I Wanna Be Your Dog (On Cynicism and Modern Art)

Statue of Diogenes the Cynic (Sinop, Turkey)

I don't want to live in a barrel, carry a lamp, masturbate in the market place, or even spit in the faces of the rich (well, maybe sometimes). But, nevertheless, one is repeatedly drawn back to the figure of Diogenes and to Cynicism; a philosophy constructed in direct opposition to Platonic Idealism with its transcendent forms and characterized by Michel Foucault as a courageous method of truth telling, public provocation, and ascetic sovereignty.

I suppose, above all, Diogenes provides us with a model not so much of the good life, or a beautiful existence - he leads a dog's life and is prone to ugly behaviour - but of extreme honesty. Honesty not as a matter of policy, but as something fundamental upon which we can build a distinctive ethics and politics; "connected to the principle of truth-telling ... without shame or fear ... which pushes its courage and boldness to the point that it becomes intolerable insolence" [165].

In other words, Cynicism is a form of punk philosophy and the Cynic can be characterized as a man of parrhesia; a free-speaker, but also someone who can be outspoken and a bit of a loudmouth. Indeed, when asked what was the most attractive virtue in a man, Diogenes replied the ability to speak candidly (without rhetoric or the shadow of a lie).     

But Cynicism is more than this, for it also has a decisive relationship to nihilism. That is to say, it's a form of realism, but the relationship it establishes to reality is not one that flatters or augments the latter; rather, it lays it bare (it strips and exposes the world and violently reduces human existence to its material components).

This, according to Foucault, is why artists of the avant-garde have long been attracted to Cynicism and willingly allowed their work to serve as a vehicle for the latter in the modern world, establishing a "polemical relationship of reduction, refusal, and aggression to culture, social norms, values, and aesthetic canons" [188].

We can think of this as both the anti-Platonic and the anti-Aristotelian character of modern art; a Cynical attempt to reveal and speak the truth (regardless of who it offends) and to change the value of the currency ...


See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

The Rainbow

 Joseph Anton Koch:  

Landschaft mit dem Dankopfer Noahs (1803)

 

Yesterday, a lovely rainbow across the skies of West London: even Hounslow was briefly redeemed by this trick of the light and band of faint iridescence colouring the heavens. But any joy is short-lived and, ultimately, there is always something threatening rather than hopeful in this mythological and meteorological phenomenon and one starts to feel oppressed. 

For despite symbolizing gay pride and the hope of social and political equality in the secular imagination, the appearance of a rainbow invariably takes us back to Genesis 9 and God's post-diluvian pledge to Noah and sons:

I now establish my covenant with you and your descendants and with every living creature: never again will all life be cut off by the waters; never again will be there a flood to destroy the earth. I have set my rainbow in the clouds and it will be a sign of the covenant between me and all life on earth. 

This is all very nice, though it might be thought too little, too late and hardly compensating for the global catastrophe caused by the very same loving Father who sent the rains for forty days and nights in the first place, ensuring that every living thing perished and was wiped from the face of the earth. It also provides significant wiggle-room; for in promising not to send another global flood, God carefully avoids promising not to exterminate life via some other means in the future. In effect, he is saying that whilst there'll be no more drownings or water torture, he doesn't promise not to one day burn the earth to a cinder.

The rainbow, however, doesn't exclusively remind us of the Old Testament deity playing his games of abuse. We also think of Lawrence's great novel of 1915 and particularly the closing passage in which Ursula sees the rainbow as the promise of a new day and a new evolution - though one which again noticeably follows an act of violent destruction:

"And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world's corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth's new architecture, the old, brittle, corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven." 

- D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 458-59.

Why are those prone to genocidal fantasies so seduced by rainbows? Is such sentimentality inherent within the psychopathology of those who thrill to the thought of apocalypse and dream of utopia at any cost? 

Beware of the grand idealists who say creation of the new can only follow the total destruction of the old. And beware of those who place, chase, or even sing rainbows ...

Ecstasy

We should be extremely wary of those attempts to conceive of the overman as corresponding to the possibility of an ecstatic break from humanity. Zarathustra explicitly warns against the thought of a transcendent leap into the future.

In fact, it's arguable that what is most needed today is some form of counter-ecstatic return to the flesh; a stepping back into material life and the rejection of all forms of idealism that would abstract us away from the world of physical objects that we might touch.

For the key to constructing an active and ethical life is to remain, says Lawrence, inside your own skin and not pretend that you're any bigger than you actually are. To overcome ourselves we need not become more hu-man or superhuman, but less so; more animal, complete with teeth and guts and genitals and all those things which our idealists hope to see shrivel away.

And so, like Anna Brangwen, I hold on to the little things that save me from being swept up helplessly into the Abstract and the Universal. I don't want to get outside myself, or go around open-mouthed with a strange, ecstatic grin like a true believer.