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Hans Steinmüller A minimal definition of cynicism: everyday social criticism and some meanings of 'life' in contemporary China Article (Accepted version) (Refereed) Original citation: Steinmüller, Hans (2014) A minimal definition of cynicism: everyday social criticism and some meanings of 'life' in contemporary China. Anthropology of This Century (11). ISSN 2047-6345 © 2014 AOTC Press This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/59999/ Available in LSE Research Online: October 2014 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. A minimal definition of cynicism: everyday social criticism and some meanings of 'Life' in contemporary China The Cynics were missionaries, and their message was that life could be lived on any terms the age could impose. (Dudley 1937:x) One evening last September, I was watching television together with my friend Chen Rong in his home in Lancang, Yunnan Province.i As a successful local businessman, Chen has a broad network of friends from all walks of life, including powerful local officials. The evening news on CCTV 1 was again focused on the trial of Bo Xilai, the former major of Chongqing who had been accused of corruption and removed from office, and whose trial had been headline news for most of September in the PRC. Day after day, new details emerged about Bo’s corruption and decadent lifestyle, including pictures of his villa in France, allegations about his mistresses, lists of his son’s expenses during his studies in Oxford and Harvard, and finally details about his wife’s affair with his police chief, Wang Lijun. If previously many ordinary people had thought highly of Bo Xilai, now his public image was thoroughly destroyed, and he would eventually be sentenced to life in prison. My assumption (and that of many observers) is that Bo’s trial was broadcast daily to damage his reputation and to convince ordinary people that he could never return to elite politics. Those who praised the publicity of the trial as a sign of the increasing ‘rule of law’ in China certainly helped this cause. ‘But everyone knows that every official in the central government has a villa in France and mistresses, isn’t that right?’ I asked Chen. He agreed: ‘Of course, we know.’ He paused and then added: ‘But actually, many ordinary people do not know.’ Does everyone in China know that high officials are corrupt? It depends who you ask. Chen claimed that he knows, but many ordinary people don’t. I asked a few more friends, and mostly got the same answer, they know (i.e. that most officials are corrupt). Some people, it is true, were convinced that Bo Xilai was somehow even more corrupt than other officials and had done all kinds of debauched things. Most of them, however, had only heard about Bo since the televised trials and hadn’t known who he was before – an ambitious local leader, highly regarded by the majority of the population in the cities he governed, and contending for the highest offices within party and state. Now, let us suppose that many people in China assume that all officials are corrupt, just like Bo Xilai, and yet the same people also maintain the appearance that the trial was transparent and fair and exemplary of the Chinese ‘rule of law’– how other than ‘cynical’ should we label such a public? 1 In this essay, I want to discuss cynicism in contemporary China, suggesting that a ‘minimal’ definition of cynicism as everyday social criticism might be useful for ethnographic analysis. This is building on, but also in some respects counter- balancing, the focus in my earlier work on irony (Steinmüller 2011). I should also explain at the outset that the ideas for this particular essay grew out of a recent collaborative project on ‘Irony, Cynicism and the Chinese State’. Susanne Brandstädter and I organized a workshop on that topic and are in the process of editing a volume of the same title. In what follows there are brief references to my own fieldwork in rural China, but I mostly rely on ethnographic examples from the very thought-provoking contributions to our workshop. *** The word ‘cynicism’ comes from the Greek word for dog, κύων (kyôn), or ‘dog-like’, κυνικός (kynikos). The philosopher Diogenes behaved like a dog, the inhabitants of Athens said. But Diogenes didn’t mind, he accepted that observation and even praised the dog: dogs don’t care about social conventions, which are vain anyways; dogs are honest and loyal. Diogenes refused the values of his society and lived a life against all conventions; sleeping in a tub, he did all his business in public – like a dog. What was meant as an insult, Diogenes turned into a compliment: the dog, not as a symbol of base instincts, but of loyalty. Obviously there are quite a few differences between the ancient Greek philosophy of cynicism and what we commonly understand as modern cynicism.ii If we disregard the details of this history for a moment, we might say that the main difference between classical and modern cynicism is the same as the difference between Diogenes and the Athenians in their interpretation of the dog: it is virtuous in its honesty or it is deplorable because it doesn’t understand morals and convention. Be it upright refusal or bitter resignation, in all of its different versions, cynicism implies an antagonism to the values of society or the values of the times. What is put against society is some kind of ‘nature’ that is more ‘authentic’ than society. Similar ambiguities about the ‘dog’s philosophy’ can be found in Chinese.iii The Athenians accused Diogenes of behaviour that was not unlike what Chinese people might find contemptible about dogs: they are seen as dirty and polluting, specifically because they do not recognize the boundaries of propriety.iv Dogs are often represented as loyal, but this can be framed in negative terms too: they are mindless and passive followers.v There are numerous swearwords that have to do with dogs; the worst of them refer to someone else as “born by a dog” or “nurtured by a dog” (gouniang yang de) or suggest that someone else’s mother is a dog, or that she had intercourse with dogs (gouri de). A common saying has it that dogs don’t recognize their ancestors, implying in reverse that every human being should hold them in respect. The dog in these Chinese proverbs transgresses fundamental boundaries of proper human behaviour and social convention. Hence in Chinese, it makes very good sense to refer to cynicism as the ‘dog’s philosophy’. In Chinese, as in English, the moral assessment of the cynic depends on what the implied view of dogs is: positive, in the sense that they are not ‘spoilt’ by society and culture, or negative in the sense that they lack ‘culture’ and ‘society’ and in some sense are just life reduced to its essence. The cynic is someone who criticizes contemporary society and compares it with life at a very base level, or ‘life itself’. 2 The minimal definition I wish to give to cynicism is the shared metaphor of the dog’s life that is compared to social conventions. Different meanings can be attached to this metaphor and cynics might be condemned as outcasts or lauded as truthful opponents of everyday hypocrisy. I am particularly interested in the social uses made of this metaphor. Calling someone a cynic – someone who refuses human (social) convention – implies an interpretation of intentionality: the cynic knows about conventions but decides to refuse them. But my argument here aims not so much at the interpretation of what is happening in someone else’s mind, but rather what is done with such interpretations, that is, how this metaphor is used practically in social interaction. The minimal definition of cynicism as the metaphor of the dog’s life allows for situated and multivocal interpretations of social action. In the following, I demonstrate how this minimal definition can be used to describe everyday social criticism in response to shifting moralities in contemporary China. But first, I will contrast the minimal definition of cynicism with the totalizing tendencies of other theories of cynicism that have been suggested in anthropology and philosophy. *** Anthropologists who have written about cynicism often refer to Peter Sloterdijk (1987:5,101,305) and Slavoj Žižek (1989:27-30). In his best-selling Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk writes against the Enlightenment discourses of rationality and modernity, which he denounces as ‘totalitarian’ and ‘dehumanizing’. According to him, these discourses have produced a lethargic cynical reason that is ‘enlightened false consciousness’. He contrasts this ‘cynicism’ with a ‘c’ with ‘kynicism’ with a ‘k’, which is bodily, active, and aggressive. To the first he applies his well-known inversion of Marx’s formula ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’: the cynics ‘know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’.

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