A Defense of Cynicism

Apropos of out conversation from last class, I want to talk about cynicism and Brian Kim Stefans’ The Dream Life of Letters. The argument was that this piece is cynical because it took a Duplessis feminist essay and disintegrated it, destroyed it, blew it up, and picked through the remains to make something that does not address the essay or the theories and implications, involved in the work. And according to his intro, Stefans couldn’t figure out the essay and therefore his response was something that cannot be understood (at least in a grammatical sense). Dream Life was likened to hipsters who only criticize and destroy without creating anything positive in return.

By saying Dream Life is cynical is saying that it is not a positive creation. And since it is indeed a creation, that much I am sure, if it isn’t positive, it is a negative creation. I find this to be a unjustified heirachization, the bane of literary theorists (MAs, PhDs mount your steeds! To battle! To battle!). To assume that Dream Life is a negative creation is to assume that Duplessis essay was a positive creation. I am not arguing that it wasn’t, but I am arguing that because Dream Life is in dialogue with it, we assume the first to be correct. I have defended this piece in two classes now, and both times it is just assumed that the feminist approach was inherently better than what Stefans produced. Yes, inherently. No one has read the fucking essay! How can we say that Dream Life is cynical if we don’t know what it is destroying? For a hyperbolic argument, what if Dream Life took the words from a Mussolini speech and made them beautiful. Essentially the piece would be the same, with the same movement and colors and whatnot, but the creation would be positive (assuming a Mussolini speech is a negative creation). That is the problem with calling a piece of artwork cynical. It creates a positive out of nothing, and vice versa. Doesn’t a creation of artwork boil down to just being a creation, even if it is in dialogue with another piece?

I feel that this is the Conan O’Brien argument for cynicism, the argument that nothing good will ever come from cynicism and therefore there it is only destructive and only harmful. I consider cynicism to be our political pain, a feeling that tells us something is wrong. It is impossible to notice something is wrong and have a replacement, or answer, instantaneously. Duplessis wasn’t wrong, of course, and Dream Life was not an extemporaneous response. But to deem a destructive response as automatically a negative one, I find jumping too far ahead.