The Cynical Antidote
There is a vulgar cynicism in this religion of merchandise. However, if we put it up against Diogenes’s philosophical cynicism, we may be able to imagine an escape from nihilism, at least within the context of aesthetics. Against its negativity, we can contrapose the positivity of Diogenes’s great cheerful health, transmission of codes, and the communicative acts. This tradition leads to a rematerialization of the real and fights, at every turn, against pathology, autism, and the rarefaction of immanence.
Ancient cynicism is hurt in many ways by its position in the dominant historiography—Hegel’s historiography. Always verging on nonsense, Hegel, in Lectures on the History of Philosophy, peremptorily states that cynical philosophy amounts to only a few anecdotes. Consequently, Diogenes is not considered a philosopher. Academics who have enlisted in the great Prussian’s platoon have copied him word for word for more than a century.
Was Diogenes not a philosopher? Why not? Because he did not pave the way for the Hegelian Absolute Spirit? Because he made no contribution to the Science of Logic? Therefore, the lantern-toting philosopher could not possibly deserve the titles of nobility that are traditionally reserved for servants of the regime!1 However, Diogenes was a real philosopher who showed a way to be anti-Platonic. He developed a lineage that is anti-idealist, antispiritualist, and consistently materialist. (None of his works survives, but they were once numerous: some dozen dialogues, a Treatise on Ethics, a Treatise on Love, another on The Republic, letters, seven tragedies…) His work is enhanced by the joyful image we have of him. But in Jena, philosophy was no laughing matter.2 There was no love for the tradition of the laughing sage, epitomized by Democritus. To enter the pantheon of dominant philosophy, you must be ominous, incomprehensible, obscure, and laborious. Diogenes laughs, puffs up, bursts, and departs…
Why discredit a whole philosophy? We always avoid talking about this. Calumny is a good option for those who can’t engage in a real contest of ideas. A perfect example of the disgraceful strategy of avoidance is the traditional stigmatization of Diogenes and his legacy. People reduce him to a mere accessory of Greek philosophical scene. But most are completely ignorant of what that scene was like, what the discourses were about, and what positions were held.
There are anecdotes about Diogenes with the herring and the lantern, the frog and the mouse, the dog and the octopus, the barrel and the satchel, the staff and the bowl, the spit and the urine, sperm and feces, the rooster and the human flesh. Are these any more than amusing sketch materials, devoid of philosophical content? He’s a fool, an eccentric, a clown, a minstrel, a buffoon, and a jester. But for the love of God, he is not a thinker, not a philosopher! We should not even use the same word that we use for Plato…
Precisely, Diogenes trains his philosophical eye on Plato and his ideas—his Ideas. To define it negatively, cynicism is a kind of anti-Platonism. Put positively, it is a nominalist perspective. In other words, there is only background; reality is reduced to its materiality; man is the measure of all things; the sensible world provides the only model; there are no intelligible Ideas; the best methods are irony, subversion, provocation, and humor; the heathen body, godless and masterless, is the only thing we have; and thus we can hold on to one formula: life is a party, live it here and now!
But we have our suspicions. Idealists do not like people and their ideas. Platonists take the fictitious ideal for the truth; they hold to a heaven of ideas where concepts float around as if in some ether; they believe that what is real must be beyond them, better than them, even more real than them—the Idea. They hold that man is detestable because of his body and true and respectable for his nonexistent soul. They believe that the world is part of an intelligible matrix, a self-evident seriousness, full of gods, demiurges, and philosopher-kings. What is their formula? Life here and now has no value, and nothing is as valuable as the fantastic conceptual universe to which they go for refuge. To hear about a living death, read or reread the Phaedo…
A Transmission of Codes
The cynical turn has multiple stages, beginning with the Hegelian stage in which anecdotes are the final word, where stories are ends in themselves. Want to make sense of those peripheral Cynic characters? Just look at the scene we’ve set…Alternatively, these little stories and gestures point beyond themselves to something larger. They are means to a subtle end. We just have to know how to read and decode them. We have to know that we can know, and then we can know.
