Irony, cynicism and the lunacy of the italian media power

Mass Zynismus

In his book The courage of truth  (Le courage de la verité), a transcript of lectures delivered at the College de France in 1984, Michel Foucault speaks of Diogenes and the other ancient philosophers known as cynicists and defines their thought as the practice of telling the truth (parresia).  Twenty-five years later, the word cynicism has acquired a totally different meaning, almost opposite: the cynic is someone routinely lying to everyone, especially him or herself.

The intimate lie … the contradiction between speech and belief lies at the core of contemporary cynicism.  Still, there remains a kind of consistency between the ancient notion of cynicism – rigorous truthfulness, individualism, ascetic behavior and disdain of power – and our own, which consists largely of lip service, moral unreliability and conformist subjugation to those in power.   This consistency lies in an awareness of the ambiguous nature of language, and an ability to suspend the relation between language and reality, particularly in the ethical sphere.  Cynicism, therefore, is closely related to irony.  Both are rhetorical forms and ethical stances that require the suspension of the relation between reality and languge.  Some German philosophers like Tillich and Sloterdijk use two different words to distinguish the ancient Greek cynicism discussed by Foucault and our own: Kynismus and Zynismus.

Modern Zynismus can be understood by recalling Stanley Kubrik’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, an artistic gravestone to the modern illusion of progressive Enlightenment.  Bill and Alice, the happily married couple (Fridolin and Albertine in the 1926 Arthur Schnitzler novel Traumnovelle that inspired the Kubrik’s screenplay) are expressions of an awareness that truth can never be spoken because the social game is based on the power of lies.  If you don’t accept the language of deceit, no one will listen to you.   This is where Kubrik’s overview of the 20th century arrives.
It began with Dax: the upright colonel played by Kirk Douglas, fighting the cowardice of military power in Paths of Glory (1957). Dax believes in ethical right.  He has the strength and courage to oppose evil because he thinks that evil can be stopped and defeated.

Bill Harford, played by Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut is still able to recognize misdeeds and distinguish right from wrong, but he knows that nothing can be done to stop and defeat evil.  Despite moral unhappiness, he must bend to evil if he wants to survive.
At the end of a century that believed in the future, Zynismus seems to be the sole accepted language, the only cool behavior.  “Cool” is a keyword in contemporary cynicism.  Andre Glucksmann, in his 1981 book Cynicism and Passion, suggests that the only alternative to cynicism is passion, but that’s wrong. The real alternative to cynicism is not passion but irony.

In his 1983 Critique of Cynical reason Peter Sloterdik argues that cynicism is the prevailing mindset throughout the post-68 era.  To Sloterdijk, cynicism doesn’t denote an exceptional social character: it is the typical state of mind.  As he describes the ancient notion of cynicism:

“It violates normal usage to describe cynicism as a universal and diffuse phenomenon; as it is commonly conceived, cynicism is not diffuse but striking, not universal but peripheral and highly individual.” (pag. 4) 

And this is the most important difference between Kynismus and Zynismus: while Diogenes and his fellows Kynicists were ascetic individualists rejecting the acquiescence to the law of the powerful, the modern Zynicists are the conformist majority, fully aware that the law of the powerful is bad, but bending to it because there’s nothing else to do. Unlike the ancient Cynism, modern Zynismus is not disruptive.  It is an internalization of the impotence of truth.  As Sloterdijk writes:

“… [T]his is the essential point in modern cynicism, the ability of its bearers to work, in spite of anything that might happen, and especially, after anything that might happen… cynics are not dumb, and every now and then they certainly see the nothingness to which everything leads. Their psychic (seelish) apparatus has become elastic enough to incorporate as a survival factor a permanent doubt about their own activities.  They know what they are doing, but they do it because, in the short run, the force of circumstances and the instinct for self-preservation are speaking the same language; and they are telling them that it has to be so.” (Sloterdijk: Critique of Cynical Reason, Minnesota Press 2008, page 5).

Contemporary mass cynicism can be linked to two different roots: the failure of 20th century utopian ideologies and the perception that the exploitation of labor, competition and war are inevitable and irreversible.  Mass cynicism results from the dissolution of social solidarity.  Globalization and the systemic precariousness of the labor market resulting from neoliberal deregulation have imposed competition as the inescapable, generalized mode of relation among social actors. Workers, once linked by a sense of social solidarity and common political hope, are now forced to think in cynical terms: survival of the fittest.

