I know enough about Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason to know that I might need to read it.
If I do read it I will read it through the lens of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.
My hypothesis will be this: Cynical reasoning is the evil twin of Rorty’s liberal irony.
Both are keeping two ideas alive in us at the same time.
To make a musical analogy both are advances from intellectual monophony to polyphony.
Both allow us to sound and hear two ideas together as a chord.
Rorty’s liberal irony separates public understandings and commitments from private ones. We pursue certain important matters where public alignment is difficult and unnecessary (things we tend to classify as subjective, like aesthetic and spiritual matters) in private, and, apart from these, commit ourselves to public goals that, among other things, protect the private sphere and create material conditions where all have the same chance to flourish publicly and privately. When a liberal says “I will die fighting for your right to disagree with me” that is the starkest liberal irony.
Sloterdijk’s cynical reasoning separates social ideals from realistic necessities. We cooperate with systems we detest. We have so much contempt for these systems we do not even wish to reform or improve them. Instead we extract as much value from these systems as we can, and lie in wait for a chance to rise up and play a part in “dismantling” it. We wait and wait for the fall of this corrupt, exploitative, soulless system — or for our retirement — whichever comes first.
I do not know if Sloterdijk takes his analysis in this direction — but the essential problem appears to me to be one of the relation between the critiquing subject and the object of critique. The cynically reasoning “warriors in Woolworths” believe that their bitter critiques of the system place them outside of the system and, at least in principle, against it. The opposite is true. The system itself is constructed precisely from their kind of participation.
“Corporate” in its pejorative sense is the emergent property of a system that can only exist by virtue of cynical reasoning. Corporateness is generated by masses of cynics participating in a system they do not believe in.
Pardon the pottymouth, but the conceptual framework of Shit Theory puts the problem of cynical reasoning in the sharpest focus.
Bullshit and chickenshit lie at the heart of corporate life. They lie and lie and lie there.
Participants in corporate life are required to pretend that meaningless “messaging” is meaningful, and that the claimed idealistic aspirations of an organization are achievable goals worth pursuing.
At minimum, they must simply behave as if these goals are real — but everyone knows that the minimum is insufficient, and that the real minimum is one’s own maximum. The required minimax is method acting wholehearted embrace, especially in the presence of corporate power.
Participants are also required to comply with purposeless, tedious chickenshit procedures and rules, imposed thoughtlessly, with an ambient awareness that whoever is made to comply has no choice. The chickenshit’s omnipresence gently and relentlessly reminds us of the brutal fact of our choiceless condition. Compliance has been “instrumented” to make each resource’s obedience quantifiable.
Compliance is continuously monitored, and noncompliance is recorded for future leverage against any nonimpotent expressions of cynicism.
For example, if a resource is invited to show up and share their truth, and the truth they share is not bullshit truth, but their true beliefs, the chickenshit compliance records can be used as pretense for punishing the offender.
So the corporate norm is this: Inwardly we think, feel and hope one way. Outwardly we think, feel and hope the opposite. The greater the difference and the more intensely that difference is felt, the greater the cynicism.
The power of an organization over those made to participate in it could be measured by how much cynicism it can bear and still flourish. An organization flexes its power precisely by the ludicrousness of its bullshit and the onerousness of its chickenshit.
Cynical reasoning does not oppose the systems it upholds — it constitutes them.
Myriad cynics working against their own ideals, sacrificing their lives for it, doing things they despise and know are pointless at best — this is what such systems essentially are. Nobody is supposed to believe. Everyone is supposed to pretend to believe what cannot be believed and participate anyway.
Cynical reasoning and all its secret, resentment critiques serve the system and are its most delectable fuel.
And what about capitalism? “Late Stage Capitalism” is the all-purpose ideological scapegoat, blamed by cynics for the cynical condition in which they find themselves, and willingly unwillingly participate.
We act on behalf of “capitalism” by its logic in our own interests. We want our own retirement to be maximally comfortable. We are building our dream beach houses, and floor finishes, windows and photogenic seafoodie food hang in the balance.
The loathsome logic of capitalism leaves us no choice but to make hard decisions that happen to benefit us personally, and happen to harm others we have called friends. But by the iron logic of business, the personal — bullshit like friendship and desire for changing things for the better, talk of “humanizing business” — all that must yield to practical and quantitative concerns. Capitalism forces us to do it.
Someday, when the time is ripe for revolution, and we all rise up in solidarity — it will finally become possible to treat one another decently. Until then we must hunker down and do what we must to endure this crime against humanity while fattening our retirements.
Maybe this is bullshit, too: I do not believe capitalism has to be horrible. I think market economies are made unnecessarily horrible by our participation. Why and how we organize ourselves, why and how we collaborate, why and how we speak truth or lies.
My problem with bullshit is not in the lying. It is in the dividing of souls against themselves, precisely in the most important matters.
Some amount of deceit is always necessary in social life. Etiquette requires tactful white lying, selective noticing and artful choosing of generous understandings. It requires some degree of self-deceit.
But etiquette serves coming together. It makes it possible to be together at all, and to make wise choices to breach etiquette and approach genuine interpersonal intimacy. We engage in light talk and refrain from dialogue in order to assess where dialogue might go somewhere.
But everyone knows well what the rules are, and why those rules are good. They ultimately serve gathering in truth.
When we gather in truth this way, aware of our own personal commitments, aware how others differ, but most of all understanding what is required of all of us to pursue our private and public aims together, we are in the sway of liberal irony.
Liberal irony is my way. We put up with some bullshit for the sake of overcoming it in the here and now, with the people around us, to demonstrate, perhaps on a small scale, that better is possible.
This is what the best design does. We demonstrate that things can be radically better if we approach work in designerly ways. It is, as Bruno Latour pointed out, a modest, cautious, gradual form of revolution. It is done in what Richard Rorty called “campaigns” designed to win local, concrete improvements — not in the totalistic revolutions, the cynical reasoning revolutionaries require, before they’ll lift a single fattened finger.
Design is anathema to cynical reason.