Brothers Karamazov (1880) & Melancholia (2011) : Cynicism III

Now, about Kant. The only work of Kant I own is a small book, bought used for 3.50$, that contains Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals & What Is Enlightenment, and admittedly, I haven't even finished reading this one. Now, of course the juxtaposition of these two works were made by an editor and not by Kant, but it is still a bit weird to put these two books together. In What is Enlightenment (from 1784) he begins by stating 'Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.' But already the next year (1785) he is writing a book trying to make a foundation for telling people what to do... I have no doubt, that Kant himself has probably written about this contradiction somewhere, but it is still one of those contradictions that runs through a lot of socalled Enlightenment Philosophy. They want people to think for themselves, and then they promptly tell people how to think. There is something weird about a philospher condemning people for thinking 'I need not think, if I can only pay - others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.' (all quotes are from page 85 of Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, McMillan, 1959. An older translation can be read here) The philosopher, who truly wants people to think for themselves, wouldn'd he be quiet? Wouldn't he withhold his knowledge from others, to force them to figure it out for themselves?

This week, I want to talk about whether or not cynicists believe people can and want to think for themselves. And then I'll discuss children, and whether or not our society believes they should be allowed to think for themselves. To do that, I'm going to talk about Dostoevsky's great final novel Brothers Karamazov from 1880, and Lars von Triers latest movie Melancholia.

Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov (1880)

Brothers Karamazov is completely central to Sloterdijk's argument in Critique of Cynical Reason. In chapter 7 called Cabinet of Cynics, Sloterdijk takes a look at 5 cynics from throughout the ages. These five are Diogenes, the original Kynic, Lucian the Mocker, who is used as an early example of a cynic on the side of the powerful, Mephistopheles from Goethe's Faust, The Grand Inquisitor from Brothers Karamazov, and finally the Anyone as used by Heidegger. Sloterdijk uses The Grand Inquisitor as an example of a powerful figure, who has begun withholding the truth from the people, because he believes that the people can't handle it. The figure is from a short story told by the middle brother Ivan, and it can be read here, where Jesus returns to Spain in the 16th century, right in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor has him arrested and confronts him in his cell. He says that Jesus failed the people, as he was too perfect a human being so that the people could never follow his example, and he claims that the people abhor that Jesus wanted them to belive in him freely. The Inquisition has returned the amount of force back into religion, that the people deep inside really want. Sloterdijk says that the inquisitor speaks like a conservative politician after the French Revolution, when he says things like this 'They will tear down the temples and drench the earth with blood. But they will realize, the foolish children, that although they are rebels, they are impotent rebels who cannot bear their own rebellion' (p 185 in Sloterdijks book)

Sloterdijk mentions that he just uses these characters as figures, as symbols, and that he doesn't care that he might have taken them out of a context. But still, I find it interesting how Dostoevsky treats this theme towards the end of the book. Now I'm not going to spoil the end of the actual plot of the book, but there is a young character who is called Illusha and who is already dying when he is introduced, and the final chapter takes place at his funeral (but be careful reading it if you haven't read the book. It talks a bit about the resolution of the plot in the beginning). Alyosha, the youngest brother and the main character of the book, goes to the funeral along with a lot of young boys, who in the book is simply called the Boys. A lot of the book has been religious discussions between the three Brothers, like the chapter on the Grand Inquisitor, but in this final chapter we see how the discussion about religion is important to young people in their darkest hour. The boy who talks the most is called Kolya, and he has before claimed that he doesn't believe. Throughout the book he seems like a future Ivan, the learned and modern and almost nihilistic atheist. And yet, at the grave of his good friend, and spurred on by a preceding speech made by Alyosha, he suddenly cries out:

"Karamazov," cried Kolya, "can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?"

"Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!" Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.

"Ah, how splendid it will be!" broke from Kolya.

To me, this almost legitimizes the Grand Inquisitor to some extent. This young boy has througout the book tried and taken pride in thinking for himself, and yet, when confronted by the true horror of life, he wants to be comforted by an older and presumably wiser man. Even though there really isn't anything convincing in Alyoshas answer, his authority, and Kolyas wish to believe in it, makes it true for him.

Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

In the writings I have read about this film, no one has really mentioned how Dostoevskian parts of this film actually are. We have the scandalous wedding in the first half, a kind of scene that happens again and again in Dostoevsky's stories, like the first meeting of the family in Karamazov, Sonya's father's funeral in Crime and Punishment, the birthday party in Notes from Underground, the wedding in A Nasty Anecdote, etc. Also, the first part of the film could be seen as trying to achieve the kind of Dostoevskian Polyphony as described by Bakhtin. So many characters seems to show aspects of the question of: Freedom to do what you want vs the obligations you have to the rest of the world. Justine is going to marry Michael, and she gets depressed by having to do all the things at the wedding that everyone else expects of her, including her husband. Both of her parents has stopped thinking about what others think of them, as they are both getting closer to death. And Jack, Justines boss, is so wealthy and powerful, that he has stopped doing what anyone expects of him, and can't comprehend that anyone might want to do anything other than what he expects of them. The point of the film then, becomes that the planet Melancholia (and just death in general in the case of Justine and Claires parents) frees everyone from the expectations of society, as society is about to end, freeing the people who were depressed by expectations, and depressing those who actually did well in society.



But admittedly, the second - and much more problematic, in my opinion - half stops being so Dostoevskian. The amount of characters is reduced to three, and instead of being ways of commenting on a theme, von Trier focuses instead on an actual psychologically true depiction of Justines depression, which I find clashes with how unreal she acts in the first part. And also, the second part seems much more focused on all the obligatory things that must happen in an apocalyptic movie. If the film had jumped from the scene where Justine is sitting alone on a table, left by her father who chose not to be there for her, just as she chose not to be there for Michael, and to the scene where the planet actually hits the earth, it would have been a masterpiece in my opinion. But Dostoevsky and Brothers Karamazov come roaring back at the end. As both Claire and Justine realize that they are going to die, Claire breaks down and asks Justine that they do something 'nice' with their final moments, like sitting on the terrace and drinking a glass of wine. Justine calls this plan a 'piece of shit'. They are going to die awfully, and they should be honest about it. Then she goes outside and sees Claires frightened son. Immediately, Justine begins lying to the young boy about what is going to happen. They are going to survive, because she can make a Magic Cave. This is once again benevolent cynicism. Justine knows it's a lie, and she refused to perpetuate this kind of lying when an adult like Claire asked her to, but confronted with a young child, Justine begins lying again.

So would the world be a better place without cynicism? Would anyone tell the truth about the horrors of the world confronted with a young innocent child? The Grand Inquisitor, Alyosha Karamazov, Justine, they are not completely alike, but their differences are more like graduations on a scale. Alyosha and Justine treat children like children, to allow them to be young and innocent in a horrific world. The Grand Inquisitor treats everyone like children, and should according to Sloterdijk allow the rest of the world to grow up. But really, it's kinda the same impulse, isn't it?

Next week: Military Cynicism and Apocalypse Now: Redux

[Part I: Introduction and Mad Men]
[Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & Police, Adjective]
[Part IV: Apocalypse Now]
[Part V: Inception]
[Part VI: Inglourious Basterds]

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (62) & Police, Adjective (09) : Cynicism II

Systems of Half-truths
Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason is a sprawling book. It's split up in two parts: Sightings: Five Preliminary Reflections, a long introductory section, and Cynicism in World Process. As with many philosophical works, you could probably read the introductory section and leave it at that... Part two discusses aspects of Cynicism in great detail, split up into Physiognomic, Phenomenological, Logical and Historical sections, but a lot of it is more examples of Cynicism and Cynicists than it is theoretical discussion. On the other hand, it does include thurough ruminations on the Kynical potentials of farts, genitals, Machiavelli, Judaism, Weimar Germany etc.

What I'm trying to get at this week is something I haven't noticed Sloterdijk discussing explicitly (but then again, I'm a blogger, not an expert on Sloterdijk), but which he seems to get at in the parts on the Phenomenological and Logical Cynicisms. These parts are concerned with how cynicism is used in governing institutions and with the knowledge and half-truths these systems use to uphold themselves, respectively. And these two parts go through subchapters on the military, the government, sexuality, medicine, the church and knowledge-gathering institutions in the same order (I'll get into a few of these subchapters in later weeks). My point is, that it would be wrong to take a simplified look at our society today, and simply say, that it is upheld by an ideology, and in the chasm between that ideology and the real truth it where cynicism is born. No, there isn't a simple cynicism in our society (as a matter of fact, what would probably be seen as reaction to the foundational ideology of our day is called Exchange Cynicism by Sloterdijk, and he only sees it as important enough to count among the 'secondary cynicisms'). There are a multitude. If anything, cynicism is rather born out of the chasm between the need to hatch oneself to a subsystem of society and it's selflegitimizing half-knowledge, and our understanding that this sub-system of knowledge is just one amongst others, with no objective way of deciding which truth-system is actually true in different situations. It's not a way of reconciling lie with truth, but rather half-truth with half-truth.

