Computer Cynicism

Joseph Nechvatal

Cynicism, everything seems to be penetrated and molded by it's force. Today the computer assisted endless cycle of the production and consumption of images and information has, it seems, generated less and less conventional meaning, not more. Realizing this, a highly cynical art of doubt, pessimism, lost faith, and suspicion emerged during the 1980s. The general effect of all this cynicism has not, it seems to me, been one of attacking out-moded abstractions (as cynicism traditionally did), but rather one of social integration.

Art education is an absolute prerequisite for the creation of cynical art, as educated minds are those affected by the vast amount of incoherent information. Artist-intellectuals are virtually the most vulnerable to cynical summations because they absorb the largest amount of second-hand, unverifiable information, yet they feel compelled to have an opinion on it, and so succumb easily to opinions offered them. They often delude themselves by submitting to cynicism's necessity, while pretending they are free in spite of it by simply saying so. They call upon cynicism to solve the problems created by the media and by the death of the progressive and heroic ideals associated with modernism. With the increased marginal role of art in an age of computer assisted electronic mediation, today's cynical art hopes to evade modernism's completed death, and thereby stages a rather desperate, pathological and cynical attempt to try to sustain it. Today's cynical art results, then, from the disparity between the modernist conventions and the postmodern reality, which is one in which we are deluged by a sea of contradictory representations which have eclipsed reality.

Cynicism is the effect of a techno-media society that embraces the entire person in order to accomplish a completed integration. It is only the innermost, and most elusive manifestation of the Spectacle. It has resulted from us trying to keep informed in an astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational world which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons not understood. Even Camus, who considered living in this understanding the only honest posture, would today be tempted to put order into our electronic world. And so cynicism supplies that order today-the more complicated the information, the simpler the smug explanation.

Cynicism succeeds primarily because it corresponds exactly to the need for an all embracing simple explanation of the Media Society. People are doubly reassured by it because it first tells them the reason behind the media image, and then promises a pseudo-solution by way of explanation. One might go even further and say that it tends to give certain people a quasi-religious personality in that their psychological life becomes organized around it's collective tenets, and thereby provides a steady scale of value. In the face of problems produced by the Media Society, cynicism seems a means of remedying social deficiencies while at the same time plunging the Social into a neurotic state (to mistake an artificial conflict for a real one is characteristic of neurosis). So is the tendency of the cynic/artist to give art a narrow interpretation, to better integrate it into a cynical system, while anxiously seeking the esteem and affection of the largest number of people. In their psychic confusion, created by their own cynicism, cynicism alone imposes the order which can alleviate that tension. The only trouble is that all it really offers is profound alienation, creating a tendency towards manic-depression.

But by truly completing the computer assisted break with modernism, cynicism should wane, for without the sense of mocking a corrupted ideal, without the sense of faded affectation, cynicism becomes implausible and unsustainable. An alternative to cynicism will come then from a disillusionment with cynicism itself. A sense of completed modernism, a sense of complete awareness of the conventions that give art it's existence, a sense of complete artistic self-consciousness should lead to a postmodernist meta-consciousness too caught up in its own spontaneous internal necessity to bother with staging cynical comments. By reflecting critically on the fact that cynicism is an act, a mask, a facile performance commenting on modernism's failures and broken promises, artists might grant their freedom and regain a sense of purpose. It is when we begin to realize that we have been conditioned into cynical self-restriction, into a narrower and narrower perception of ourselves, our importance, and our magnitude that we will begin to seek out something else. If we have been trained in skepticism and sarcasm, if cynicism is the dogmatically imposed moral paradigm of our time, a deprogramming emancipation can begin with this realization. The fight becomes one between suppression and expression. If we now realize that cynicism leads not only to the tearing down of bogus abstractions, but also to a deadening repetition, to the absence of feeling, and to the dehydration of art, how can we once more stir things up?

