, he notes, a "respectable science" and science is no "life insurance for illu- sions" (p. 141). For the rest, Bergler's interest centers on personalities in whom cynical tendencies are striking, as his depth- psychological studies of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Grabbe, and others demonstrate. It is obvious that his reflections are motivated by current events - as shown not least of all by the fact that as examples he brings in texts and events of the most recent times, for example, Erich Kast-
11
ner's novel Fabian from 1931.
some examples, that he believes he has found traits of cynicism in some patients that, as a rule, manifest themselves in the form of aggressions against him, the analyst. To that extent, we are justified in saying that this psychoanalytic state- ment on cynicism arose in a thick mesh of current motives and stimuli that tie the text precisely to the historical moment (1932-33) and to the author's professional situation. He defends his profession against the charge of cynicism; he diagnoses some patients who attack him as having traits of cynicism ("moral insanity").
Finally, Bergler's study reveals, with the use of
a pupil of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 405
There is thus no question that here we are in the middle of things --even when they are spoken about matter-of-factly. What strikes us is the extraordinary emphasis with which the analyst proclaims cynicism, or better, the "cynical mechanisms" to be a manifestation of the uncon- scious and of the persisting infantile component in the adult. With a grand gesture the whole domain of cynical phenomena is pocketed for psychoanalysis. Bergler allows only four of the sixty-four listed forms and variants of cynicism to count as "conscious," and even behind these, insofar as they are not
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
disqualified from the beginning as "shallow" and "worthless," he conjectures that there are "grave neuroses. "
Cynicism, says Bergler, is one of the forms in which people with extremely strong emotional ambivalences (hates-loves; respects-contempts, etc. ) create a psychic possibility for discharge. Cynical "discharge" accordingly stands on the same level as classic neurotic mechanisms such as the hysterical, melancholic, compulsive, paranoid, and criminal(! ) defenses. In cynicism, the negative, ag- gressive side of the ambivalence can be expressed. However, this side alone does not characterize "cynical discharge. " In addition, an extremely strong "uncon- scious need to be punished" must be present--masochistic and exhibitionist ten- dencies (although male verbal cynics are often said to be strikingly prone to shame regarding their bodies). In cynical speech, a psychodynamic related to the compulsion to confess (Reik) is said to be at work-to know that one violates the commandments of the strict "super ego," but that one cannot refrain from the in- fringements, and so, to settle the inner conflict thus created, one resorts to truth that is now aggressively revealed. The cynic attacks the outer world in trying to overcome an "inner conflict. " "He beats the others; he wants to beat his con- science" (p. 36).
But through its aggressive, comical side cynicism is also a method of gaining pleasure, and this in a sevenfold way: (1) because cynics become temporarily free of guilt by means of an apposite remark; (2) because the rage of others amuses them (this thesis is reflected in the blurb from J. Drews [ed. ], Zynisches Worter- buch [Zurich, 1978]); (3) because they can enjoy their own exhibitionistic tenden- cies; (4) because cynicism is a method of distancing; (5) because narcissistic plea- sure can occur insofar as clever statements are admired; (6) because jokes are simply funny; (7) last of all, because thereby cynics can live out their infantile tendencies --by which are meant early infantile fantasies of grandeur, "anal" ten- dencies, and early sexual-cynical rage against the whore in the mother, said more generally, the scars of old Oedipus conflicts.
The crux of this interpretation of cynicism is the older psychoanalytic su- perego theory that sees the human being as a creature that continually cowers un- der the commands and threats of a lofty, strict, "heavenly" superego. However, it is curious that the analyst who deals with the cultural relativity of the so-called superego (which is expressed in cynicism) does not venture to think through this
406 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
? From Neue Jugend (June 1917, Malik-Verlag).
concept of the superego --as if his intellect cowered and crouched under the authority of the superfather, Freud. This is curious because Bergler comments on phenomena in which obviously the superego does not succeed in confirming itself in the cynic's behavior. Should the superego too not be something more than it once was?
