Retreat from Politics: The Cynic in Modern Times

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Retreat from Politics: The Cynic in Modern Times Author(s): Sharon Stanley Source: Polity, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 384-407Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4500282Accessed: 03-08-2015 16:26 UTC

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Polity * Volume 39, Number 3 * July 2007

? 2007 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/07 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

Retreat from Politics: The Cynic in Modern Times

Sharon Stanley University of Memphis

This essay examines contemporary diagnoses of cynicism, issuing from scholars such as Peter Sloterdijk, Frederic Jameson, and Slavoj Zifek, to distill a clear concept of cynicism and its social and political consequences. In particular it seeks to call into question accounts in which cynicism suddenly bursts onto the scene as a response to recent, post-1960s political disappointments and the corrosive philosophy of postmodernism. Instead, by turning to Denis Diderot's perplexing dialog Rameau's Nephew, I demonstrate that the impulse toward cynicism may lie buried much deeper in modernity, in the thought of enlightenment itself This longer perspective helps us to understand the conditions for the emergence of cynicism today, while problematizing hard and fast distinctions between enlightenment and postmodernism. I conclude by warning against excessively moralistic denunciations of cynicism, demonstrating that such denunciations harbor the very same anti- political tendencies which they locate in cynicism. Instead, I argue we must find a form of politics appropriate to an increasingly cynical age. Polity (2007) 39, 384-407. doi:10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300063

Keywords cynicism; Diderot; Sloterdijk; enlightenment; postmodernism

Sharon Stanley is Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Memphis. She completed her dissertation, "The Enlightenment and the Emergence of Modern Cynicism," in May 2006. This article is drawn from that dissertation. The author can be reached at [email protected]

Introduction

We live in cynical times. This diagnosis has become commonplace, if not ubiquitous, in contemporary cultural commentary. The bitter urban cynic is a stock character type in literature, film, and popular culture, casting aspersions and scorn on anything we might still dare hold sacred. Furthermore, we are told, this cynicism has an alarming political dimension: we have lost faith in the body politic. We condemn our leaders as irredeemably corrupt and our highest ideals as mere sham, to be trotted out at election time for vacuous lip service. Those



Sharon Stanley 385

who still engage in political action are dismissed either as hypocrites or, worst of all, dupes-naive young "idealists" for whom only disillusionment and despair lie at the end of their journey. And so, the story goes, we have retreated from politics and social action into the world of private pleasures and pursuits, smug in our

knowledge that at least we won't get fooled again. This pervasive diagnosis appears not only in popular discourse, but also in

scholarly works. Peter Sloterdijk famously introduced the concept of cynicism as the final, melancholic resting place of an exhausted critical consciousness in his 1983 work, the Critique of Cynical Reason.' Admittedly, Sloterdijk's masterful study was deeply rooted in his German context, taking up German historical experiences and philosophical dilemmas largely adopted from the tradition of German critical theory. Nonetheless, in the years since its publication and

particularly its 1987 translation into English, numerous scholars situated outside of Germany have found something compelling about Sloterdijk's book. Both his

elegant definition of cynicism as "enlightened false consciousness" and his

diagnosis of cynicism as the dominant form of contemporary consciousness have been more or less endorsed by a diverse array of scholars.2

Two book-length English-language studies of cynicism have followed on its heels: Timothy Bewes's 1997 Cynicism and Postmodernity, and William Chaloup- ka's 1999 Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America.3 Beyond these sustained studies, many well-known theorists have offered brief ruminations on the pervasive cynicism of our times within broader commentaries. For example, Frederic Jameson acknowledges the "universal triumph of what Sloterdijk calls 'cynical reason' in the omnipresent consumerism of the postmodern today." Slavoj Zifek also identifies our age as a profoundly cynical one, in which ideology's ultimate triumph lies in a perverse revelation of its deepest secrets. Based on his reading of Sloterdijk, Zifek believes this revelation no longer poses a substantial obstacle to the continued functioning of ideology: "today, however, in the era of cynicism, ideology can afford to reveal the secret of its functioning (its constitutive idiocy, which traditional, pre-cynical ideology had to keep secret) without in the least affecting its efficiency" Terry Eagleton, though rejecting the sheer ubiquity of cynicism, nonetheless also draws a connection between what he calls "advanced capitalism" and cynical consciousness: 'Advanced capitalism accordingly oscillates between meaning and non-meaning, pitched from

1. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

2. See Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 5, for his celebrated definition of cynicism. The degree to which Sloterdijk's thesis has been endorsed should not be overstated, however. While his diagnosis and definition have appealed to many, his suggested cure, a return to the cheeky, subversive "kynicism" of the Greek Cynics, has been enormously controversial.

3. Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997); and William Chaloupka, Everybody Knows: Cynicism in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).



386 MODERN CYNICISM

moralism to cynicism and plagued by the embarrassing discrepancy between the two."4

What are we to make of these diagnoses? Despite their variety, many share a number of basic assumptions. First, cynicism is dangerous, producing a toxic form of anti-political paralysis and rendering critique impotent. After dismissing our collective capacity to craft a more just world, cynics presumably resign themselves to getting by as best they can in a necessarily corrupt world. They can only scoff at the naivete of those persistent idealists who refuse to play the only game in town. Second, it has not always been thus. Today's diagnosticians of cynicism believe that the present constellation of social, political, economic, and ideological forces breeds a pervasive, all-consuming cynicism which marks our age as different from earlier ones. Thus, Zi2ek contrasts today's form of ideology with a "pre-cynical" ideology, implying a temporal dimension to the triumph of cynicism. Indeed, as Sloterdijk tells the story, cynicism emerges wholesale after critique has performed its final unmasking. On his account, critique is a kind of self-consuming cannibal, successively cutting the ground out from beneath its own feet until the whole edifice collapses entirely This story of critique's progressive self-destruction conjures the specter of a bleakly dystopian end of history. Finally, in a related move, many scholars suggest an intimate, albeit severely under-theorized, relationship between postmodernism and cynicism. Eagleton frequently accuses postmodernism of a cynical embrace of consumer culture.5 In the preface to his famous work on the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay distinguishes postmodernism from critical theory by highlighting the cynical rejection of ideology critique at the heart of postmodernism:

The central role of "ideology critique" in Critical Theory is, moreover, relegated to the margins of most postmodernist theory, which lacks-or rather, deliberately scorns the possibility of-any point d'appui for such a critique, preferring instead a cynical reason, if any reason at all, that attacks all transcendent positions as discredited foundationalism and mocks utopianism as inherently fallacious.6

4. Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism and the Market," in Mapping Ideology ed. Slavoj Zi2ek (London: Verso, 1994), 291; Slavoj Zi2ek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 201 (emphasis in the original); Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 39.

5. This accusation appears repeatedly throughout Eagleton's book-length critique of postmodernism. See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996).

6. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xvii.



