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]