It seems that Bergler begins, against his will, to give an account of this. Cyni- cism is after all a phenomenon that belongs to the "dialectic of culture," and inso- far as psychoanalysis as a theory of psychic processes is inevitably a theory of
DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS ? 407
culture, in the long run, it cannot pretend that cultural phenomena such as cyni- cism can be treated merely psychodynamically. In fact, this is precisely the topic through which psychoanalysis sublates itself. The individual psyche has to be grasped just as much from the cultural aspect as the latter has to be grasped from the psychic aspect. The universal, transtemporal, strict superego is a superseded analytic fiction. In most of Bergler's examples --there are some very nice ones among them, and they alone make the reading rewarding --we can say that the mechanisms of the cynics' statements were hidden to them only if we do violence to these examples. They know what they say and they say it not so much on the basis of "unconscious" mechanisms but because they have become conscious of real contradictions. Thus they often express a contradiction kynically, or they ex- press one of the many forms of mauvaise foi cynically. The unconscious scarcely has to make an effort. The conscious participation of the ego is objective immoral- isms and the obvious fragmentation of morals explain the matter much more effectively than does the depth- psychological theory. Only at one point does the analyst widen his field of view.
The flooding of the entire culture with fear of one's conscience (Gewis- sensangst) leads to the circumstance that even there, where persons seek to rid themselves of their fetters in thought, as in cynicism, noth- ing other(! ) than a compromise with the superego comes about. One is thus not very far removed from reality when one says that cynicisms are profoundly also a bowing before the superego and compromises with the inner voice of conscience. "Not all those are free who mock their chains," taught a poet-philosopher. But that even in this mockery people pay tribute to the superego is grotesque, (p. 166)
It cannot be better said: "One is thus not very far removed from real- ity . . . ," but still pretty far away. Bergler understands that many forms of cynicism are efforts to strip oft fetters--consequently, that cynicism belongs to the dynamic of cultural liberation struggles and the social dialectic of values and that it is one of the most important methods of working through ambivalences in a culture. The expression "compromise" indeed hints in this direction.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:16 AM]
With something that stood "above" me, no compromises could be concluded; then it would just be a matter of obeying. The compromise is concluded with an authority that has no penetrating imper- ative force --with a weak superego and a conscience that only pricks but can no longer give orders. Bergler shows involuntarily that analysts and cynics are in a way the last real moralists. They let themselves be reminded now and again of the commandments of conscience and morality, even if only when a conflict arises between reality and morality. For the rest of the world, morality is always and everywhere not broken with such matter-of-factness, but split, so that one no longer even feels the "inner conflict" with it. With its theory of the superego, psy-
408 ? DADAISTIC CHAOTOLOGY: SEMANTIC CYNICISMS
choanalysis gives the "moralists of the last days" a medium in which they can ex- press themselves. However, the collective decomposition of the superego is al- ways a step further along than the moralists think. Objective cynicism has a head start on subjective cynicism which can never be made good. When cynics make malicious jokes, when they give morality the cold shoulder, when they demon- strate an icy coldness with which they anaesthetize themselves against the amoral- ism of the world, indeed when they even want to outdo its amoralism --then the subjective coldness toward morality reflects a general social freezing over. The
joke that comes out of the cold at least reminds us in its aggressivity of a more vital living. The "ice dogs" still have the energy to bark and still possess enough bite to want to make things clear. Psychoanalysis, which is "precisely not life in- surance for illusions," also has it in its better half. The scientific embalming can- not erase the fact that enlightenment, as Kant and many others emphasized, is just as much, if not more, a matter of courage as of intellect and that those who want to say the truth will not be able to avoid conflicts.
The date is January 1933. Psychoanalysis reflects on cynicism. Soon it will have to emigrate. It is done with the analytic explanation of cynicism. It becomes evident that what was supposed to have been the solution has been overwhelmed by the problem.
Notes
1. Otto Flake (1923): "Dada is the same thing as was earlier the famous, little understood roman- tic irony --a dissolution.
