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In Dubiis Libertas: A Diogenic Attitude for a Politics

of Distrust

Christopher J. Gilbert

To cite this article: Christopher J. Gilbert (2012) In�Dubiis�Libertas: A Diogenic Attitude for a
Politics of Distrust, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 42:1, 1-25, DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2011.618173

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Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 1–25

In Dubiis Libertas: A Diogenic Attitude

for a Politics of Distrust
Christopher J. Gilbert

Cynicism is generally considered anathema to democratic politics. This essay argues that it is a
potential wellspring of constructive distrust. Diogenes of Sinope, the fountainhead of Cynic
philosophy, is recollected as a means for recuperating cynicism as an attitude, and thus a mode of
civic being, rather than simply a social condition. Particular attention is paid to the liberatory
promise of the Cynic exercises of parrhesia (truth-telling), askesis (training), and ponos (hard
work), as well as the use of chreiai (anecdotes) as critical rhetorical devices, in order to approach a
more charitable and humane politics. Street and graffiti artist, Banksy, is situated as an important
figure of contemporary cynic citizenship.

There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a
better place.
—Banksy

This is what I practice doing all my life.

—Diogenes of Sinope

Myth has it that Diogenes of Sinope, the fountainhead of Cynic philosophy,

wandered the streets of fourth century Athens with a lit lantern in broad daylight.
Many thought this an act of adolescent protest. Diogenes thought it an imaginat-
ive performance insofar as he claimed to be in search of an honest man. Anyone so
bold as to inquire if he found one received not a straightforward reply but simply
a laugh.
In May 2010, pseudonymous street and graffiti artist, Bansky, stenciled on a wall
in the Dumbo district of New York City a black and white image of an adolescent
boy. The youth sat slouched on a scrawled trashcan, sporting a flat cap and
wayfarer sunglasses. In one hand he held an electronic device, and in the other

Christopher J. Gilbert is a Graduate Student in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana
University, 800 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. E-mail: chrgilbe@indiana.edu

ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) # 2012 The Rhetoric Society of America
DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2011.618173
2 Gilbert

a hulking red crayon with which he was penning the last letter of the name,
Diogenes. Above the name appeared the following maxim: ‘‘One original thought
is worth a thousand mindless quotings.’’
It would not be a stretch to suggest that Banksy is a cynic. By now infamous
for his crude, ironic, and subversive artworks, Banksy embodies the very
‘‘expression through action of an attitude toward conventional culture’’ so charac-
teristic of Diogenes (Branham 339). More importantly, he recalls a fundamental
aspect of ancient Cynicism that is absent in contemporary discourse—cynicism
is at once a philosophical art of life and a public activity. It is no mystery that
denunciations of contemporary American politics reveal widespread sentiments
of civic disengagement, public distrust, and political impurity. If anything, Jeffrey
C. Goldfarb’s lament that cynicism ‘‘is a form of legitimation through disbelief’’
has become a sort of twenty-first-century truism (1). Indeed, there is a sense in
which cynicism has become an excuse of the surefire failure of politics, while rela-
tive (un)truths of political speech and action prefigure cynicism as a vehicle for
extracting virtue from the revelation of falsity. Diogenes’s lit lantern therefore
becomes a metaphor of distrust, and Banksy’s appeal to ‘‘original thought’’ speaks
to a broader need to reimagine the space of the political.
While many have revamped the meaning of citizenship to recuperate democ-
racy, few have engaged cynicism as anything more than the preordained, injurious
political condition of our time. To be fair, some have attended to cynicism as a
heuristic for civic action. More often than not, however, conceptions of cynicism
peg rhetorical agency as the mere labors of language, restrict what ‘‘counts’’ as
political participation to resistance (or expand it to no end), or utterly condemn
political institutions in esse. Yet cynicism is not simply a condition or a tactic; it is
an attitude. And if it is contributing to anti-politics, anti-social behavior, and
unhealthy distrust, it is among the most crucial problematics of our time.
This essay attempts a reimagination of cynicism. I argue that contemporary
cynicism is a perversion of what it once was (and what it could be or do), and
an outgrowth of the very political culture from which it has been borne. Predomi-
nant accounts posit cynicism as the outright, preemptive dismissal of the possi-
bility of honest politics. What we need, then, are newer, if not better, accounts
of cynicism and its relation to democracy. What we need is a conception of cyni-
cism as an attitude, an art of living, and ‘‘an ethic of the political put into rhetori-
cal practice’’ (Kennedy, ‘‘Cynic’’ 30). For my part, I recollect the spirit of Diogenes
for a more restorative sense of the constructive elements of cynicism. I then
critique the rhetorical force of Banksy’s work as an illustration of a positively
doubtful mode of life.
I begin with a revaluation of contemporary cynicism from its roots in the lived
philosophy of Diogenes. This allows me to distinguish between cynical
anti-politics and the potential for an enlivened diogenic attitude as a constructive
and humane praxis. I argue that cynicism can reclaim public spaces for political
activity as evidenced by Diogenes’s cynical practices. Next, I examine these
 In Dubiis Libertas 3