Sharon Stanley 387

There is something troubling about all three of these assumptions. First, excessively reproachful screeds against cynicism often devolve into cynicism's equally anti-political foe, moralism.' Moreover, such screeds can overstate the

inestimably noxious effects of an attitude which surely need not always be all-

consuming. For example, in an effort to distinguish modern cynics from their classical linguistic ancestors, Luis Navia offers the following stunning rhetorical condemnation: "Akin to nihilism, cynicism leads individuals and nations to abandon all moral values and to drown in a fetid sea of intellectual and ethical moroseness and pessimism."8 Second, cynicism's temporal dimension, its strong association with recent historical developments, begs more questions than it answers: why would cynicism become so ubiquitous in our present era? And what exactly marks this era, anyway? What did cynicism look like in the past, and how widespread was it? One begins to worry that we may suffer from historical amnesia, or inflated self-importance, when we insist that cynicism is a plague unique to our own time. Finally, the relationship posited between cynicism and

postmodernism can only further obscure the already muddy waters. Both

cynicism and postmodernism remain highly contested concepts, often flung accusingly at one's opponent in a heated polemic. Neither concept affords a settled definition.

We must approach cynicism from a sensitive historical perspective and a theoretically informed standpoint if we are to understand the conditions for its emergence and the ethical and political consequences it may have. The frequent polemics surrounding the wages of cynicism have all too often prevented it from receiving serious treatment; instead, "the cynic" appears simply as psychologi- cally defective, intellectually lazy, or politically apathetic. This paper seeks to rectify this problem and treat cynicism as a theoretically revealing mode of consciousness in the modern world. I do not provide an exhaustive genealogy of cynicism, an impossible undertaking for a single essay. Rather, I trace particular features of modern cynical consciousness to aspects of enlightenment thought, demonstrating that the impulse toward cynicism may lie buried much deeper in our social and philosophical heritage than recent commentary has suggested. Ultimately, I accept that a particularly virulent form of cynical consciousness

7. For useful examinations of the dangers which moralism poses to politics, see Jane Bennett and Michael Shapiro, eds., The Politics of Moralizing (New York: Routledge, 2002). The essays in this book collectively demonstrate that moralism fetishizes an unattainable purity of motivation and an unrealistic organic community of shared values. Moralism is therefore monological, certain of the rightness of its own standards, and therefore unwilling to countenance disagreement, which always appears as a fall from virtue. It is this monological character of moralism which potentially shuts down politics.

8. Luis Navia, Diogenes ofSinope: The Man in the Tub (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 147. In contrast, Navia paints a generally positive and admiring portrait of Diogenes, whose commitment to speaking freely and living a self-sufficient life serves as a respectful model of forthright, honest human behavior.



388 MODERN CYNICISM

may thrive today, but we can understand this in terms of the aggravation of tendencies in the intellectual project of enlightenment itself, rather than as the unfortunate result of a lamentable betrayal of enlightenment ideals. In particular, Diderot's satire Rameau's Nephew spelled out in the eighteenth century the

danger of enlightenment degenerating into cynicism. If we are to believe today's cultural critics, then Diderot's vision was prescient indeed. After tracing the

relationship between enlightenment cynicism and contemporary, postmodern cynicism, I conclude by considering the appropriate response to widespread cynicism, rejecting excessively moralistic denunciations as politically counter- productive.

Understanding Cynicism

How can we make an ill-defined concept like cynicism the object of rigorous scrutiny? What kind of understanding will illuminate the complicated workings of cynical consciousness? First, I do not mean to suggest that cynicism has an eternal, ahistorical manifestation in the world. It should go without saying that cynicism in the seventeenth century was probably directed against different objects than cynicism in the twentieth century.9 Nor do I suggest that particular individuals either are or are not cynical, as though cynicism exhausts any individual's consciousness. I offer a more modest reading of the form of cynical consciousness, a form into which we can pour the various concerns of different epochs. This formal analysis should prove useful to the extent that it underscores why so many cultural commentators worry so much about the impact of cynicism.

Because Sloterdijk's work often serves as the backdrop for more recent discussions of cynicism, I begin with his definition of cynicism and attempt to distill the elements of this definition that implicitly inform much of today's more scattershot discussion. Throughout this analysis I will often refer abstractly to "the cynic"-this serves as an ideal-typical construction, meant to highlight the various characteristics attributed to cynical consciousness by cultural commentators following in Sloterdijk's wake. What exactly does this cynical consciousness entail, then? Sloterdijk defines cynicism as "enlightened

9. While this is outside the scope of this paper, one might consider modern cynicism a kind of democratic levelling of the courtly cynicism of the seventeenth century, of which we might view La Rochefoucauld as an exemplar. Where we might interpret La Rochefoucauld's cynicism as an insider's disdain for the preening, sycophantic, self-promoting masquerade of courtly politics, this form of cynicism could well spread throughout society as rigid status hierarchies begin to crumble and the world of commerce allows individuals of all ranks and classes to play a similar theatrical game. See La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tancock (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1959).



Sharon Stanley 389

false consciousness" and explicates this provocative phrase in the following passage:

It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.10

Sloterdijk views cynicism as a potential manifestation of a particular kind of

enlightenment, then, one which he identifies with critique-as-unmasking." Thus, Sloterdijk argues that the seeds of cynicism are planted whenever individuals strive to bridge the gap between an "official" vision of the truth and the "naked" truth: "Cynical thinking only arises when two views of things have become

possible, an official and an unofficial view, a veiled and a naked view, one from the viewpoint of heroes and one from the viewpoint of valets.'12 The very terms of this distinction harbor an obvious suspicion of all official stories and doctrines, a tendency to view the true workings of power as artfully masked.

Of course, critique itself may issue from a similar desire to unmask the naked truth distorted by official doctrine. The suspicion that power masks its own authentic workings obviously does not in and of itself constitute cynicism. Indeed, we might read it as healthy skepticism, essential to the practice not only of politics but also of intellectual life. After all, this was precisely Marx's insight in pointing out the mystifying effects of ideology, and of course of capital itself. But critique as unmasking does begin to look like a risky gambit after encountering Sloterdijk. Tearing the masks from arbitrary power might leave this power exposed to revolt, but why should the game of unmasking stop at the critique of arbitrary power? The lesson learned from this unending game of unmasking might dissolve all social bonds in a fog of mistrust and suspicion. In this fog, the logic of cynicism becomes particularly seductive: in this corrupt world, it reasons, no one and nothing can be trusted. Everyone wears a mask beneath which naked, brutal self-interest calculates and plots. This cynicism reduces all social roles, from idealistic crusaders to cunning criminals, to this most base self- interest. The archetypal cynic cannot abide any appeal to shared values, any statement of love or virtue, without bitter incredulity and skepticism. Hence

10. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 5. 11. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 22. See ch. 3 for Sloterdijk's examination of "the most

historically successful figures of demasking"-Sloterdijk portrays each of these figures as harboring a

potential moment of cynicism. Thus, Sloterdijk is not suggesting that today's cynicism is unprecedented, but rather that its sheer pervasiveness emerges after a final unmasking, after critique fully cannibalizes itself.

12. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 218.



