Reclaiming cynical landscapes
August 31st, 2020There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they seem to repel any attempt to give them value or meaning. They are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel the imagination. But if we ignore them entirely, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them. - David Graeber, 2006
It is time to state a new understanding of cynicism, following a few developments within and without cynicism itself, to account for what cynicism looks like in a new climatic and catastrophic regime. It is time to detect and modify those new cynical modes of response that leave our environment in the hands of destructive forces.
I will propose cynicism as abandonment, in which cynicism will no more be recognized as an attitude, a negative one, in an economic environment, but a search for small uplifting regions of inner experience concurrent with abandonment of larger zones of ecological (including human) exhaustion.
The cynicism of the 20th century was, in retrospect at least, not sustainable. For Peter Sloterdijk, cynicism was a mechanism of coping with modern economies, building in security for self-identity from the caprice of working life to which one held on externally for earning a living but capitulating the meaning of labor and value in retaining (a sense of) control over one’s private feelings and intellect. This strategy was one of the mode of sacrifice, of one’s productive energies as well as the milieu of consumptive and productive economy. It was moreover a middle class strategy, suitable for those who did have work and a home to be cynical for.
The cynicism that fenced the inner experience from ongoing erosions, cleared the grounds for “identity.” Quite a lot of events culminated into a segmentation of populations into identities, e.g. market segmentation and later on social networks technology. These matters are critical now about but beyond the purview of this text. The contribution of the strategy of cynicism of fencing those parts of the mind that could justifiably be protected at the cost of whatever found itself beyond: an honest remark, the risk of speaking up, feedback on errors necessary for correction, moral engagement tout court, etcetera.
However, the juice is finished and people are burning out even while capitulating regions of their lives to save what’s left. Psychological coping with structural defect is untenable. Soft skills too wear out when dealing with hard problems.
What had taken place in human communications (“honest remark” and the like listed above), had increasingly taken place everywhere. Engagement with neighborhoods is relatively abandoned, by those who have to move out, those who feel too cosmopolite to bind with their hoods, those investors who only have one concern, those policymakers who have tried everything except addressing the root causes and those policymakers who cannot succeed in engaging sustainably all other stakeholders. Concern about sustainability is everywhere superseded by the stronger forces that are there to make things and humans move through: nothing should bind to the place, which must be soon ready for transformation for higher modes of exploitation.
The reader can extend this example of neighboorhoods to other “landscapes.” I mean to be very inclusive with what belongs to this category of landscapes. Otherwise I would be saying nothing new here. A good contrasting example can be a corporation of governmental department. Here too, we can see people moving around and doing things. But this place is in fact abandoned. The engagements are cynical. Not as an attitude, not consciously, but plainly in their extensions temporally, effectively, affectively. The contracts are temporary, the plans are watered down in every aspect so as to be affordable and insult no one, the risk of mentioning errors is too great, credits for accomplishments are distributed awkwardly, the communications are read carelessly, the social talks don’t touch on any matters of importance. Those who hang on have learnt not care, not because they are evil. No–and this is the point–they know they cannot afford caring.
Likewise we leave a piece of land empty of what we call biodiversity. This example is familiar.
Even if in all these examples the work of abandonment is never done, it is just a reason for further emptying out.
In numbers we abandon numerous landscapes sooner or later. The feeling of cynicism is avoided by leaving the landscape were cynicism germinates, even if this landscape is where living takes place, or decisions about a highway trajectory, future investment, or an algorithm that could discriminate is made. Thus cynicism as affect is no longer a concept that would help us detect this destructive version of the cynical reason.
These organizations learn to continue without care, and bind labor and force not by adding care but by punishing deviance and dissent. We speak here of organizations where bureaucracy is entrenched and institutions that hold on to out-of-touch calculations, trickle-up hierarchies, and an economy of expendable human resources (among other materials). But even if the feeling of cynicism is replaced with a new breath, the act of abandonment has been definitely and ultimately cynical.
Thus response is added on top of cynicism, because the way to taking on the root causes is diligently gated by those who, we are learning to say, “benefit from the current situation.”
I already implied that abandonment is not particular to those who, so to say, are exploited or exploit themselves. It is a general mode of response. These same groups who “benefit from the current situation,” those who we can call the irresponsible responsible guardians, their calculative organization that inflexibly call the shots and command the scripts, they divest from zones they consider unfit for business–zones previously exploited and sacrificed. They themselves feel abandoned, moreover, whenever they fail to reproduce the business identity. “In your suit you’re someone, without it you’re nobody.” They take not-caring as their ultimate motto, having learnt as MBA freshman or otherwise to minimize the cost of winning.