practices according to Michel Foucault’s understanding of ancient Cynicism and

truth, and their imbrication in civic relations. I conclude with an analysis of
Banksy’s reappropriation of cynicism as a contemporary mode of political being.
I argue throughout that, if citizenship itself is a critical art, cynicism might provide
a foundation for a more liberatory sense of the political. After all, with doubt as
less a justification for indifference and more a conduit of social concern, cynicism
can enable the production of both knowledge and trust, not to mention a more
just politics.1 In dubiis libertas: in doubtful things liberty.

What is Cynicism?
The stamp of cynicism has become so common to political life that it borders
on the banal. What is more, it has become the political posture through which
the hard work of understanding is given up for the complacency of disregard.
Goldfarb was early to express suspicion over cynicism as a pervasive cultural form.
His chief concern was that its ubiquity catalyzed widespread mockery of democ-
racy and became an unsurprising byproduct of mass society and its institutional
inadequacies. Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson confirmed such sus-
picions in their study of news discourse and public opinion in the mid-1990s.
Cynical news frames, they argued, engender a cumulative ‘‘media cynicism,’’
which in turn begets public mistrust. Both accounts have obvious empirical
grounding. Yet both view cynicism as a political hurdle to overcome.
Similar judgments emerge in more recent analyses of democratic practice.
Gerard Hauser, among others, writes that citizens today are justifiably cynical
(Vernacular 30, 78). Benjamin Barber posits a salient ‘‘politics of negativity,’’
and laments the fact that politics has become ‘‘a matter of ‘not doing’ rather than
of ‘doing’ ’’ (7–8). Robert M. Eisinger warns that ‘‘cynicism is more than mild dis-
trust. [It] entails intense, antagonistic distrust of or contempt for humanity’’ (56).
Robert Asen bemoans the fact that cynical attitudes hinder democratic citizenship
and inculcate debilitating reservations about the efficacy of political participation
(201). And Robert Hariman admonishes that ‘‘cynicism [is] corrosive: it can

1
It is important here to distinguish between ‘‘skepticism’’ and ‘‘cynicism.’’ Skepticism has a deep history,
preceded by Cynicism as a philosophical school and originated by Pyrrho of Elis in fourth century BCE. Its
fundament is a willingness to affirm negation (or to accept the untruth of a thing) and withhold judgment.
Philosophical skepticism, by extension, assumes that all categories of knowledge and understanding (includ-
ing sense perception) should be doubted. As an everyday practice, skepticism might be read as ‘‘rational
doubt,’’ whereby knowledge, understanding, and truth are negated to be affirmed (Kleinig 79). Cynicism,
on the other hand, moves beyond a simple epistemological stance. Its history claims far less interest in
knowledge itself and far greater interest in the role of knowledge production in the establishment of social
convention. As such, ‘‘Cynicism tends to be a generalized attitude . . . toward politics in general . . . or more
generally toward the public or humankind’’ (Kleinig 79). It is not simply a question of knowledge, but
challenging it as a conduit of principles of living. ‘‘The cynic,’’ in other words, ‘‘doubts motives, not [just]
reasons’’ (Kleinig 79).
4 Gilbert