To discuss these themes, I'll go through two films. The first one is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from 1962 by John Ford, and it chronicles the establishing of American Cynicism. The other one is Police, Adjective from 2009 by Corneliu Porumboiu, which is concerned with Cynicism in post-communist Eastern Europe.

Pre-Ideology: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (62)

When I thought about doing some posts on Cynicism, this film imediately came to mind. Mostly because of that famous final statement: This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. As such, it seemed like a perfect example of how the ideology of the American nation is based on Cynicism. Some might think, that the film shows how a young honestly idealistic lawyer has to succumb to lying to establish his carreer, but it's not that simple. I'll try and show how Ransom Studdard is actually throughout the film an avatar of half-lies and ideology, and the film more shows the world accepting the lie, rather than creating it. Rather than being a film about the creation of ideology, it is, in fact, a film about the creation of Cynicism.



Studdard goes to the West because of ideology: He tells us that he had taken Horace Greelys advice 'Go west young man, go west. And seek fame, fortune, adventure' We hear this in voiceover at the beginning of his flashback, and it is imediately juxtaposed with the actuality of the west, as his stagecoach is held up by masked gunmen. We learn that Studdard is a student of law, one of those systems of halftruths I've just written about. As Liberty Valance rips out the pages of his lawbook and says: 'I'll teach you law. Western law' we get a summation of what the persons represent. Studdard is truth as it should be. Liberty Valance is truth as it is. That Studdard isn't representing truth is perhaps most clear in his dicussion with Hallie about the Cactus Rose she has just been given by Doniphon. 'Isn't that the prettiest thing you ever did see?' 'Yes, it's very pretty... Hallie, did you ever see a real rose?' 'No. But maybe someday, if they ever dam the river, we'll have lots of water. And all kinds of flowers' The irony comes from Studdard dismissing the rose in front of him as 'unreal', and calling a dream-rose located somewhere else, or somewhere in the future, the actual real rose. Studdard seems to think that his world, the world of the big city, a civilized world of law and democracy, is truth, and that the Western world he is in is just a temporary deviation from the world as it should be. When Studdard begins teaching a small class, his lessons seems to be mainly concerned with getting the students to repeat exactly what he believes in. Nora answers: 'A Republic is a state in which the people are the boss. That means us.' There is also a pretty on-the-nose comment on American history when Pompey, who is black, can't remember the part of the Declaration of Independence that goes 'All Men are created equally' prompting Studdard to reply: 'A lot of people forget about that part'. On the nose, but probably quite progressive for 62. And it shows that even 'self-evident' truths could be bended in the history of America.

What the film never forgets is, that in a democracy, truth and right is contested and ever changing. To begin with, Studdard admits that the marshall of Shinbone probably can't do anything about the hold-up, since it is a territorial offence. But his lawbooks says that in fact the marshall can arrest Valance when he returns to town. That the marshall in reality can't arrest him, since Valance would shoot him down, is not something Studdard realizes. He takes the Law as right, more than the world. The plot of the film revolves around the decision of whether the territory Shinbone is located in should become a state or not. The big ranch-owners want to remain a territory while the little people want to attain statehood, with the order that would come from that. We instinctively root for the downtrodden majority, but the film reminds us, that not just the ranchers but also the Native Americans want the area to remain open and ungoverned. Who is actually right in this question? And yet, it's not just democratic votes that determines this question. The clearest example of this is of course the shooting of Liberty Valance, and how the resulting legend influences the carreer of Studdard, but before that, in the scene in the town-hall, Studdard acts very undemocratically, when he reads out the names of himself and Liberty Valance quite normally, and then enthusiastically reads out the name of Peabody.

Throughout the film, Studdard is an ideologue. The film is not the story of the creation of an ideology to ground the creation of the nation. It is the story of the creation of a conscious exploitation of this ideology. It is about the establishment of Cynicism in America.

Post-Ideology: Police, Adjective (09)
The way American Westerns seem to be the primary group of films to grapple with the creation of American Ideology, in the same way the new wave of Romanian Cinema seems to me the primary group grappling with the dis-mantling of Communist Ideology. While none of the directors are as brilliant and singular (at least as of yet) as a Sokurov or a Tarr, precisely the singularity and personality of these two great auteurs means their works work on a more abstract and diffuse level. Romanian cinema, on the other hand, seems quite concerned with Romania.



