Picture this: Two dogs face each other. On the floor between them is a bowl on which is printed the word "Skippy." Dog One says, "I insisted on the quotation marks." It could be a cartoon in a sophisticated magazine. “Skippy” knows the ontological instability of his status, the arbitrariness of the name imposed on him by his "masters."
A tenuous chain links a system of 4th century b.c.e. thought, from Socrates -- Antisthenes -- Diogenes of Sinope -- Crates of Thebes and of course Zeno, to the Stoicism that later infiltrated Rome and had far-reaching importance in medieval ethics. They were wrestling with weighty, thorny, indigestible questions. And what has any of it to do with dogs? Their "lowliness" in relation to humans? Their needy gregariousness? Their (potential) ferocity? Or the hierarchical nature of their social organization (the pack)? Who knows.
The Cynics were a small but influential school of "philosophers" in ancient Athens holding the view that virtue is the only good, and that its essence lies in self-control and independence. (Whether this is related to existentialism is a good question.) Another definition suggests that a cynic is one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest. (A world populated only by Donald Trumps, as it were.) Question: Can any intelligent person be anything but cynical at the perverse self-destructiveness of the human race?
Cynical thought is parenthetical, elaborated in the cracks and crevasses, gaps and lapses, at the points of juncture or transition, of the main stream of thought. The concept of "margins" and marginality in relation to issues of power and self-articulation and representation made sense within the discourse of de-colonialization as it expanded from strictly political and economic problems into the realm of the creative arts and culture in general. But maybe it's time we lay it aside. For one thing, the use of "marginalized" (to describe the condition of oppositional or oppressed groups, for instance) while it depends upon a spatial metaphor, is a move away from the corporeal and toward the abstract.
For years, I've been publishing chapbooks of my writing and distributing them at readings and to interested persons. This was the method by which that small, privileged and elite minority -- the literati or intelligentsia of 18th century western Europe -- circulated stimulating, possibly controversial ideas. Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream by Diderot and the Confessions of Rousseau convey some of the flavor and fervor of that scene. But that was 18th century Europe. So we must make adjustments, invent, adopt and adapt; self-sufficiency and knowledge play a crucial role. [see Hard Times by Charles Dickens.]
It's my party and I’ll cry if I want to. The question is: Do I want to? A different question is: what are the limits of cynicism? Where does it spring from, where does it lead? And we must always account for pigrizia, the laziness inherently part of our nature too. Noam Chomsky in Turning the Tide suggests that the average person's databank and opinions on celebrities or sports far outpaces what they are willing to retain about world or even local affairs.
The gift economy is a sort of antidote to the psychological colonization that drives consumption and the appropriation of human activity by selling it back to you (e.g. "reach out & touch someone" by using telephone equipment; buy "homemade" soup in a can.) see The Gift by Lewis Hyde, a book about the alternative economy of artistic practice … and you could follow the chain reaching back via Clifford Geertz, to Marcel Mauss.
If large swathes of our culture are colonized by commercial interests and corporate power, where can we find or make space for areas of resistance, antidotes, "play"? How do we recognize such "windows of opportunity"? Is that what the internet could have been? When did it cease to be so? What will be the next window? see also Herb Schiller, Jerry Mander etc.
The reality or "fact" of the immune system (a relatively recent discovery-invention in western medicine) opens out into research that could potentially cure cancer, AIDS, so much human suffering. The metaphor of the immune system opens into the whole water-logged subject of Self and Other, not only in biological but also social, cognitive, psychological, and historical terms.
Being, myself, mal-adapted to the physical environment of late 20th century material civilization -- which is in many ways toxic, voracious and wasteful -- and to the mental environment -- which is intrusive, fragmented, distracting and narcissistically oriented -- I, Marina LaPalma, do recount to you the following story:
"The old queen went to the bedroom, removed all the bedding and put a pea on the bed. She then piled up 20 mattresses on top of the pea and added 20 eiderdowns over those. The princess now had to spend the night on this bed. The next day, when the queen asked how she had slept, the astonishing princess replied, "Oh, I hardly slept a wink! There was some hard thing in my bed and I tossed and turned all night and now I'm all black and blue." So the old queen at last believed that the girl was a real princess and allowed her son the prince to marry her."
This is from The Man of Jasmine and Other Texts (Atlas Press, London, 1994) by Unica Zurn! (could I have invented such an improbable and wonderful name?) Zurn — gifted artist, schizophrenic, bi-polar flyer, lover of Hans Bellmer, friend of other surrealists such as Henri Michaux — concludes this passage with, "One needs incredible resources to be the princess on pea. And that is my shortcoming, that is my flaw.”
Now, there are those among us who will be too young to recall this situation but:
[… is]” the sheet pasted in a library book with a return date stamped on it a piece of ephemera worth saving? I always look at these at some point while reading a library book, to see how often it has been checked out previously” writes Nicholson Baker in "The Trashing of America's Great Libraries" (The New Yorker, 4/4/94.)
He continues, “Again, lest we become confused and forgetful, the function of a great library is to store obscure books. This is above all the task that we want libraries to perform: to hold onto books that we don’t want enough to own, books of very limited appeal, unshielded by racks of Cliff Notes or ubiquitous citations or simple notoriety. A book whose presence you crave at your bedside or whose referential or snob value you think you will need throughout life, you buy. Libraries are repositories for the out of print and the less desired, and we value them inestimably for that. The fact that most library books seldom circulate is part of the mystery and power of libraries. the books are there, waiting from age to age until their moment comes. And in the case of any given book, its moment may never come -- but we have no way of predicting that, since we are unable to know what a future time will find of interest.”
A la carte, as it were, I will conclude this banquet of the mind with an amuse bouche from Adrienne Rich "A plain fact cleanly spoken by a woman's tongue is not infrequently perceived as a cutting blade directed at a man's genitals." [Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. NY: W.W. Norton, 1976. p.213] Or in more contemporary terms “men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them.”