destroy the trust in other citizens essential for democratic participation and
accountability’’ (‘‘Defense’’ 273). These are all fair concerns. Nonetheless, the
ostensibly nagging distrust in our social order seems to render civic agents unim-
aginative and combative to almost any form of political process. It also seems to
elide an important insight of Kenneth Burke: that democracy is best understood as
‘‘government by interference, by distrust’’ (119).
For starters, cynicism today is scarcely synonymous with ancient Cynicism.2
The latter, although vulgar, was charitable in its appeal to a more just human
order, not coarse and uppity. Even when, in a particularly uncouth instance,
Diogenes trampled the carpets in Plato’s home, he did so with ‘‘proud humility
or, we might say, humble pride’’ (Navia, Classical 110). As Luis E. Navia notes,
‘‘to be cynical [today] really means to be the opposite of being a Cynic, and being
a Cynic has hardly any relationship to being cynical’’ (Classical 7). Much of what is
dubbed cynical today is polarizing, derogatory, or downright mean, and perhaps
rightfully dismissed as absurd, inappropriate, or self-righteous. A Cynic’s criticism
(even if base and ignoble) exercised an ethic of openhandedness and civic friend-
ship. Diogenes used to say that ‘‘one ought to hold out one’s hand to a friend
without closing the fingers’’ (Laërtius, Lives 227). Additionally, a Cynic was hardly
a misanthrope. ‘‘On the contrary, it [was] because [Diogenes did] not hate
[people] that he [felt] compelled to behave toward them as he [did]. He view[ed]
himself as a physician who must inflict pain in order to heal, as a parent who must
punish in order to teach’’ (Navia, Classical 104). Ancient Cynicism was humane,
founded on sympathy for the human condition. If it evidenced a revilement of
people, it was only to animate how inhumane people can be. It therefore has
potent potential as a critical politics.
While little has been done in rhetorical studies to appropriate the thought and
practice of Diogenes, some have approached cynical rhetoric as useful to civic
life. George E. Yoos teases out some implications of a rhetoric of cynicism. How-
ever, Yoos deflates what he regards as antithetical to cynical beliefs, attitudes, and
discourses, then paints a crude picture of cynical misconduct as that which does
more to dissemble than to demonstrate ‘‘healthy cynicism’’ (61). Kristen
Kennedy theorizes a Cynic rhetoric of resistance. Though effective in linking
ancient Cynicism to cynicism today, she relies too much on a one-to-one link
between the two. She further reduces the promise of cynical rhetoric to episodic
(and hence isolated) protest, as well as to rhetorical tactics for those operating on
and from the margins (‘‘Cynic’’). While Kennedy’s proposals are valuable, they
devalue the role of cynicism as a set of motives guiding everyday activities,
especially of those who are not protestors or activists. They also lead Kennedy

2
At this point, I distinguish between cynicism (as an attitude or a disposition) and Cynicism (as a
‘‘doctrine’’ of the ancient Cynics).
 In Dubiis Libertas 5

to discount the fact that cynicism has long inhabited the center of contemporary
American politics, not the periphery.
My hope is to demonstrate how cynicism might serve as a starting point for a
fresh approach to democratic citizenship. As I will illustrate, despite his base, even
abject lifestyle, Diogenes took practical steps to illuminate injustice and inhu-
manity, to disrupt and dispute abusive rhetorics, and to hold up for inspection
social conventions that lived up to democratic ideals in name only. He embodied
citizenship as a playful, good-natured (however vulgar) lifestyle and a mode of
civic responsibility that implicated fellow citizens in the health (or sickness) of
public life. Diogenes’s Cynicism was thus not just tactical, but attitudinal. How-
ever, before I proceed, I must temper my position.
First, much has been written on the life of Diogenes, yet not without speculation
and embellishment. While any revaluation of cynicism is unbound to the strictures
of its counterpart in ancient Athens, it is important to heed both contextual diver-
gences and conceptual convergences. In this way, we can recall the past in order to
understand the present, but only in view of the opportunities and constraints rela-
tive to historical conditions of possibility.
Second, I submit that cynicism is not necessarily the attitude from which demo-
cratic citizenship par excellence is guaranteed to spring. Not only has it proven to
be an incapacitating (if not ill-mannered) way of thinking and acting, but
Diogenes was known for his callous public existence, not his civility. While he
counteracted and countervailed ruinous institutional practices and political forces,
he frequently did so at the expense of any reverence for ‘‘the dictates of human
morality or custom’’ (Mazella 26). Further, Diogenes’s critical fundaments, which
blatantly disturbed cultural values, belief systems, and principles of propriety,
seem to beg the question of how to uphold those core tenets that are essential
to political accord. This is likely why ‘‘the terms ‘cynic’ and ‘cynical’ are used eva-
luatively in a pejorative sense to condemn attitudes, persons, beliefs, and actions’’
(Yoos 61). It is also the burden I am willing to bear in my affirmation of cynicism
as a fulcrum on which to hinge a revised politics—especially since Diogenes was
motivated by a peculiar duality of construction and destruction.
If cynicism is ‘‘everywhere,’’ as Goldfarb suggests, it is my intent to animate
the ways in which this is not a cause for distress (29). Such a view seems
imperative if we are to refashion the cynical mold out of which politics is cast
as an inherently failed project. After all, if politics is the object of disapproval, it
follows that politics itself—not cynicism—is the pejorative. Either way, both
cynicism and politics can be balanced by some measure of reflexivity. Consider
that the Cynic exercises of parrhesia (truth-telling), askesis (physical and mental
training), and ponos (labor and hard work) need not be adversative to modes of
contemporary civic being. Instead, they might be translated into a renewed com-
mitment to public relationality. So it is that we can revisit the Cynic philosophy
of Diogenes within its historical context in order to situate Banksy, and a
diogenic attitude, within ours.
6 Gilbert