Let us be clear that the job of “business,” its birth right, is to only speak positively of solutions, solutions that are ready to be sold, or can be promised. Solutions that promise a future profit. It is its job to excavate new and cheerful opportunities. In this definitive sense every businessman is an idealist, just as any entrepreneur is “creating a better world” and pragmatic too. But on the same grounds business has to remain silent on the much larger group of problems that invite no business solution. Business speaks of cheerful opportunities even if the enunciator and the interlocutors are staring at a scene of a disaster, a ghetto, or tortured landscapes. As if one can pick and choose what critical and collective problems one finds attractive to tackle! It should be clear, business cannot replace the hard work of politics.
But also urban spaces and infrastructures, with the famous examples of Detroit or Flint Michigan, are left behind in their toxicity by the value that was extracted from them. Values that now “positively” infest other promising landscapes. And at the same time, castes of lower order leave their deserted lands where the slowly unfolding catastrophe has devastated their livelihoods. We can now put the movement of refugees out of their burning homes and the movement of urban “human resources” leaving science, government, and (its subsidiaries,) and corporations, into one picture. We are all in a flight. The difference is that some of us can retreat into zen jobs and tiny green bubbles, based on what they have extracted and accumulated from the landscapes they now have left, while others end up between and within the walls that prevents them reaching the inhabitable bubble. There isn’t enough place on an earth that is becoming tinier and tinier as we abandon it further.
Surely, enough minions figure will remain to occupy existing positions in institutions. But trust and enthusiasm will everywhere plummet and recedes into a silence of negativity.
And I emphasize again. I speak of minions, but none of us, none of these groups are cynical in attitude, or cynical in consciousness. It is a basic fact of life, and it is that one thing that economics got right: that everyone does his and her best. So no, the landscapes are cynical and our strategy to deal with them are intelligible even if complicit.
Thus every landscape is abandoned, however differently, by its sustainable parts and supportive attachments, left either to decay or peak in exploitation.
Herein lies the advantage of talking of cynicism within a story that is otherwise not new to many ears. It identifies a concerted response in humans that allows us to put into a one picture the process of de-civilization, be it in an office within a skyscraper where bizarre talks about the newest conspicuous consumptions or advancements in exploitation take place, or be it large stretches of land skinned and devastated, a the good old distrust in the capacity of others to think. Its original point is that, as such, the retreat to a “local community” or “just doing one’s job” will be counted as a cynical reaction, an abandonment of a world which sooner or later will, once again, intrude our bubble; whereas re-engagement with abandoned zones, ruins, and decaying institutions will become a new question and a new invitation for amor mundi.
Its originality too is that it does not exempt anyone. It is about those lower on the ladders of hierarchy who abandon their ambitions, and also those higher in the hierarchy who abandon the care for their subjects. It is symmetrical and recognizes neo-cynicism as a common material condition, not a psychology. Hence my use of the word “landscape.” It is not a matter of “those others” who are mistaken, misinformed, misled, compromised, polarized, and those who want to retreat into their gated parcels. This is a direct warning to the reader. It should point toward us, more than it would point to “others,” those others in whom we have abandoned our hope and our connection.
We cannot go back, of course, to the never-resolving promise of a globalization. But neither is it possible to isolate a region of the earth from the havoc and toxicity that we have spawned elsewhere. Refugees will always try to reach our bubbles to which we fled first, awakening our bad conscience–a conscience which we will violently try to expel! Retreat is part of the problem, and the only solution moves in the direction of reclamation and distribution of all areas of responsibility, especially since we now have disturbed almost everything.
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Retreating into one’s mind and bubble, characteristic of both the 20th-century cynicism and the 21th-century zen neo-cynicism, will not save us; it will add to the destruction even if passively, by merely failing to act up against it. Retreating into smaller lives, moreover, is a privilege of those exactly who can nevertheless consume the world and inherit a better part of a still unjust distribution of the consequences of the environmental mutation. It means the evasion of our political prerogative, that is, our inevitably collective problem.
Retreat is a psychologization, neatly in line with the impoverished metaphysics of sorting things out in no more than two categories of being, psyche and world, culture and nature. It might make the greater world a little better, or a little less worse. But it does not compensate for the necessity to reclaim–a reclamation that will not be easy in any regard, considering that we are occupied with so many bad habits. We will have to work this out later, since this is an expansive topic. My focus here is on the subtle but crucial difference between cynical retreat, which is proliferating, and reclamation, its necessity. Most crucially we should dare to suspect cynicism in positive talk and as inconsequential–that is, merely psychological–attitude, if want to begin distinguishing problems from solutions at all.