Within the ’68 movement, different cultures and political tendencies co-existed. Some dreamed of the historical Aufhebung: the institution of a proletarian dictatorship, who would seize power in their own hands.  Like Hegelians, the doctrinaire Marxists dreamed of a triumph of Reason in which the good guys were destined to win.  To remain with the proletariat was to be on the winning side of history.   When the wind turned and the worker’s movement was defeated, neoliberalism provided an ideology for a new wave of capitalist aggressiveness.  Those who wished to remain on the winning side of history decided to stay with the winners because all Real is Rational in the end!  In their dialectical scheme, who wins is right, and who is right is destined to win.

The majority ’68-era activists were not orthodox dialecticians and did not expect any Aufhebung . We never believed in the end of historical complexity and the final establishment of the perfect form of communism. This sounded false to students and young workers seeking autonomy in the present, not communism in the future.

The today’s neoliberal conformists are the perverted heirs of ’68.  Those who came to power after ’89 in Russia, in the US and Europe are not as free from ideology as they pretend. Their ideology is a dogmatic faith in the unquestionability of the Economy. The Economy has taken the place of the Hegelian all encompassing Dialectic of Reason.  Bending to the dominant power, neoliberals accept the (economic) Necessity.   The only difficulty is that no one knows which trends will achieve dominance in the complicated Becoming of future events.  Consequently, cynicism – despite its apparent inevitability – as a position, is weak. No one knows what will happen next.  Unpredictable events cannot be reduced to logical necessity.

Irony and Zynismus

Sloterdijk is not alone in his conflation of mass cynicism and irony.  As he writes in Critique:

“From the very bottom, from the declassed urban intelligentsia, and from the very top, from the summits of statesmanly consciousness, signals penetrate serious thinking, signals that provide evidence of a radical, ironic treatment (Ironizierung) of ethics and of social conventions, as if universal laws existed only for the stupid, while the fatally clever smile plays on the lips of those in the know.”

Of course irony – like sarcasm, its more aggressive form – can be an expression of cynicism. But irony and cynicism should not be conflated. Irony can be a linguistic tool for rationalizing cynical behavior.  Both irony and cynicism imply a dissociation of language and behavior from consciousness: what you say is not what you think. But this dissociation takes different turns in irony and cynicism.

Vladimir Jankelevitch defines cynicism in the following way in his book Irony: “[C]ynicism is often deceived moralism, and an extreme form of irony…” Cynicism, he implies, is a learned form of irony, used for the pleasure of shocking the philistines.
Cynicism is the philosophy of exaggeration (surenchère): as Jankelevitch writes, “irony after Socrates tends to be exaggeration of moral radicalism…” Cynicism is deceived moralism, a judgment of behavior that depends on a fixed system of (moral) values.  Dialectical materialism, the philosophy of the past century, implied a form of moralism.  Anything (progress, socialism, etc.) that moves in the direction of history is good; whatever opposes the movement of history is bad.  Post-68 cynicism results from a painful awakening.  Since the truth has not been fulfilled, we’ll align ourselves with the untruth.  And this is where irony and cynicism differ.  Ironic discourse never presupposes the existence of a truth that will be fulfilled or realized.  Irony implies the infinite process of interpretation, whereas cynicism results from a (lost) faith.  The cynic has lost his or her faith; the ironist never a faith to begin.  In Jankelevitch’s words: “[I]rony is never disenchanted for the good reason that irony has refused to be enchanted.”

And yet, irony and cynicism both start with a suspension of disbelief in both the moral content of truth, and morality’s true content.  Both cynics and ironists understand that True and Good do not exist in God’s mind or in History, and that human behavior isn’t based upon respect for any law.  In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze says of irony and the law: “we call irony the movement that consists in going beyond the law, towards an higher principle.”

Neither irony or cynicism believe in the true foundation of law. But the cynical person bends to the law while mocking its false and pretentious values, while the ironic person escapes the law altogether, creating a linguistic space where law has no effectiveness.  The cynic wants to be on the side of power, even though he doesn’t believe in its righteousness. The ironist simply refuses the game, recreating the world on the basis of language that is incongruent with reality.  Whereas mass cynicism (Zynismus) is aggression, both suffered and inflicted, irony is based upon sympathy.   While cynical behavior pivots upon a false relation with interlocutors, irony involves a shared suspension of reality.  The use of irony implies a shared sense of assumptions and implications between oneself and one’s listeners.  Irony cannot be conflated with lying.  As Jankelevitch writes:

 “Lying is a state of war, and irony is a state of peace. The liar is not in agreement with the cheated. The gullible consciousness is late in relation with the lying consciousness, which is trying to maintain its advantage. Irony, instead, is crediting the interlocutor of sagacity and treats him/her as a true partner of true dialogue. Irony incites intellection, and is calling a fraternal echo of understanding.”