While I just assumed everyone would have a basic idea of the plot to John Ford's western (it's pretty much in the title), it's probably in it's place to present a small recap of this kind of obscure film (spoilers of course). Cristi is a policeman working in a small Romanian city. He has just returned from his honeymoon abroad, where he has seen how the law is different in other countries, and it makes him question the rules he is meant to uphold. He has been assigned to a case concerning a young man who apparantly deals marihuana, but Cristi suspects that his witness is accusing the young man for personal reasons, and he fears that the punishment of the young boy would be disproportionate to the crime. The film mostly just follows Cristi. Not just as he stands around watching the young man and his friends, but also in his home, where he eats a dinner by himself one night, and another night discusses a song with his wife. In the end, Cristi is called into the office of his boss, where he expresses his concerns that an unjust law of society shouldn't trump his own feeling of a 'moral law', and is forced by his boss to read the definition of several words in a dictionary, none of which provides any proof for the importance of 'moral law'. After that, the arrest takes place off-screen, and the film ends. It is a very slow film, but also very riveting.

The reason I thought of this film as a companion to Liberty Valance, is the way both films are concerned with books and rules and law. In the scene where Cristi and his wife discusses the song, Cristi claims that the lyrics doesn't make sense, while his wife sees them as making sense on a symbolic or imagery level. She can't really choose. Here we get the discussion of whether language should be stringent and bound by common rules of meaningmaking, or if a subjective and sorta artistic (I'm not sure I would describe the very kitschy lovesong as 'art'...) can reach a more profound truth, sorta the same discussion I noted in Solaris. Yet the differences between this film and the Western mirror the differences between democracy and authoritarianism. While the key scenes in Liberty Valance is the ones where we see how the characters use and bend the voting system to their advantage, the key scene in Police Adjective is the one where Cristi is being forced to read out the definition of words. As I said, in democracy, truth is contested, while in an authoritarian system, it's decided from on top. Even when Studdard references laws that are bigger than his surroundings - as he does when they discuss whether or not the hold-up was a territorial offence - he does so in a searching and inquisitive manner. In Police, Adjective, Cristi's boss Captain Anghelache uses the authority of the book to support his authority as a boss.

The cynical moment in the film is where the film gets it's title. As Cristi reads about Police, he gets to the two uses of Police as an adjective: The Police Novel (as it's apparantly known in Romania) and: About police states or regimes which are supported by the police and which exercise control through repressive methods' This, however, immediately prompts Anghelache to reply: 'Ridiculous! All states depend on the police' Through this reply, he suddenly admits that the book could be wrong, yet this admission doesn't make him change his stance on the arrest. This is authoritarian Cynicism, where the tyrant know full well that the rulers has stopped serving the law, and instead uses the law to serve the rulers themselves.

So to sum up: Cynicism is not just usable to explain how big ideologies like Liberalism or Communism can continue to function. It also helps to overlook more structural issues. In a democracy, truth is contested and subservient to the views of the majority, while in an authoritarian system, truth is subservient to the views of those in power. The Cynicist realizes this, yet he continues to believe in his place in the system.

Next week: Pedagogy as a possible example of benevolent cynicism. With Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamasov and Lars von Trier's Melancholia.

[Part I: Introduction and Mad Men]
[Part III: Brothers Karamazov and Melancholia]
[Part IV: Apocalypse Now]
[Part V: Inception]
[Part VI: Inglourious Basterds]

Cynicism I : Sloterdijk and Don Draper

An experiment. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll try and publish a number of posts connected by a single theme. Hopefully, there will be a new one up every wednesday until mid-December. This will mean that I'll hopefully get something written, but it will also allow me to discuss different aspects of the theme in question. Each post will be on a different cultural object, which will be used to try and discuss a different part of the theme. A lot of it will be translations, or based on translations, or ideas I've thrown out and discussed in different places at times, and there will probably be a lot of repetions. I don't really have time for writing something completely new every week. Hopefully, some people will want to read it, if so I'll probably try this again with a new theme next spring. The theme this time is, as the title of this piece says, Peter Sloterdijk's notion of Cynicism. If you have comments or suggestions for other artworks or cultural objects that could be relevant for this theme, feel free to comment or send me suggestions. I have already planned and collected notes for this theme, and as I said, I don't really have time to write about something completely new to me, but I'd love to find other examples.