390 MODERN CYNICISM

Judith Shklar's description of cynicism: "There are also cynics, driven by contempt for ideological politics to reject all public standards as mere sham."'13

Shklar's cynics harbor an overwhelmingly hostile attitude toward social convention. Through deriding the dominant beliefs of his peers as sheer

hypocrisy, the cynic implies that these beliefs mask the true motives upon which human beings act. Cynics scoff at ideals, principles, and noble convictions as mere sham and artifice, fundamentally unrealizable for inevitably corrupt and selfish men. Thus, the cynic offers a decidedly grim evaluation of human nature and society. Through the constant practice of unmasking, the cynical imagination takes the old theatrum mundi insight that all men are actors and gives it the most

socially pessimistic interpretation possible: society is an elaborate con game in which all the most savvy social actors willfully deceive and manipulate one another in the pursuit of their own private ends.14

We have now arrived at the crucial aspect of cynicism. We have moved from a

grim descriptive vision of man and society to a particular orientation to action.

Viewing society as a battlefield of narrowly self-interested con men does not in and of itself constitute cynicism. Nor does a relentless exposure of man's most noble virtues as mere masks for the ugliest passions: pride, vanity, greed, gluttony, lust, and their assorted dark companions. After all, this kind of unmasking plays a central role in the Augustinian tradition, in which the curtains always pull back to reveal the fallen human soul tainted by original sin. Yet, cynicism does not so much condemn humanity for its sins, compelling men through a confrontation with their abjection to seek divine grace, as counsel a kind of realistic capitulation to the corruption of the world. This self-aware complicity with an irredeemable world comprises the second move of cynicism.

First, then, the cynic accepts the impossibility of truly virtuous and principled action in human society. This is cynicism's descriptive vision. Second, the cynic contemplates what sort of action and behavior is appropriate in such a society. If virtue, authenticity, and principled action are beyond the reach of human beings, then we must abandon hope for any future transcendence of corruption and

injustice. Therefore, the cynic often decides that he can only secure personal satisfaction through a mastery of the arts of deception and manipulation which constitute the foundation of society. This is cynicism's posture toward action. Thus, the cynic comes to a resigned acceptance of things as they are, because

13. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 85. 14. It is here that we must be especially careful in distinguishing cynicism from irony After all, the

ironist also rejects the search for authenticity, yet an ironic critique of authenticity could have liberatory effects. It might open space for a playful attitude both to the self and to society, in which individuals can

try on different selves and steer clear of some of the existential baggage that a demand for authenticity could bring. Cynicism shares with irony this theatrical imagination, finding an endless play of surface appearances in the social sphere, but cynicism remains convinced that something dark, calculating, and base lurks beneath the masks, while irony takes no such position.



Sharon Stanley 391

presumably they could be no different, and learns only to play the game, to thoroughly implicate himself in the very system he has damned. Here, quite obviously, the cynic parts ways with the St. Augustines of the world.

The account of cynicism offered thus far skirts over certain instabilities and tensions built into the very structure of cynical consciousness. On the one hand, the cynic seeks to condemn the world around him for its moral failings, yet at the same time, he mocks serious moral aspirations. This mockery erodes the standpoint for the initial condemnation; "corruption" only gains substance if it can be read against some realizable standard of purity or integrity. In order to unmask the baseness of the human soul, the cynic must remain within the conventional categories of "base" and "virtuous"-a counterintuitive similarity in moral frameworks informs both cynicism and moralism, then. Thus, the cynic retains a paradoxical investment in the very values he dismisses as naive pieties, and the very virulence of the cynic's mockery betrays this persistent investment. The cynic and the moralist both describe the landscape of a fallen world, but the moralist counsels reform, redemption, or exile, while the cynic immerses himself in the fallen world. Moralism is the more simple and coherent mode of consciousness; cynicism is constitutively unstable and shot through with internal tensions. Yet these very tensions, as we will see later, also suggest the possibility of a more productive and dialogical cynicism, one that need not stand in absolute antithesis to any and all political action.

Critics of cynicism do not typically attend to its self-contradictory nature, instead treating it as though it were internally stable, unitary, and basically exhaustive of a person's consciousness. In other words, they treat the ideal- typical cynic sketched above as a faithful representation of many modern subjects. I will return to this problem in the final section of the paper, offering a cautious and partial political defense of cynicism as it actually appears in the world. In the rest of this section, however, I will return to the ideal-typical construction in order to better grasp the role cynicism plays in Sloterdijk's and Zifek's account as the final executioner of an already weak and beleaguered critique of ideology. Zi2ek writes: "in [the contemporary cynical attitude], ideology can lay its cards on the table, reveal the secret of its functioning, and still continue to function.'15 In a world of rampant cynicism, people expect to be lied to, but rather than responding with outrage and seeking to build a more honest world, they simply accept this deceit as inevitable and calculate how they can best take advantage of it. Cynical logic goes roughly like so: The naive and idealistic get trampled in this world. You have to do what you can to get by. Better to do the outwitting than to be outwitted. Society will always be cutthroat, politicians will always lie, greedy businessmen will always squeeze profits out of

15. Zifek, The Indivisible Remainder, 200 (emphasis in the original).



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suffering. If we can do nothing to change this, then at least we want a piece of the pie. To quote Zifek once again: "the formula of cynicism is no longer the classic Marxian 'they do not know it, but they are doing it', it is 'they know very well what they are doing, yet they are doing it.'"16 Significantly, even though cynicism offers a stinging critique of social corruption, it allows this corruption to continue functioning indefinitely because it refuses to act on its own critique.

Sloterdijk himself believes the only way to overcome this feeling of impotence is through a revival of the Greek Cynical tradition of mocking satire and jeering laughter. He portrays modern cynicism as bitter and melancholic, resigned to a

deeply flawed world and capable of guarding itself against despair only by always anticipating the worst." In sharp contrast, classical Cynicism is joyful and cheeky, mocking the philosophical seriousness of would-be reformers and idealists not with tears of resignation but with laughter and mirth.'" Furthermore, this subversive tradition of cheekiness presents itself for Sloterdijk as the solution to the problem of contemporary cynicism: the only escape possible in an age which already knows the futility of political action and idle utopianism. In some sense, Sloterdijk turns back the clock on enlightenment itself, freezing it before it collapses into cynical hopelessness. Yet, this very move perhaps concedes too much to cynicism itself. Why accept the futility of politics or utopianism? Does Sloterdijk really overcome the paralyzing impact of cynicism, or merely accept it but seek to make it less melancholic and more joyful? Does Sloterdijk's good, cheeky "kynicism" really overcome the political shortcomings of the contemporary form of cynicism that he rejects?

On such a reading of Sloterdijk, cynicism begins to look like a dangerously seductive foe. If our pre-eminent scholar of cynicism, in attempting to prescribe a cure, ultimately succumbs to the disease, then it must be contagious and cunning indeed. In fact, precisely because Sloterdijk offers a meticulous catalog of the many aspects of the world (and of our philosophical heritage) that might breed a most paralyzing form of cynicism, reading his book can certainly give the impression that cynicism is the most logical response to the world we inhabit. One also gets the impression that the collective weight of the horrors of the twentieth century, coupled with the apparent exhaustion of the tradition of critical theory,19 makes our new century especially ripe for widespread, diffuse cynicism. Although I will conclude with a reading of the aspects of the present day that indeed might provoke widespread cynicism, I would also caution against

16. Zifek, "Introduction," in Mapping Ideology 8. 17. See Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 88-100, for a bleak portrait of the almost pathological

modern cynic. 18. See Sloterdijk's discussion of Diogenes of Sinope on 156-69 of the Critique of Cynical Reason. 19. On Sloterdijk's reading. I do not mean to suggest that I really believe the tradition of critical

theory is exhausted.



