Sloterdijk and Adorno

[Ben B. Day]

On Mon, 1 May 2000, Ralph Dumain wrote:
> ... his general conception of cynical reason as enlightened false
> consciousness, a peculiar state of culture in which all the dirt is out in
> the open, people think they see through everything but still manage to be
> fooled all the time and complicit in society's crimes.  Hence the
> traditional enlightener's conception of exposing illusions and revealing
> hidden truths needs to be revised in light of this changed situation...

"Traditional enlightener"? O contraire! Although certainly the critique of
ideology is given its limits, and presented with a new horizon of "immune"
action, contestation, and coercion (and this is where Sloterdijk would
pose an important challenge to Adorno), many other traditions that rely on
a negative logic of "demasking" the subject-positions of traditions
making claims to metalegitimacy (to stick some words to together) are
implicated, for example deconstructionism. Cynical reason is not so much
having all of the dirt out on the table but still being fooled or coerced
into acting a certain way, it is being /aware/ of the limited or
constituted (and therefore, objectively, arbitrary) nature of a
value-system, or culture of rituals, while employing them and abiding by
them anyway. In a way, this notion is the image of the Nietzschean free
spirit, somehow able to invent itself, not needing to project and disown
its values onto some convenient objective Other (God, reason, etc.).
The challenge that such a form of action poses to the Frankfurt tradition
of Ideologiekritik is clear: you can critique any tradition that
fetishizes its own legitimacy (i.e. - we didn't create our movement's
legitimacy, we "found/discovered" it!) by exposing its constituted nature
by placing it in a particular historical moment, cultural position, etc.
How, though, do you critique a claim that acknowledges its own
subjectivity (as it were)? "Cynical reason" makes itself immune to
Ideologiekritik by getting there first, by wearing its ideological
character on its sleeve, by not taking itself too seriously.
There is, of course, a totalitarian possibility within such a logic. The
surrealists - one of the most amusing but also most dictatorial groups in
recent history - immediately spring to mind as an example of pre-empting
criticism of one's fascist tendencies by refusing to take onself seriously
in the first place. One's critics are then forced to take a
transcendental, or metadiscursive point of view in order to attack the
"jokers" (by dismissing them as not properly serious - as seriousness is
required for these matters), and thereby also exposing themselves (the
critics) to a critique of their ideology, an historical/cultural placement
of their /criticism/.
Zizek speaks of this briefly in a section entitled "Totalitarian Laughter"
in his _The Sublime Object of Ideology_ (maybe ken, our resident Zizekite,
can expand on how this fits into the world of Slovenian Lacanian theory).
I think that this problem is, first of all, deserving of its own name -
the "Sloterdijk paradox" or the "Sloterdijk problem." The first generation
Frankfurters, unlike Habermas, arrive at a modernist perspective largely,
or exclusively, through a negative logic of critique, and it is precisely
at the level of critique that Sloterdijk strikes. Although, certainly,
the implications of Sloterdijk (if we buy into the possibility of cynical
reason) don't challenge the efficacy of Ideologiekritik as such, but, as I
said at the outset, offers it its limits by describing a mode of action
that stands beyond its efficacious capacities. And, presumably, if actions
taken under this mode expand, so too will the capacities of a critique of
ideology shrink. Or, even better, if such types of action have been more
prevalent in the past than we may have thought, then the critique of
ideology may be shown to have been been historically more constrained than
it might hope.

----Ben