Diogenes, a Vestigial Tale

Diogenes of Sinope is the iconic Cynic. But if truth-telling was one of his staple
practices, it is somewhat ironic that a ‘‘true’’ account of Diogenes’s life is
unobtainable. Third century writer and archivist of Greek philosophy, Diogenes
Laërtius, documents much of Diogenes’s life in his voluminous text, The Lives
and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Although copious, his account is sketchy
at best. There is even debate as to whether Diogenes (as opposed to Antisthenes)
is the progenitor of classical Cynicism. Accordingly, any ‘‘biographical account of
Diogenes’’ will ‘‘[oscillate] between fact and fiction, history and legend, and truth
and fabrication’’ (Navia, Sinope 6). Still, it might be that the apothegms and tales
are as instructive as was the figure himself. So while accounts of Diogenes are
sundry, I convey a story that can be read analogically, if not allegorically, in order
to adapt the myth of his lifestyle to contemporary public life.
Diogenes was the son of a banker, Tresius. At a young age, he defiled the
Sinopean currency (along with his father’s name), which led to his banishment
from Sinope and subsequent emigration to Athens. On some accounts, Diogenes
soon thereafter visited the Delphic oracle for advice as to what he should do with
his life. Conventional wisdom has it that the oracle admonished him to do pre-
cisely what he had already done: deface the currency. Diogenes took this for its
‘‘metaphorical meaning,’’ whereby ‘‘currency’’ is not simply ‘‘the coins that circu-
late in the market place’’ but the ‘‘values and customs’’ of society itself (Navia,
Classical 93). There is reason to believe, then, that Diogenes arrived in Athens
‘‘with the express purpose of challenging and invalidating the moral and social
‘currency’ that circulate[d] among [its] people’’ (Navia, Classical 93).
In any case, Diogenes scarcely lamented his exile. When Sinopean citizens grew
infuriated over the defacement of what he considered a rather trite emblem of civic
affairs, the rudiments of Diogenes’s Cynical attitude began to take shape. The
Sinopeans’s misplaced ire led Diogenes to loathe a superficiality he saw as endemic
to the whole of Greek life. Wealth, renown, personal triumph—such were the
pinnacles of human existence for the Greeks and altogether baneful to a man
who survived by ‘‘teaching, shouting, sometimes cursing, gesturing, embracing
statues, begging for food, and, above all, insulting those people and those things
that he estimate[d] worthy of being insulted’’ (Navia, Classical 100). Simply,
Diogenes traveled westward to Athens to become an itinerant public pest.3 After
his arrival, he found a sympathizer in Antisthenes. Diogenes, with some prodding,
convinced the older man to be his mentor and friend before both conspired in
an abstemious and dubious lifestyle that became the groundwork of a Cynic
philosophy.