If images are no longer anchored by representation and float around weightlessly in hyper space, then the challenge is to assume this new world of simulation and to take it to it's logical conclusion, to the point of shattering itself completely. Baudrillard has suggested that we are no longer a part of the drama of alienation, that we live in the ecstasy of communication. By taking this ecstatic freedom and coupling it with an antagonism towards the present state of affairs, one might skew the continuity of cynical discourse by setting up multiple readings, transparencies, non-linearity, and random chance. By showing that everything, all visibility, all simulation, is phantasmagorical, an exit from the current postmodern dead end of empty surfaces might be uncovered. A phantasmagorical conception of simulation shifts established understanding away from the old hierarchy. The exclusive cynical use of simulation is only the result of a nostalgia for the old reality of the sure belief in representation as accurate map. By realizing and facing the lack of true reality that organizes the Social, by facing the contamination of the concept of "reality", we assure ourselves of the potential for escape from any overarching ideology.

We can do, then, a lot more than wear the mask of the cynically computer assisted commodified simulator. Since the cynical aspect of simulation and commodification has taken on, lately, the stature of a meta-narrative, lets' not forget Jean Francois Lyotard's influential definition of the postmodern condition as one which stresses an incredulity towards meta-narratives. The need to ascribe meaning to ones actions against the terms of an overarching, all-inclusive cynicism either renders superfluous the primary understanding of postmodernism or becomes the latest candidate for postmodern deconstruction. Granted all dystopian and utopian ideologies oversimplify and overstate their condition; but if with computer assisted postmodernism we have, as Lyotard exclaims, reached the end of generalized ideology, then can and should we not now shrug off the pithy ideology of cynicism as well? If the logic of the image, of the whole computer assisted Media Society, of postmodernism in general, is satiated in an overabundance, then can we not now take this decadent condition to it's logical conclusion?

Decadent modes of expression always assert themselves in response to dogmatically imposed paradigms. It is in the hyper-logic of decadence, in the abuse of simulation itself{ where we might stage the site of contestation and negation today. A computer assisted post-simulation decadence asserts an active force which can seek out an antithetical response to the established simulated norms.

There are no fixed answers, but in decadent modes of contestation, form enmeshes, alters, and disrupts the commonly understood meaning. The greater the amount of information, the greater the noise, the greater the freedom of choice, the greater the uncertainty. All great artistic periods collapse in a burst of hyper-logic which we understand to be mannerist and decadent. Hence, with the nearing end of modernism, cynicism becomes a prelude to this last gasp. Cynical art itself remains modernist, however, due to it's self-criticality, an attribute we attribute to the basic underlying logic of modernism.

It is interesting to note that the basic stance of cynical art's questioning everything has to date been largely ineffectual. The basic tenets of cynical art seem to be mere reproductions of Pop Art: is pop art cynically commodified in it's use of mass media, or does it ironically appropriate the commodified image in order to effect a critical reappraisal of mass culture and to comment upon the commodification of daily life under capitalism? Pop and computer assisted cynically simulated art leaves itself open to both these kinds of readings. Cynical parody can be read as either conservative and nostalgic, or critical in it's ironies and implied commentary on society. Can one both challenge and exploit? I think that, no, one cannot. What ends up happening is that the dominant, mass culture is stronger than any ironic, paradoxical subversion, and so the dominant culture wins out every time. By making ones art easily accessible to the dominant culture, with the naive hope of subverting it, one merely guarantees it a speedy neutralizing complicity. On the other hand, blatant offensiveness will merely be overlooked and rejected by society. Seduction and computer assisted decadence I feel are key at the moment. They understand the essential revelation of poststructuralism, that everything is concocted and thus alterable. Poststructuralism reminds us that there are all kinds of orders and systems in our world, and that we as humans create them all. The world is meaningless. Any meaning, including cynical ones, are our own creation. We grant meaning.

The art made in the computer assisted 90s will hopefully challenge us to further understand this, and not merely reproduce blindly handed down conventions. If so, it will first do so by rejecting the current cynical master-narrative: the single bad idea that creation (play) is impossible in the collapse of meaning. The mass media does not neutralize reality for us and replace it with simulation without our consent. Perhaps we will reject this and all absolute dogmatic theories. In meta-cynicism we are aware, then, of ourselves operating cynically, and from this perspective we can again inquire within for inspired vision.

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Joseph Nechvatal, Paris, France, Europa
http://www.cybertheque.fr/galerie/jnech
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