Sharon Stanley 393

overstating this connection. In particular, I believe the enlightenment itself harbored a potential cynicism, most completely expressed in the thought of Diderot, which might illuminate critique's present predicament. Moreover, the fact that Diderot wrestled with this cynicism yet still presented a positive political project should give us pause before condemning cynicism wholesale as utterly antithetical to the practice of politics.

In the proceeding section, then, I turn to Diderot's curious dialog, Rameau's Nephew. Many scholars have identified the nephew as a cynic, but he is all too often read simply as the enemy of the enlightenment, the voice of the critics of the

Encyclopedie. Instead, I will offer a reading of the nephew's cynicism as emerging from within enlightenment itself. Moreover, as several scholars have read

Rameau's Nephew as an early precursor of postmodernism, then if we also understand the nephew as a slightly perverse figure of enlightenment proper, we might begin to question the rigid oppositions frequently erected between enlightenment and postmodernism.20

Rameau's Nephew and the Cynicism of Enlightenment

In Rameau's Nephew, two interlocutors, identified only as "Lui" and "Moi", discuss their social milieu in eighteenth-century Paris. Moi gives voice to traditional, relatively moderate enlightenment beliefs about virtue, happiness, and the pleasures of sociability. Lui, the nephew of the famous composer Jean- Philippe Rameau, repeatedly mocks his companion's ethical and social commitments, exposing them as unrealistic pieties in a cutthroat and duplicitous world. The dialog ultimately exposes the high culture of Paris as smothered in ill- concealed hypocrisy and absolute superficiality. It is a world in which clever conversation about the good life, happiness, virtue, and art has replaced their genuine pursuit. Appearance is everything in such a society. So long as one gives the impression of virtue, it matters little whether he is in fact a rogue. Such a society clearly invites unmasking, and the nephew fulfills this function with gleeful abandon.

The nephew's response to this superficial and false society is precisely the two- fold movement of cynicism identified in the preceding section. His descriptive

20. Both defenders of the enlightenment and postmodern critics equally bear responsibility for this

questionable, rigid opposition. Nonetheless, more nuanced scholarship has recently emerged which identifies affinities between enlightenment and postmodernism, resisting taking a polarized for-or-against position in the ongoing debate over the enlightenment's legacy or the consequences of postmodernism. For a discussion of such work, see David Bates, EnlightenmentAberrations: Error and Revolution in France (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 14-15. For a reading of Diderot himself specifically in this light, see Elisabeth de Fontenay Diderot: Reason and Resonance, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1982).



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vision of Parisian social life depicts not only the prevalence of hypocrisy, but also its virtual inevitability. Apparently virtuous and self-mortifying women are secretly consumed by burning lusts, while proud and boastful noblemen with rattling swords are cringing cowards.21 He catalogs a variety of social actors, from specific individuals such as his patrons M. Bertin and Mlle. Hus, to general types such as representatives of particular vocations, as ultimately driven by the pursuit of a narrow and vicious kind of self-interest, what Rousseau would have condemned as amour-propre. In this status-obsessed society, it is impossible to take professions of virtue and sincerity seriously, and so the nephew rejects a series of admirable virtues offered by his companion as mere "vanities": he dismisses patriotism, friendship, duty, and even familial bonds as useless and antiquated in the decadent and hedonistic society he inhabits.22 Thus, Moi's sincere attachment to the virtues and to an ethical life appears as naifve and out of step with a society in which such attachments can only be falsely mobilized to buttress one's reputation, but secretly disdained by all who struggle to get ahead. Or, in the words of the nephew: "People laud virtue, but they hate and avoid it, for it freezes you to death, and in this world, you have to keep your feet warm.'23

If the nephew merely stopped here, he might even resemble Rousseau in his description of vacuous and superficial society life. However, unlike Rousseau, the nephew also makes the second move of cynicism: he abandons any reformist intentions, and willfully becomes complicit in the corruption he identifies around him. He calculates how to exploit a social structure based upon envy, greed, and empty status symbols to advance his own social position, and in the rare moment when he fails to debase himself so thoroughly he bitterly curses his inadequacy: "Couldn't you flatter as well as the next man? Couldn't you manage to lie, swear, perjure, promise, fulfill or back out like anybody else? Couldn't you go on all fours like anybody else?"24 Describing his former job as a music teacher, he readily admits that his lessons were, initially at least, utterly worthless, and when Moi asks him if he "rob[bed] without compunction," he cheerfully replies: "Oh yes, no compunction at all. They say that when a thief robs a thief the devil has a good laugh."25 This witticism perfectly encapsulates the nephew's cynical worldview and orientation toward action: society is full of dissemblers and thieves, so the best way to climb the social ladder is to dissemble and steal. Needless to say, the nephew's self-conscious immersion in the ubiquitous corruption of

21. See Diderot, Rameaus Nephew, in Rameaus Nephew/D'Alembert's Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 69-70, for the nephew's gleeful unmasking of the cowardly Chevalier de la Morliere and the lustful "virtuous" woman.

22. See Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 65-66, for the nephew's wry denunciations of Moi's catalog of virtues.

23. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 69. 24. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 49. 25. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 63.



Sharon Stanley 395

eighteenth-century Paris distinguishes him from Rousseau's moral denunciations of the same milieu.

One might wonder, though, what this account of Rameau's Nephew has to do with us today After all, Old Regime France was still a monarchical society rooted in a rigid status hierarchy soon to be torn asunder by emergent capitalism and, more decisively still, the French Revolution. If the cynicism of the nephew still

rings true today, then his consciousness must be more than just a product of a

premodern, long-gone world. We must therefore pay close attention to the objects of the nephew's cynicism. He has just been expelled from the household of M. Bertin and his mistress, Mlle. Hus, when he first encounters Moi. Bertin and Hus appear as grotesque caricatures of the Parisian upper-crust. As Wilda Anderson describes them: "she is an obese, incompetent actress; he is a tall scarecrow, a venal speculator... these people of money rather than merit pursue a sysiphean goal of buying the signs of a merit that their very buying shows they can never reach.'26 The nephew's cynicism, then, differs substantially from the

courtly cynicism of a La Rochefoucauld, exposing the self-aggrandizement of courtiers angling for more power and influence with the King. For as Anderson points out, the nephew's social universe excludes any authentic source of power like a monarch. Money becomes the new sun from which all prestige and status radiate in the nephew's world: "When Rameau speaks to Bertin, he reveals that the relational stucture implied by the appearances is not there, that the courtiers are attracted not by a real king's real merit but by a pseudo-king's pseudo-merit: by his money."27 Thus, Diderot ultimately satirizes a society driven by the pursuit of money, a pursuit in which all the social classes participate. Hence the nephew's famous act of prostrating himself before the Mighty Louis, a performance from which it is worth quoting at some length:

