CYNICISM AND POSTMODERNITY

[Ralph Dumain]

I came across some notes I made from August 1998 on Timothy Bewes' CYNICISM
AND POSTMODERNITY:

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The description you sent me is even more ambiguous than the book itself.
Most of it sounds good, except for this phrase:

>and a neurotic attachment to metaphysical truth. 

This doesn't sound good, but the description may be misleading.  Actually,
from leafing through the book, I got a different impression.  The author
criticizes the "anti-metaphysical" postmodernists for being "metaphysical"
themselves in a very old fashioned sense: they have withdrawn from the
particulars of the world and collapsed them into a warped kind of a priori
metaphysical thinking--politics has been absorbed into metaphysics.

The author also sharply cticizes postmodernism but he doesn't reject all of
it. He thinks his critique falls in with the better aspects of Derrida,
etc., or so this is the impression I got.  He justifies himself by saying
he wants to recuperate what he can out of the postmodernist miasma.

Best of all he calls for an imaginative leap forward not just to moan about
what is, but to imagine what has not yet come to be.

While he mentions some contemporary manifestations of cynicism, e.g. Tony
Blair's blather (remember, this is an English book), and analyzes
complaints about cynicism from the right, I'm not sure he gives adequate
coverage of examples familiar to us; he picks some strange ones, as strange
and unfamiliar as Sloterdijk's.....

His criticisms of Sloterdijk are interesting.  He says Sloterdijk calls for
open kynicism so as to allow a really conscious resignation of the
Enlightment project of ideology critique and hope for the future rather
than a half-hearted and hypocritical cynicism we have now, that fools
itself with his own hipness....

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.... I finished CYNICISM AND POSTMODERNITY.  For what it covers, it's a
brilliant book.  I'm still left with that empty feeling, though.  What can
one do with Bewes' conclusion that it is necessary to separate politics
from metaphysics (postmodernism being a metaphysical position in spite of
itself) and renounce the quest for authenticity upon which all this stuff
is based in spite of itself?  How are Bewes' recommendations going to make
an impact on the culture (besides the coteries of intellectuals which
concern him) or stop Tony Blair and other politicians from continuing to
spew metaphysical hogwash to drown out the cynicism of society?

There are several references to Sloterdijk, and sometimes Bewes invokes
Sloterdijk's distinction between the cynical and the kynical.  Bewes
touches a paradox (which I've noted) that the contemporary cynical
intellectual is still not cynical enough, but he doesn't develop the
insight as I would....