The stories of the Cynics contribute to a joyful alternative to the Platonic world. Diogenes looks around for a Man in the streets of Athens. He holds out a lit lantern in broad daylight…Hegel calls this a “schoolboy’s farce” and passes over it. But the true sage would call this a philosophical lesson. He is looking for a Man, with a capital M, the idea of Man, his concept, his immateriality that manifests his nominalist materiality. Of course, he doesn’t find it, since it doesn’t exist, because all that exists is tangible, material, concrete reality. For Plato, famously, Man is a featherless biped. Very well, Diogenes plucks a chicken and tosses the creature into the idealist philosopher’s lap. He is able to refute the erroneous Platonic definition of man through this playful demonstration. Aptly, the author of Parmenides added a correction: with dull nails…There you have it!3
All these stories of the Cynics, which are numerous, operate under the same principle: they drive a meaning; they carry a signification. The Hegelian wants to destroy the imbecile who looks at the finger pointing to the moon. Diogenes and others had already put forth every theory (Antisthenes’s works comprised ten volumes, Crates left behind many letters, Metrocles burned his own books, Menippus wrote some fifteen texts). They all theatricalize their thought, which is to be found not only on paper, but also in their physical acts. The body theatricalizes thought; it puts ideas on stage.
A veil is not an end in itself; it is an invitation for an unveiling. The same goes for codes. The Cynic acts as an ontological street artist; she knows we will understand her story. The works, meetings, and exchanges that took place in the Cynosarges—a dog cemetery that played the role of Plato’s Academy or the Stoic Portico—all preserve something. They were all interconnected. Irony relies on the intelligence of the spectator—the viewer sets the agenda. Then, in a kind of methodological revolution, the philosophical scene leaves the School, leaves the esoteric, confined space that is closed in on itself, and it opens up to the world. It goes outside, in public, and philosophy becomes an exoteric practice.
The same thing can be said for contemporary art. The artifact is not an end in itself; it indicates something beyond itself, theoretically something greater than itself. The aesthetic movement has meaning when there is an initiation in a specific place, where codes have been handed out, and where those who embark on an aesthetic journey are given the means to understand the code. The general public often repeats Hegel by saying, about a piece of contemporary art, “This is anecdotal, useless, meaningless, foolishness, nonsense.” They say this because they ignore the moon and look at the finger. So how should we look at art, if nobody has told us what it’s about?
Form is not an end in itself. It carries, supports, and reveals a depth—if such depth is there. If it lacks depth, the form is formless because the depth allows the form to appear. Formalism has had deleterious effects for too long: form for itself, the cult of form…In the Structuralism of the 1960s, the container preceded the content. The signifier was a step ahead of the signified, which, at times, did not even exist…For value to again make sense, the two instances must coincide: there must be a configuration and something configured.
Conceptual and structural formalism is largely responsible for the public’s disillusionment with contemporary art. The religion of pure combination has generated devotees, clergy, castes, and sects.4 This is detrimental to the majority, who see the logic of the temple where the cult of the Single Form gathers, and who must validate this celebration of emptiness and the lack of content. Nihilism rejoices in the veneration of the carcass.
Bringing form into the service of a depth sends art down an aesthetically inverted path. Worldly art—in other words, the use of aesthetics—appeals to our predilection for surfaces over depths. Decoration justifies itself in this. When a work’s sole allure is its appearance, it can integrate itself into the landscape as an element of finery or ornamentation. The bourgeoisie are masters of these codes, which require absolute depolitization.
A work’s value is measured by the sum of intellectual exchanges it generates, be they ethical, political, philosophical, metaphysical, or, of course, aesthetic. Abstraction, the quintessence of pure form and form that is pure, makes things pretty.5 It rarely carries a political or military message. To repoliticize art (I do not mean a political art in the militant sense of the word) there must be an infusion of content able to produce a communicational act, to us the term of Habermas.
The untransmittable, the unspeakable, and the ineffable, as well as the singing-saw of transcendence,6 are all part of religious people’s conceptual equipment. They are also very Kantian concepts. Very often when invoking the untransmittable, it’s really just that there is nothing to transmit. The obscurity and false profundity of so many commentaries betray a confusion, a paucity of content, a work’s inconsistency. Restoring content goes beyond mere aestheticism and validates the power of art. In order to accomplish this, our spaces, occasions, and circumstances must conduce to transmission. The Université Populaire de Caen takes this as a formula for its seminars on contemporary art.
