The... phenomenon of cynicism as reflectively buffered false consciousness, that in order to be understood, it has to be localized in a kind of "dialectic of enlightenment". Specifically, as a polemical dialectic that is oriented to illuminating via unmasking and exposing our political opponents motives. Basically, about exposing their false consciousness their prejudices, their desires, their hidden class interests, whatever, as a way of attacking their political or social position. So, I say something, you say something else, you know, how do we achieve synthesis here? Where do we go from from there? And the way that it works is not, you know, we come to X Y or whatever, but "I have this bias, you have that bias, this is a class interest, etc.", right? So he sees the process of enlightenment as a kind of progressive development of this sort of discourse. These techniques of unmasking, they become increasingly sophisticated and widespread, and then we wind up, not with a win-win discourse, as proponents of the Enlightenment project would like to say, that truth capital 'T', but an interminable clashing of different identities, class interest, desires, passions, hegemonic positions, psychological resistances; we get a war of consciousnesses rather than a dialogue of peace. And this discursive war consists in the reification of the other's consciousness, for analysis and inquiry. The others consciousness is the target of the argument, rather than the validity or the invalidity of their ideas. It involves endless reciprocal reification of subjects, leading to a condition where our interactions no longer are really intersubjective, but inter-objective, and there's universal suspicion.
With Freud, false consciousness looks like a kind of sickness, we trace it to unconscious drives. For Marx, we trace it to non-subjective economic historical laws and see individual people as just sort of epiphenomenon in the process of Capital. And all this stuff is operating behind people's backs, and becomes the real subject of enlightenment discourse. That's what enlightenment discourse is, illuminating. He actually thinks that Marxism is a kind of particularly important jump in cynicism, since we get not just false consciousness, but necessarily false consciousness. False consciousness that is false in precisely the correct way, because stemming from your social class you know the false consciousness appropriate to your social class. He thinks any functional understanding of truth actually inclines one to cynicism. Sociologists, even if of the non-Marxist variety, tend to have a functional view where they think, basically, that false consciousness isn't necessary for society to function.
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