Lui says: 'Of course. Money, money. Money is all, and the rest, without money, is nothing. And that is why, instead of stuffing his [Rameau's nephew's son] head with fine maxims that he would have to forget or else beg for bread, when I possess a louis, which isn't often, I take up my stand in front of him. I take the coin out of my pocket. I show it him with admiration. I roll my eyes to heaven. I kiss the louis in front of him. And to make him appreciate still more the importance of the sacred coin, I stammer out the names and point out with my finger all the things you can acquire with it-a nice child's frock, a nice bonnet, a lovely biscuit. Then I put the coin back into my pocket. I strut around proudly, lift my waistcoat and tap my fob pocket. In this way I make

26. Wilda Anderson, Diderots Dream (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 214.

27. Anderson, Diderots Dream, 221.



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him understand that the state of self-confidence he sees in me comes from the coin in there.28

Decades before Marx, centuries before Baudrillard, Diderot offers a glimpse into the empty heart of exchange-value. To quote Anderson yet again: "He [the nephew] is dealing with people who live in the shadow world of signs, with simulacra of people of merit for whom the most undesirable event is to have the

emptiness behind their carefully constructed images revealed."29 This emptiness is money-the very dawning of commercial society. If the nephew teaches his son to value money above all else, if he recognizes the corrosive power of money to vanquish virtue and principle, then his lessons appeal to a rather more modern audience than those of La Rochefoucauld. The nephew shrewdly observes not

only the declining aristocracy but also the rising bourgeoisie. When he unmasks men as creatures of base self-interest, then, he sees this self-interest filtered

through an emerging commercial economy. After all, aristocratic privilege was no

longer so secure in the middle of the eighteenth century. Wealthy men could

purchase offices. The wives of merchants could afford to dress above their "true" rank. Paris experienced a mass influx of strangers seeking to improve their social status; these social climbers clearly threatened any rigid status hierarchy. The nephew demonstrates how the corrosive logic of exchange-value invades human relationships themselves, eradicating the concreteness and particularity of individual human beings. Describing Bertin's table as a microcosm of modern culture, James Schmidt writes: "The circulation of guests at Bertin's table mimics the fate of all demarcations within the world of Bildung: like cash, they are always exchangeable.l30 The nephew's cynicism therefore has much broader implica- tions than an aristocratic cynicism limited to observations of courtly culture.31

Moreover, as the nephew confronts this rapidly changing society, he does so with the clear-eyed vision of a man who has cast aside prejudice and superstition.

28. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 110. 29. Anderson, Diderots Dream, 220. 30. James Schmidt, "The Fool's Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and Hegel," Journal of the History of Ideas 57

(1996): 639. 31. It is worth noting that this concern about the power of money to usurp and destroy authentic

values was a recurring theme in Diderot's writing. The nephew's cynical paean to the louis echoes the

dialog which Diderot crafts between himself and Grimm in the preamble to the Salon of 1767. The Diderot-character tells the Grimm-character: "Money, which purchases anything, became the measure of all things. It became necessary to have money, and then what? More money And when it ran out, it was

necessary to keep up appearances and create the illusion that one was still well supplied". Recalling the

nephew's own evocation of eighteenth-century Paris, the Grimm-character responds with the inevitable effect this mad scramble for money has upon social behavior: "And there thus arose insulting ostentation on the part of some and a kind of epidemic hypocrisy of fortune on the part of others."' See Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Diderot on Art, trans. John Goodman, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). This

ostentation and hypocrisy creates a breeding ground for cynicism in a commercial, rather than an aristocratic, society



Sharon Stanley 397

Although the Moi character in the dialog clearly represents a conventional philosophe position, it does not necessarily follow that the nephew represents a complete outsider to the enlightenment, a victim of the superstitions and prejudices which the philosophes sought to banish from the world. In fact, the nephew often appeals to familiar enlightenment tropes in order to defend conclusions which would make any moderate philosophe blush. In doing so, the nephew does not speak as a voice of enlightenment's enemy, but rather, as a kind of immanent critic of enlightenment.32 Like any philosophe, the nephew speaks from a position of worldly secularism and materialist empiricism, rejecting grand metaphysical systems, whether religious or philosophical. Yet, where the philosophes slammed the brakes on their critique after razing religious pieties to the ground, the nephew continues to blaze his destructive path, calling morality itself into question by dismantling any universal truths: "Moreover, bear in mind that in a matter as variable as behavior there is no such thing as the absolutely, essentially, universally true or false, unless it is that one must be what self-interest dictates-good or bad, wise or foolish, serious or ridiculous, virtuous or vicious."33 The appeal to both self-interest and the variability and mutability of human behavior echo familiar enlightenment themes, yet the nephew puts them to work in a decidedly cynical fashion.

Also like the philosophes, the nephew defends the natural, bodily passions as legitimate paths along which to seek worldly happiness. Notably, Diderot himself offered one of the strongest defenses of the passions among the philosophes, refusing to condemn them merely as dangerous urges which must be suppressed in the name of rational self-discipline. But the nephew literally embodies a life driven by the passions, and in his dissolute lifestyle calls into question Diderot's own faith in the goodness of natural human urges. Lui mocks Moi's insistence that he prefers moderate and calm pleasures to "debauchery and vice"-dismissing his companion's list of elevated pleasures such as helping the unfortunate, reading something pleasant, and instructing his children, with the brief remark: "What funny people you are!"34 For Lui, the passions lead him only to a superficial hedonism of temporary pleasures: "[D]rink good wine, blow yourself out with luscious food, have a tumble with lovely women, lie on soft beds."35 It is difficult to read Lui here as a voice of any of the traditional enemies of enlightenment; certainly, he does not speak as a superstitious or religious man, nor as a cruel

32. On the subject of enlightenment autocritique, see Mark Hulliung, The Autocritique of

Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), in which Hulliung reads Rousseau not as a vicious outsider to enlightenment, but rather as a figure who uses many tools of the enlightenment itself to call into question the enlightenment's own self-confidence.

33. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 83. 34. Diderot, Rameaus Nephew, 67. 35. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 65.