 

The Italian dictatorship of meaninglessness

In the 1970s members of the European autonomous movement discovered, by reading Deleuze and Guattari, that reality has no particular meaning.  The meaning of reality will be created by the movement itself.   In this way, the autonomous movement freed itself from dialectical materialism’s precept of an ethical horizon that will be determined by historical necessity.  Once freed, the movement opened itself to a more ironic mood: the singularization of political choice and ethical responsibility.  In this post-dialectical space, language and political action are devoid of any ontological foundation and are morally neutral.

The conflation between power, and the incessant movement of historical events towards the good, that defined Marxist thought was sundered.  Here the fork between irony and cynicism opens.
Irony suspends the semantic value of the signifier to freely choose among a thousand possible interpretations.  Ironic interpretations of events presuppose a common understanding between speakers and listeners; a sympathy among those who, engaged in the ironic act, arrive at a common autonomy from the dictatorship of the Signified.

Cynicism begins with the same suspension, but – slavishly imitating irony – puts itself at the service of power.   While irony does not postulate the existence of any reality, cynicism postulates the inescapable reality of power, particularly the power of Economy.  Irony opens a game of infinite possibilities, whereas cynicism merely disassociates itself from ethics and possibility. The cynical mood begins with the belief that ethical action is doomed to failure.  The ironist sleeps happily because nothing can awake her from her dreams. The cynicist sleeps lightly.  Though he might dream, he awakes as soon as power calls him.

The relation between irony and cynicism has interested me since the late 1970s, when an Italian cultural movement based on the mass practice of irony was sucked in and obliterated, by a massive wave of organized cynicism that eventually led to the media-dictatorship of Silvio Berlusconi. The transition between the 1970s and 80s in Italy was marked by a shift from irony to cynicism.  Certainly, the Italian 1970s were not a wholly ironic decade … the political culture of Italian Catholic communism was unfortunately not ironic at all.

But irony did offer a common understanding throughout Italian society in a meaningful way during that decade. When, in the mid-1970s, state ownership of the Italian electronic media ended, the seriousness of official Catholic Communist reportage was replaced by the ironic, Maoist-Dadaist style of unofficial autonomous media.  This change marked the second half of the decade.

But while the Free Radio movement – which transmitted the rebellious ideas of Autonomy to the first postmodern generation – paved the way for the final explosion in 1977, it also opened the door to the invasion of the mediascape by advertising and commercial television.  Publitalia and Mediaset, two television channels owned by Silvio Berlusconi, became the dominant cultural enterprises of the Italian 80s.  Mimicking the style of Free Radio, hired professionals drawn from the ranks of the autonomous movement helped to transform cultural irony into mass cynicism.  The intellectuals charged with stylistically conceiving Berlusconi’s TV stations and the designing a postmodern advertising aesthetic throughout the 1980s were largely drawn from radical media experiments of the past decade like Radio Alice, A/traverso and other new Dada media agencies.
The difference between the experimental mood of Free Radio and the brittle and cynical style of commercial TV greatly contributed to the cultural shift that occurred in the 1980s, and would result in a cultural and political catastrophe that is both pervasive and unpredictable in terms of its consequences.  This transition can be described as a transition from irony to cynicism.

Even if he is not known as a writer or an ideologist, the Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi – who is one of the most remarkable examples of contemporary Zynismus in the world – Actually wrote a preface to the Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. Berlusconi’s Erasmus is used to introduce the mad world of merchandise.  Together with Erasmus’ folly, modern times start with the Baroque perception of a “locura”. Only the affirmation of the arbitrariness of power can prevail in the absence of theological foundations. The cultural background of Italy’s post-democracy ethos lies in the transition from the Catho-communist identity, based upon ideological compromise and the respect of political formal rules, to the mix of entrepreneurial pragmatism and aggressive lunacy that is the special feature of the Berlusconi’s new class. The cult of an ambiguous freedom that is not freedom, but a contemptuous manipulation of the other’s mind, is the ideological mark of Berlusconi’s political identity.