I mean to speak of cynicism the way it is described in Peter Sloterdijk's book Critique of Cynical Reason from 1983. He positions Cynicism as the dominant mode of thought in postmodern society. It is 'enlightened false consciousness'. It is the fourth untruth, after lies, errors and ideology. It means lying even though you know you are lying, because the lie serves a purpose, mainly to maintain your position in society, whether it is a dominant or a subservent one. The term can be used to explain why the process of history seems to have stalled. In leftwing circles, class-struggle was seen as an objectively true aspect of society, and as soon as the majority of people understood this, they would enter the struggle and bring about the communist revolution. The trouble then begins when time goes on, and the vast majority of people fail to become communists. Two answers seem possible: 1) The communist analysis of society was wrong. 2) People have remained too dumb to realize the reality of our society. Now of course, when choosing that other answer, people can make up all kinds of different sub-explanations, about hegemonic ideology or how powerful society has turned out to be, or about governmentality or whatnot, but the fact remains, that the theory says the the theorist has realized something which the majority of the people has failed to do. For me at least, as the decades go on, I sense a growing contempt for the people in the writings I've read. But Sloterdijk is very helpful in this regard. One of his chapters is titled: Enlightened Prevention of Enlightenment. People aren't dumb, they simply choose to believe in what is best for them, not what is right. Of course, this sort of Intellectual Vanguardism is not just found in Communism, but can be seen throughout Enlightenment theory from Kant onward. More on that in the coming weeks.

Sloterdijk writes about Cynicism in many different shapes and figures. He then finds another cynicism, an older, original kind of cynicism, which he calls Kynicism. It's is the philosophy of the old Greek Diogenes. Is is cheekiness, it is philosophizing with your body, it is making fun of everything, it is laughter, sticking out your toungue, it is farting or masturbating in public. I'm not going to write too much about this anti-cynicism over the weeks, but the term reminds me quite a lot of Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque (a similarity noted by Sloterdijk), and a writer such as Pynchon seems sublimely Kynical.

Anyways, that was a very short and simple introduction. I don't mean to give a complete and exhaustive presentation of the many aspects and implications of Sloterdijks book. I'm just going to use the notion as a lense to look at some cultural works. To start with, I want to take a short look at the character, whom I think is the emblematic character of the post-millenial age, and who is also obviously a master-cynic: Don Draper from Mad Men. I don't mean to say that he is the best character ever created. I'm not even sure he is the best character on tv at the moment. But I believe that he almost perfectly encapsulates the time he was created in, rather than the time he actually lives in. To say that he is a cynic seems painfuly obvious. That he is living on a lie is the whole point of the first few seasons. And of course, his job is to sell lies and halftruths. Sloterdijk's book is much concerned with a very long historical perspective, so he does not devote all that many pages to the present, but I for one can't find a more cynical profession than the ad-man. It's most clear in the first season, as later seasons seem concerned about finding cracks in the cynical armor of our heroes. We see the cynicism in the first episode, in the making of an ad-campaign for Lucky Strikes, where a 'truth', the psychological 'truth' of our death-drive, is thrown in the garbagecan as the buyers are uncomfortable with it. Instead, we get another kind of truth: 'It's toasted', a half-truth that is true enought, but doesn't mention that every other cigarette is of course toasted as well. And we see it again in the marvelous final pitch of the season, the famous one with the 'Caroussel' from Kodak. 'Nostalgia litterally means: The pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone' says Draper. Nostalgia is not based on actual memory, not on actual history. As Draper makes his pitch, amazingly affecting pictures from his own family life are shown on the screen. There are many layers in this speech, but an important thing to keep in mind is, that it is based on a completely made up image of the Draper family. We know it is just a pitch to sell a product, we know that Draper is a philanderer and not a very good familyman, we know that he in no way feels nostalgic about his - real - past, there was even in episode three a scene in which we saw Don Draper film a party at his house, where the film seemed to cover up a lot of really uncomfortable incidents. We know, that in every way, the speech is a lie. And yet it works. Not just on us, but on the client, on Harry Crane, who has to get up and leave the room with tears in his eyes - as he has just drunkenly cheated on his wife, he is the one who most easily feels the nostalgic pain - and even on Don Draper himself, who seems to be so caught up in his own idea of a perfect family life, that he fantasizes on the train about coming home early and taking on a weekend trip with them, an offer he turned down earlier that day. It is a lie, but it works on everyone, even the liar. It is true cynicism in effect.

That was a short and boring introduction. With that out of the way, hopefully the next posts will be better. Next wednesday: Laws of Logic, Logics of Lies, and stuff on the ideologies of the 20^th century, with John Ford's The Man who Shot Liberty Valance and Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective.

[Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & Police, Adjective]
[Part III: Brothers Karamazov and Melancholia]
[Part IV: Apocalypse Now]
[Part V: Inception]
[Part VI: Inglourious Basterds]