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despot. Rather, he calls into question whether "pleasures of the mind" can really be ranked higher than "pleasures of the body" from the perspective of someone who wholly embraces worldly pleasures-a perspective which is by no means

foreign to the standard-bearers of the enlightenment. There is, finally, a third route to cynicism (in addition to his implicit critique of

commerce and his articulate deployment of the tenets of enlightenment) which the nephew takes, one which explains the occasional venomous and bitter edge of his proclamations. For the nephew is a figure of profound personal disappointment. His uncle is a renowned musical genius, yet the nephew has somehow failed to inherit this genius: "Yes, yes, I am mediocre and angry . . . In fact I was jealous of my uncle, and if at his death there had been some fine compositions for keyboard still unpublished, I wouldn't have hesitated to remain myself and be him too.l36 The nephew heaps scorn and derision upon the "great men" of his age partially because he envies them and he despairs of his own

mediocrity. Cynicism, in this case, is a kind of armor against despair. By disparaging all his contemporaries, and reducing them all to the same vicious level, the nephew avoids confronting his own mediocrity. His final judgment on the world he inhabits, bordering on total fatalism, is the judgment of a thoroughly disillusioned man: "In nature all the species feed on each other, and all classes prey on each other in society. We mete out justice to each other without the law taking a hand"'37

I have offered this portrait of the nephew to show that the impetus toward modern cynicism draws on familiar enlightenment themes. This should certainly give us pause before we declare cynicism as a plague unique to our own time. Of course, it does not follow that present-day cynicism does not merit analysis. It is now worth reappraising our own "cynical times" in light of the nephew. We can now identify those aspects of contemporary society which might aggravate cynical consciousness, while at the same time avoiding excessively moralistic denunciations of cynicism. After all, Diderot clearly confronted the cynical impulses within his own thought without ever abandoning a positive political or moral project.

Cynicism and Contemporary Society

In Rameau's Nephew, we can observe several factors that produce the nephew's cynicism. I will focus on three such factors in the following discussion. First, he responds to an emerging commercial society in which exchange-value threatens to extinguish all other values. The upper-crust of Paris treats not only

36. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 43. 37. Diderot, Rameaus Nephew, 63.



Sharon Stanley 399

objects but also other human beings as exchangeable and expendable. Second, he accepts the enlightenment critique of religion and metaphysics, but carries this critique even further, banishing all traces of transcendence from the world, and reducing man to a constellation of crude animal-like passions. Third, the nephew is a figure of profound disappointment, unable to live up to the legacy of his famous uncle or to achieve the genius he always sought.

I would like to examine briefly how each of these avenues to cynicism persists in aggravated form in today's world. First, and most obviously, while the nephew's critique of money has a modern ring to it, the two centuries of intervening economic development have drastically heightened the sting of such a critique. If money was already the emptiness at the heart of the Old Regime, it is difficult to imagine what the nephew would have made of modern mass-commerce, with its relentless colonization of every last corner of society. Numerous contemporary critics have depicted modern society in precisely this fashion, as a world in which exchange-value has vanquished all other forms of value, and the imperatives of consumerism have colonized formerly autonomous spheres of culture. In "Postmodernism and the Market:' Frederic Jameson argues that mass-media has paved the way for a universal commodification in which the boundaries between advertising, information, entertainment, and education have all but evaporated.38 Jean Baudrillard has theorized a new form of culture marked by the total domination of simulations and the corresponding extinction of symbolic exchange from the modern world.39 While we can and should question excessively totalizing accounts, it is beyond dispute that subjects in advanced capitalist societies constantly encounter a barrage of mass-media imagery and advertising.

Cynicism potentially arises here as a defense mechanism. We can avoid becoming the dupe of the latest fashion or advertising trend by treating everything as a matter of fashion and advertising, reassuring ourselves as we flip through the television channels or browse through the shopping mall that at least we know what's really going on. This is cynical insofar as we still watch television and shop, scoffing at the possibility of any real escape from consumer society, but simply do

38. As Jameson himself notes, this account owes a debt to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, a 1967 effort to theorize a new stage in the logic of commodity fetishism, in which it is no longer merely individual commodities themselves that acquire a magical, unreal aura, but the entire structure of society (as epitomized by television) that submits to the unreal logic of commodification. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). See footnote 4 for Jameson's "Postmodernism and the Market" citation.

39. On Baudrillard's fatalistic analysis, only death can escape the logic of commercial exchange in today's world. See Jean Baudrillard, "Symbolic Exchange and Death," trans. Charles Levin, in The Structural Allegory ed. John Fekete (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). For Baudrillard's account of simulation, see Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Paul Foss et al. (New York: Semiotexte, 1983).



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so knowingly Indeed, those like Terry Eagleton who accuse Baudrillard of a fashionable left-cynicism believe this is exactly what his analysis of simulacra amounts to-a sophisticated self-justification for giving up on radical political transformation.40 If we take Baudrillard as representative of postmodernism, or at least one version of postmodernism, then, this is one place where the alleged cynicism of postmodernism emerges-in a self-aware surrender to the perceived total victory of the empty spectacle of consumer society.

While the nephew already recognized the capacity of exchange-value to mimic (and thus efface) authentic merits and virtues, today's mass-mediated, mass-produced world has vastly shrunk the spaces of refuge from the logic of consumption. Television and the Internet beam advertising and infotainment directly into the home, and billboards and storefront displays constantly remind us that money can purchase the markers of a sophisticated lifestyle. It becomes more and more difficult to believe we could possibly escape this pervasive spectacle. Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money originally published at the turn of the twentieth century, eloquently captured the potential relationship between money and cynicism, providing a compelling bridge between the nephew's early ode to money, and our own mass-mediated information economy One century ago, Simmel wrote:

The nurseries of cynicism are therefore those places with huge turnovers, exemplified in stock exchange dealings, where money is available in huge quantities and changes owners easily The more money becomes the sole centre of interest, the more one discovers that honour and conviction, talent and virtue, beauty and salvation of the soul, are exchanged against money and so the more a mocking and frivolous attitude will develop in relation to these higher values that are for sale for the same kind of value as groceries, and that also command a "market price."41

One can easily imagine how, on Simmel's account, the rise of mass-commerce and mass-media would provoke a marked increase in cynicism. Yet, we need not necessarily accept a bleak account of universal cynical triumph, in which modern cynical subjects retreat entirely from politics into the dystopia of the worldwide shopping mall, congratulating themselves all the while on their clear- eyed recognition of the true contours of this dystopian world. Such an account

40. For such an accusation, see Terry Eagleton, Ideology: an Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), 38-39. Eagleton writes: "It then becomes possible, in a cynical 'left' wisdom, to celebrate this catatonic state as some cunning last-ditch resistance to ideological meaning-to revel in the very spiritual blankness of the late bourgeois order as a welcome relief from the boring old humanist nostalgia for truth, value and reality"

41. George Simmel, The Philosophy of Money trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, ed. David Frisby, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 256.



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forgets that cynicism may have a particular object, and may recede outside of particular contexts. While our ideal-typical cynic condemned the world wholesale as irredeemable, individuals need not apply their cynicism to all objects within society; indeed, the unstable character of cynicism discussed above indicates the likelihood of such partial and directed cynicism. We might be cynical when we watch television, but it does not follow that we remain cynical in all other aspects of our lives. (Nor is cynicism necessarily an objectionable disposition for television-viewing!) The same individual who scoffs cynically at the absurdities of "reality" television may still find inspiration in the struggles of the dispossessed. Thus, sincere activities, political and otherwise, clearly persist even today.