A Rematerialization of the Real
The twentieth century was a time of rarefaction: dodecaphonic and serial music, through Webern, leads up to Cage’s silent concerts; painting abandons subjects for light, and then light for abstraction, and then abstraction for nothing at all, a vacuum, from which we get Malevitch’s White Square on White Background; the Nouveau Roman declared war on characters, on plots, on psychology, on narration, on suspense;7 Nouvelle Cuisine, also marked by Structuralist thinking, breaks with flavors and the mouth’s palate in favor of impressing the eye with color schemes and architectural structures on the plate. All of that bends toward less, nothing, and then less than nothing.
The twentieth century’s output went backward: music rediscovered tonality, florid orchestral colors, symphonic instrumentariums, and neo-Romantic melismas, and churches were filled with the neomedieval music of the Baltics. Painting resurrected the purest tradition of color and classical composition, mixing it with a bit of poetry. The novel once again took up bourgeois adultery, narcissistic stories, the character and his states of mind, and descriptions of emotions. (Even though the pope of the Nouveau Roman spurned the saber and the cocked hat, he did all he could to gain his seat at the Académie Française.)8 At the same time, the culinary industry made a fortune selling tête de veau…Then as much as now there was a celebration of reactionary virtues.
It was a mistake to move toward nothingness. It was also a mistake to try to push it away by reactivating old values. Neither Zen nor kitsch was the answer. What is the alternative then? A taste for the real and the matter of the world; a desire for immanence and the here and now; a passion for things’ textures, for tactile softness, and for the corporeality of substances. The answer is not limited to the opposing paradigms of angels and beasts. Where should we look then? Men, individuals, nominalist entities, singular, indivisible identities. No more grand rhetoric; we must move to a place completely beyond grand rhetoric…
When Christianity and Marxism end their shared reign, we will need visions of new possibilities. There is always one fixed point: the body. Not a body of Platonic ideas, nor a body cut in two, carved out, mutilated, and dualistic, but a body of postmodern science: flesh that is living, amazing, meaningful, rich in potential, bearing forces still unknown, and worked on by still unharnessed powers. Instead of this, art has always served the sacred, that which seems to be beyond the pale of reason.
These days we seem to think of the body as something beyond reason. Spinoza wrote that we have not yet taken full advantage of it, to the point that we are still ignorant of what we can do. Deleuze and Foucault put that same concern at the center of their philosophies. The body is still Christian, marked by more than two thousand years of civilization; but it contains amazing powers.
In the chaos of a crumbling civilization, among the nihilistic ruins of the end of an era, there in what lays before the Faustian body, art can be a kind of conceptual, ideological, intellectual, and philosophical laboratory. After the death of God and the death of Marx, and after the deaths of smaller idols, everyone just has their body and it’s back to the drawing board. Considering all its modalities, how do we define, understand, train, tame, and master the body? How can we sculpt it? What can we, and what must we, expect from it? How far can we go with this irreducible ontology?
There are already artists working on cloning, genetic engineering, transgenesis, the production of a man-machine with the machine providing at least one of its vital functions: ingestion, digestion, excretion…They are working to redefine corporeal identity through surgery, to construct a heathen soteriology by mastering the corpse and thus death, and to digitalize matter through virtual-reality imaging. These and so many other undertakings are no less artistic for being postmodern.
These artists are forming a new kind of beauty. It is not a Platonic Beauty or a reality measured by some fictive reference. It is a beauty of objects, new forms, and new appearances that make up a sublime percept. Why a percept? In the Pragmatic tradition this term indicates that which appears to a sense, before the perceptual judgment. And why sublime? Because in the Romantic tradition, the word indicates that which overwhelms a person through its power and force, and that which judges the object in question by means of that sensation. This world of sublime percepts suggests something greater than concepts, something that can influence the content and structure of reality. This begins of our escape from nihilism…