I should say more on my meaning of psychologization. I mean by it examples such as promotion of psychological techniques, e.g. mindfulness meditation (which increasingly tends to desensitize than to sensitize to experience and experience of thought in particular), psychotherapeutic internalization of response to oppressive conditions, gaslighting and propaganda techniques, catering to mere images of facts, or more radically the fundamental confusion between information (the response to which is “OK”, meaning correctly received) and knowledge (the response to which is substantive and differential). I also mean the reduction to “opinion” of plain facts (not scientific facts; see H. Arendt’s Truth and Politics), expansion of the marketing and communication dispositifs that create mere images forming curtains between insides and outsides, etcetera.
These are historical movements that isolate experience from the world and have been positively employed in following the doctrine that nature is deterministic and a domain exclusive to science and scientists, whereas the psyche is the domain of the freedom of individuals, however impotent. However, an isolated psyche is nothing more but a psyche compromised and neutralized. The impotence is programmatic to a habitual 20th-century politics that misidentifies it as a solution to the problem of mass upheaval and popular uprising. Such impotent psyche cannot orients itself in the world except by following some external authority without an ability to examine and judge.
To understand, but also to modify the new cultures of coping, its neo-cynical variety, we should respond to the demand of de-psychologization and prevent falling back into nature-culture and mind-world dualisms. psychologization of human response to material exploitation has, in the end, exacerbated our condition.
This is no different than going from the perception of cynicism as attitude to cynicism as a material effect on all landscapes. For longer now, we have understood cynicism as a psychological condition and response. But now we can speak of factual abandonment, in line with reality. We can detect cynicism in its silence, a silence that is a very loud representation of those bio-poor landscapes that laying waste or are being wasted.
Even if things appear in a very positive light in a situation, we will nevertheless see the darkness that surrounds it: in the words of someone who speaks of ‘taking care of oneself’ (but did you give up on caring for the world?), ‘I leave that to the scientists’ (but they need your help), or ‘nature will resolve with or without us’ (and yet our irresponsible responsible guardians don’t let that happen).
The same holds for business talk. In its positivity we should learn to detect and name what it lays waste in silent darkness–both in its downtrodden back offices, its displaced sights of production, as well as the landscapes that it empties out. This is necessary because the prerogative of optimism and the entrepreneurial and networking etiquette of always being upbeat has become part of the problem. We don’t want to find ourselves remaining positive within an ever-shrinking area of life and experience.
We should dare to be integral and address the difficult silence. We have to become able to recall what we previously had given up personally and collectively, or in reverse, what landscapes have left us hopeless and are in need of our care. And thereby we can sense, again, what regions of existence are calling for our concern and care. And not only that, there might be a reward waiting for us: the experience that, yes, the world is more spacious than our enclosed and colonized psyches and lives, a world that can prove yet again that it is accommodating and inhabitable.
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What happens after detecting, naming, and struggling to reclaim depends on particular and situated responses, not to be generalized. The net of generalization is now surely too thin and infirm to extend over all the complex landscapes. But above all, the point is to resist expelling those cynical landscapes from our minds and to resist being satisfied with one’s parcel only, leaving the movement of business as usual to its devices. However it happens, the lesson remains: out of sight is never out of existence.
This sounds like good sense and thus hopes to reach the being of the reader. But it can also be regarded as old news. “Of course we try to care.” “We are already working full capacity and cannot take on board more than that.” Or it can be seen as empty words or “it’s easy for you to talk.” It can read as a cynical text itself (it does not deny being part of the contemporary). Or the response can be “and what solutions do you propose?” I believe this text has done sufficient work if it has sensitized us to the displacement of cynicism and enabled us to spot it where is happens and shift course at any juncture in life where cynicism dissuades to care and have us close our senses.
“We already care” is indeed a legitimate reply, but I am certain that only a very small group can so exclaim. The persuasion of others to care also instills the hope that the task will become less difficult and exhausting. But the question of structures that dissuade care remain a question and to the same extent the task of care remains doubled too: one of caring for what is damaged, “a damaged planet,” but also care about the forces in place that do the damage.
Thus the in shifting the cynical response to one of care (to an old and healthy cynicism that does care about the state of the world and the varieties of existence), it will not be a matter of caring for what we encounter in peril, and caring for the landscapes where we now are, and those landscapes which we gave up previously. No, its second layer is that of following the lines from place A about which we care to place B and C and perhaps further, that is, Bs and Cs that are responsible for shaping place A.
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And for those of us who keep to our humble contributions at the limits of home and work (and I have done both), this should be a question for us, one that demands examination, whether we are not living in a bubble that we have built to merely keep out of sight those parts of existence that make us feel desperate and cynical. Whether this neo-cynical way of life will prove sustainable. The real and good cynicism might after all be the one that actively engages with whatever is imperfect in the world. Our world is indeed not ideal and very complicated, the cynic knows, but it remains our world.