However, as we saw in the preceding section, the nephew's total surrender to the corruption of the Old Regime is partially enabled through his strategic deployment of particular enlightenment doctrines. He does not simply capitulate because he foresees the triumph of commercial society; rather, he foresees the triumph of commercial society partially because he recognizes there can be no authentic foundation for higher values after enlightenment critique has razed faith, religion, and ultimately morality to the ground. If shared values are hollow at their core, then we might as well trade and purchase them like commodities. So the nephew's unmasking of the foundations of justice and morality work in tandem with his complicity in the emerging commercial society. One might argue that the process of disenchantment inaugurated by enlightenment has reached its pinnacle in so-called postmodernism, and alongside mass-commerce breeds a far more paralyzing, corrosive, anti-political form of cynicism than the occasional, context-dependent cynicism of the television-viewer I have outlined above.

Rigid distinctions between "postmodernism" and "enlightenment" fail us here. If we can read the nephew as a figure of enlightenment, then we cannot accept caricatured depictions of enlightenment as the last stand of universal, abstract reason and truth. If enlightenment unmasked the grand metaphysical system- building of seventeenth-century practitioners like Leibniz and Descartes, then "postmodernism" is as much an extension of enlightenment unmasking critique as a bitter opponent to enlightenment. Condillac's grounding of knowledge in language and sociability as opposed to innate ideas, and Diderot's relentless insistence upon human inconstancy and changeability, may be taken as paradigmatic examples.42 Postmodernism's anti-metaphysical, fragmentary, rela- tivist vision surely existed in some nascent form already in the eighteenth century.

42. For Condillac's theory of knowledge, see Condillac, Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Diderot's insistence on the inconstancy of human desire was often couched in the context of a critique of the institution of marriage. For example, in his Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, Orou responds to the chaplain's discussion of marital fidelity in the following manner: "What could be more absurd than a fidelity



402 MODERN CYNICISM

Of course, this is not at all to suggest that there have been no theoretical innovations in the past two centuries, or that the thinkers of the enlightenment never valorized categories like reason and nature which postmodern theorists view with particular suspicion. Indeed, in a full account of the genealogy of contemporary cynicism, we could not do without an account of Friedrich Nietzsche's stinging critique of enlightenment-the nineteenth century is notably absent from this paper. Instead, I only want to call into question accounts of "postmodern cynicism" in which cynicism suddenly bursts onto the scene as a result of the poisonous philosophical doctrines unique to our time. Rather than enlightenment's implacable foe, we might view postmodernism as a more extreme application of some of the principles of enlightenment itself. None- theless, I would certainly grant, alongside Sloterdijk himself, that successive stages of unmasking critique could well aggravate the tendency toward cynicism I have already identified in enlightenment, as we find it more and more difficult to believe in anything but the absolute superficiality of a world of images and simulations. The popularized dissemination of postmodernism could plausibly provoke such a worldview.

But this worldview itself need not amount to political fatalism. For in a sense, it is only the first move of cynicism, the exposure of the falseness and duplicity of our society, albeit a falseness and duplicity that spirals into infinity, rather than covers a hidden truth. It becomes cynicism if, for example, we proceed to embrace prefabricated market identities even as we mockingly unmask their falseness. But a critique of authenticity-a fundamental move for much postmodernism-might instead appear as a liberation of the subject from weighty modernist anxieties. Ultimately, a critique of authenticity corrodes politics only if one believes to begin with that politics requires a commitment to authenticity Cynics who do in fact retreat from politics based on their critiques of authenticity obviously make this assumption, but self-proclaimed critics of cynicism who presume that all critiques of authenticity necessarily lead to political retreat in fact make the very same error.

But all this skirts the central historical accusation frequently lodged against both postmodernism and cynicism. Postmodern cynicism here appears as an embattled reaction to the concrete, historical failure of radical politics. Sloterdijk himself locates this moment of political disillusionment with the collapse of the student movement of the 1960s: "The dissolution of the student movement must

restricting the most capricious of our pleasures to a single individual; than a vow of immutability taken by two beings formed of flesh and blood, under a sky that doesn't remain fixed for an instant, beneath caverns poised on the edge of collapse, under a cliff crumbling into dust, at the foot of a tree shedding its bark, beneath a quivering stone?" See Diderot, Supple'ment au Voyage de Bougainville, in Political Writings, ed. and trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 50-51.



Sharon Stanley 403

interest us because it represents a complex metamorphosis of hope into realism, of revolt into a clever melancholy, from a grand political denial into a thousand- faceted, small, subpolitical affirmation, from a radicalism in politics into a middle course of intelligent survival."43 As Andreas Huyssen puts it in his eloquent review of Sloterdijk's book: "Sloterdijk attempts to theorize that which has often remained submerged in the recent debate about modernity and postmodernity: the pervasive sense of political disillusionment in the wake of the 1960s and the pained feeling of a lack of political and social alternatives in Western societies today."44 This reading of contemporary political malaise recognizes an important facet of cynicism apart from the analysis of its formal content: cynicism tends to arise from the ashes of shattered faith. In order to be disillusioned, one must harbor illusions to begin with. Hence the frequency with which we read that

leading postmodern intellectuals, like Baudrillard and Lyotard, are former Marxists.

An analysis of cynicism that foregrounds the concrete moment of disillusionment could treat the ideological content of cynical consciousness merely as a post hoc self-justification. On such an account, it hardly matters what explanation the cynic offers for his political hopelessness-whether he appeals to the ultimate, incontestable triumph of consumer culture, or the inherently corrupt motives of all political leaders, or the meaninglessness of shared values. What matters is that he offers these indictments of political action after the fact to justify his retreat from politics in the face of prior failures. This kind of historically conditioned cynicism need not be political, of course. One might become cynical about love after a particularly painful failed relationship, or cynical about academia after failing to get into the graduate school of one's choice. For Rameau's nephew, his moment of disappointment arrives when he realizes that he lacks his famous uncle's musical genius. Unable to find authentic merit in himself, he perfects a cynical critique of merit itself.

Certainly, we can understand widespread political cynicism today in this light. For critics of capitalism, it has been painful to watch concrete efforts at establishing a socialist alternative collapse after periods of grim totalitarianism. And of course, the sheer horrors of the twentieth century could easily provoke a loss of faith in mankind's basic decency. But again, we must avoid overstating the uniqueness of our present conditions. After all, disillusioned revolutionaries have haunted modernity from its very inception. Numerous Romantics initially cheered the French Revolution, only to condemn it in the wake of the Terror. Karl Marx himself grappled with the failure of the 1848 revolutions. More recently,

43. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 89. 44. Andreas Huyssen, "Postenlightened Cynicism: Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual7' In Twilight

Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 159.



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here in America, Judith Shklar's After Utopia sounds many of the notes we anticipate from post-1960s political reflections, but in fact was written in 1957- against the backdrop of the failure of 1930s socialism.45 Thus, we may suffer from a form of narcissism when we depict our contemporary moment as uniquely scarred by painful political failures.

Indeed, the preceding discussion suggests that a combination of narcissism and amnesia may infect much of the contemporary discourse on cynicism. The experience of cynicism in today's world is not unprecedented, even if it is becoming increasingly widespread. If we truly want to understand modern cynicism, we need to look much deeper into the history of modernity for its emergence. This longer perspective serves a purpose beyond simple historical accuracy-it calls into question the more hysterical tirades against cynicism, in which modern society teeters on the brink of some catastrophic abandonment of politics.

