Dämmerung: The Twilight of False Consciousness

Once again, we recall the year: 1981.  The echoes resound. We hear Nietzsche and Heidegger to be sure, also Adorno and Benjamin but above all perhaps we hear Marcuse.  We hear little Lyotard in Sloterdijk, though we might have done and the term postmodernism could be substituted for cynicism, Umberto Eco certainly did do just that.  

 Umberto Eco

But that is to make it too easy. We think we know what it is to be modern (Bruno Latour rightly disputes this as does indeed Foucault).  We do not know the cynics and yet all of us use the word, all of us are, indeed, cynics already and in advance.

So we speak of Diogenes in his barrel (and the well-educated translator gives us Diogenes in the tub, to catch the reference both to Athenian pottery and to Swift, references we now see as needful clarification):

In the picture book of social characters he has always appeared as a distance-creating mocker, as a biting and malicious individualist who acts as though he needs nobody and who is loved by nobody because nobody escapes his crude unmasking gaze uninjured.       

        Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 3-4

The reference to the picture book is one small part Nietzsche, almost no part Kittler and an important concession to the culture of self-advertisement. 
To read the Critique of Cynical Reason is to read a book that uses its illustrations to make at least half its case. Like Horst Bredekamp but also like Theweleit, Sloterdijk offers a kind of web-page text, avant la lettre. An early exercise, some might say, of media archaeology.

Our definition comes early in the text: “Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness.” (2) This is a picture-book definition of cynicism, complete with emphasis.  Have your yellow highlighter ready.  And so we read, all sober scholarship, for Sloterdijk is sufficiently down with Nietzsche and critical theory to know all about the object contractions: “The sentence itself is cynicism in a crystalline state. Nonetheless, it claims an objective validity… logically it is a paradox, for how could enlightened consciousness still be false?” (Ibid.) How indeed?

“In laughter, all; theory is anticipated.” (42)

Hence I have certain sympathy with the spirit of Sloterdijk’s bemused recommendation that one imagine what a society composed solely of Levinas scholars might look or feel like (Sloterdijk, Regeln für den Menschenpark, 29), which does not mean that Sloterdijk has an excessive sympathy for animals or for nature — and it has rightly been observed that he is not quite up to the task of thinking about women even where, perhaps especially where he speaks of the body, masturbation, pornography.

Like most of us, Sloterdijk too has his blind spots just because he is limited, qua male, to his own perspective and only women have to learn, this is the singular philosophic advantage of oppressed consciousness, to take the viewpoint of others. 

What makes Sloterdijk elusive here is both his insistence on maleness or virility, a Falstaff-style modus that is hard to refuse because it simply insists upon itself — like a man sitting in a New York Subway car with his legs spread as wide as possible in order to take up two or three or four seats, he’s a man, you see, and he needs those seats.  

But there is also far more than this at work: Sloterdijk seems to know this too, or at least you can content yourself with supposing that he does.  Here he borrows a leaf from Nietzsche (his translator misses the allusion but it’s not a direct one anyway), where Nietzsche talks about his stupidities “down deep” (relevant after Sloterdijk’s Critique of Transparency in psychoanalysis, contra Freud’s self-serving insistence on patenting the technique solely and only in his own name by naming himself the discoverer of the unconscious despite antecedents), Sloterdijk goes in for Mesmerism, but and of course the unconscious is already in Kant, and this is the point of the allusion to the “dear little self,” and why, for Kant, subjective intentions fail to suffice as proof of conformity moral law as they offer no assurance that some other self-interest may have been in play). Natural Illusion (Rousseau’s nostalgia that some convert to the green nostalgia for the underdeveloped or natural world), we read, in his Critique of the Illusions of Privacy of “artful stupefaction” or I would say, as stupefaction is far too kind: it is “stupidification” [Verdummung].  Thus Sloterdijk writes that such deliberate or “artful” stupidification “manifests itself in a whole range of modern naturalisms: racism, sexism, fascism, vulgar biologism and egoism.” (CCR, 59)