The contemporary critic of cynicism might grant all of this. Very well, he might say, perhaps cynicism has a much longer history than I indicated. All the same, cynicism erects a formidable obstacle in the path toward social change, and we must be vigilant in condemning it. It would be difficult to disagree that a society in which every last citizen succumbed to a thoroughgoing, permanent cynicism would enter a state of political paralysis. Fortunately, we do not live in such a society, and it is not really clear that such a society could even exist, since cynicism emerges from a paradoxical simultaneous investment in and rejection of contemporary values that always threatens its permanence and its thorough conquest of any individual consciousness. To a lesser extent, though, I have granted that advanced capitalist societies could well aggravate already existing tendencies toward cynicism, and that cynicism does pose substantial difficulties for political practice. How then should we confront these difficulties? In this paper's conclusion, I will only sketch some possibilities, but perhaps even more

importantly, I will argue that stringent moral condemnations of cynicism tend to backfire completely

Conclusion

I have already noted that the monological character of moralism threatens political practice. Even more significantly, moralism itself tends to inspire or heighten cynicism insofar as moralists leave themselves uniquely open to charges of hypocrisy To whatever extent we really do live in an age of pervasive cynicism, moralism is an exceedingly dangerous response, because the moralist is exactly

45. Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957).



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the kind of self-assured, sanctimonious figure whose professions of piety and

sincerity the cynic finds absurd and deceitful. As Alan Keenan writes: "In a

society as saturated with everyday cynicism as ours, where the thought of remaining uncontaminated by unfairness, power, or self-interest is an impossible one for many, the pretense to purity of any form of moralizing discourse is a ripe target for cynical unmasking."46 Thus, moralism actually aggravates the very cynicism it intends to dissipate. As Keenan shows, this generates a vicious cycle in which moralism and cynicism face off endlessly across an unbridgeable abyss.

Moreover, if we really believe that so many aspects of contemporary society conspire to produce cynicism, then dreams of eradicating cynicism seem woefully misguided and utopian in the worst possible sense. Instead, we must learn to live with a certain level of cynicism, to work through cynicism to create a

political practice appropriate to our time, rather than to condemn wholesale an attitude that isn't going anywhere. Rameau's Nephew may again be instructive for us. After all, the nephew is not the only character in the dialog. Instead, Diderot stages an encounter between cynicism and a more conventional enlightenment position. Many scholars have observed that Lui and Moi function best as a pair, gradually modifying their hypotheses in light of each other's observations and counterpoints.47 Lui's extreme cynicism tempers Moi's complacent pieties. Gradually, between the two of them, a realistic examination of human society and human nature can emerge. This is possible because, in spite of his moralistic tendencies, Moi is willing to engage in a genuine dialog with Lui. After all, Moi is least effective when he chastises Lui, and most effective when he works through Lui's observations to arrive at his own more nuanced understanding of society. Moi himself recognizes the utility of characters like Lui: "He stirs up and gives them a shaking, makes them take sides, brings out the truth, shows who are really good and unmasks the villains. It is then that the wise man listens and sorts people out."48 So long as cynicism is not universal, then, cynics may help more politically motivated actors to sharpen their social critiques and achieve a clear- eyed recognition of the forces with which they must contend. Cynics can therefore act as provocative gadflies. Lui may refuse to act on his exposure of M. Bertin's decadence and profligacy, but he has paved the way for others to do so.

46. Alan Keenan, "Generating a Virtuous Circle: Democratic Identity, Moralism, and the Languages of Political Responsibility," in The Politics of Moralizing, ed. Jane Bennett and Michael Shapiro (New York:

Routledge, 2002), 44. 47. See, for example, Merle Perkins, Diderot and the Space-Time Continuum: His Philosophy,

Aesthetics, and Politics (Oxford, The Voltaire Foundation, 1982), ch. 12. Perkins writes: "Moi puts up with his unusual interlocutor for the very reason that together they constitute through their give and take a useful pair, equipped to explore human nature' (117). Although we should note that, more often than not, it is Moi and not Lui who appears willing to modify his positions in light of his opponent's responses.

48. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew, 35.



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Second, we must keep in mind that cynicism is likely always to be partial and incomplete, not exhaustive of a person's consciousness. As Terry Eagleton puts it: "People who run rape crisis centers or teach their children Welsh also tend to watch television and shop in supermarkets; there is no question of a single form of subjectivity (or non-subjectivity) at stake here.'49 On a related note, we must distinguish between cynicism as a rhetorical performance and cynicism as a deeply rooted aspect of an individual's subjectivity. The individual who has perfected the jeering, mocking one-liner has not necessarily given up on politics-and the jeering, mocking one-liner might even be put to solid rabble- rousing use. Perhaps we can learn to work with the genuine attachments that people still have, to craft a rather more modest politics that allows for and works

through a diversity of such attachments. Rather than scold and berate the cynic for his cynicism, we could learn what the cynic isn't quite so cynical about. This positive appeal creates an opening in the political space where even the partial cynic (and I would maintain that almost every cynic is only a partial cynic) could enter, whereas a moralistic denunciation simply drives the cynic further away from politics.

Moreover, because of the investment cynicism necessarily retains in the very values it mocks, the political space for mobilizing these values never wholly closes for the cynic. If the cynic is a figure of disenchantment, he is not a figure of terminal disenchantment, and the possibility of re-enchantment always lurks on the horizon, provided we do not drive cynics entirely out of politics through irate condemnations. Rameau's Nephew again offers valuable insight: Lui and Moi are not, after all, actual people in the world, but creations of Diderot's imagination. Thus, one can profitably read the two characters as simultaneous aspects of Diderot's own consciousness, a kind of internal dialog between his inner philosophe and his inner cynic. To the extent that such a dialog can take place at all, though, we can see Diderot as himself a partial cynic whose cynicism never wholly vanquishes his ethical and political commitments, but instead sometimes helps him to draw a more complete picture of the social obstacles that the enlightenment project faced.

Finally, we might acknowledge honestly some of cynicism's more compelling aspects. The nephew, after all, is not a figure of total despair. He punctures the hypocrisies and pretensions of his age in a fashion that often borders on exuberance, even delight. Perhaps our politics could find a place for this satirical exuberance, this zealous deflation of pompous sermonizing. I am not suggesting that we simply give up on political transformation, but rather that political transformation need not be such a stodgy, grim affair. The cynic-friendly art of burlesque no doubt has its own contribution to offer to contemporary political

49. Eagleton, Ideology 39.



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practice. Moreover, while moralism alienates those inclined to view all political practice with suspicion, a less pompous form of politics might reawaken the political impulse even in such cynics.

If indeed we live in a time of political and moral crisis, then cynicism might not be an entirely inappropriate disposition. Critique in such a world requires a difficult tightrope walk--on one side of the tightrope lies the abandonment of politics, on the other, nostalgia and irrelevance. I have merely offered above some rudimentary suggestions for navigating this tricky terrain. The point, however, is that we cannot cling nostalgically to moral certainties likely to inspire incredulity today Instead, we must craft a form of politics appropriate to a more cynical age.



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Retreat from Politics: The Cynic in Modern Times

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