3
I do not use the language of nuisance haphazardly. Diogenes gleaned much from the Socratic tradition,
Socrates was labeled a gadfly, and the illustrious moniker given to Diogenes was: ‘‘Socrates gone mad.’’
 In Dubiis Libertas 7

Diogenes promptly parlayed his cynicism into a critical art of living. Diogenes
Laërtius’s testimony points to a lifelong practice of citizenship predicated on
Diogenes’s lowering of himself, not to encourage imitation or to attain martyr-
dom, but rather to perform a didactic function for other citizens—to remind them
that one is always a divided self. At his best,

ironically and sarcastically, [Diogenes] mimic[ked] the senseless activities of the

human world around him, ridiculing the stupidity of war and nationalism, and,
more generally, denouncing through his actions the mindless bustle that char-
acterizes much of human existence. (Navia, Sinope 23)

Mimicry and ridicule were undoubtedly part and parcel to what Diogenes mocked
as the swank of Greek philosophy, art, theater, commerce, and politics. Further-
more, Diogenes observed a decline of democracy and a rise of Greek kings and
warfare, not to mention increased restrictions on citizenship and public deference
to stately orators in the supposed interest of political stability (Ober, Mass 112).
Yet he displayed an unequivocal ‘‘arrogance before men in power’’ (Navia, Classi-
cal 175). An interaction between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, which took
place while Diogenes was seeking respite in his tub, is illustrative of his attitude.4

Alexander.—Diogenes.
Diogenes.— Who calleth?
Alex.— Alexander. How happened it that you would not come out of your tub
to my palace?
Diog.— Because it was as far from my tub to your palace, as from your palace to
my tub.
Alex.— Why then? Dost thou owe no reverence to kings?
Diog.—No.
Alex.— Why so?
Diog.— Because they be no gods.
Alex.— They be gods of the earth.
Diog.— Yea! gods of earth (i.e., made of earth).
Alex.— Plato is not of thy mind.
Diog.— I am glad of it.
Alex.—Why?
Diog.— Because I would have none of Diogenes’ mind, but Diogenes.
Alex.— If Alexander have anything that may pleasure Diogenes, let me know,
and take it.
Diog.— Then take not from me that (what) you cannot give me, the light of the
world (i.e., stand out of the sun).
Alex.— What dost thou want?
Diog.— Nothing that you have.
Alex.— I have the world at command.
Diog.— And I in contempt.

4
It is widely held that Diogenes, as part of his relinquishment of worldly possessions, lived in a tub.
8 Gilbert

Alex.— Thou shalt live no longer than I will.

Diog.— But I shall die whether you will or no.
Alex.— How should one learn to be content?
Diog.— Unlearn to covet (to be covetous).
Alex.— Hephæstion [a companion of Alexander in tow during this meeting],
were I not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes. (Payne, Studies 98)

This is an infamous interaction, commonly marked by Diogenes’s flippancy with

eminent Alexander the Great as well as the wit of his retorts. Diogenes’s remarks
are crude and forthright, and they illuminate his efforts to expose the fragility of
human nature and the precariousness of political life—both of which are strongest
when capable of withstanding their own negation. Far from engendering an idle
dismissal of Athenian society and its conventions, Diogenes’s Cynicism motivated
civic action, embodying completely the conviction that acting—even acting out—
in particular ways could make a real difference on how social life was shaped and
who shaped it (Cutler 30). He was unimpressed by the proselytizing discourse of
exalted philosophers or kings, believing instead that truth and virtue are found
in speech and action. He did not renounce social customs for the sake of it; he
performed their contradictions to expose the artifice of the dominant and more
authoritarian rule of the day.
After the Peloponnesian War, citizenship as an art of living was a political privi-
lege, open only to those few who were destined to govern, who had free time
(otium), or had the financial wherewithal (Foucault, Hermeneutics 126). During
the later Hellenistic age, monarchical states emerged and Greek citizens became
utterly subordinate to powerful rulers and political elites (Ober, Democracy 25).
Nonetheless, Diogenes troubled an Athenian citizenry that was supposedly becom-
ing more and more complacent in its own renown let alone its democratic prin-
ciples. Consider here our own apologies for consumerism and individualism,
which celebrate material wealth, leisure, and too much care for oneself, while writ-
ing off political impoverishment. Consider also the discrepancies between ancient
Cynicism and cynicism today, the former of which inspired direct engagement
with the ‘‘tension[s] between upper- and lower-class citizens,’’ between the ‘‘elite’’
and the ‘‘masses’’ (Ober, Mass 198).
Diogenes’s art of living brought people down to earth. It liberated citizenship as
an accessible political art. Diogenes refused to passively acquiesce to social, polit-
ical, or even geographic boundaries. Such boundaries, he assumed, promoted false
dichotomies and delimited greater or lesser persons and ideas. It is telling that
‘‘counterpublics’’ today are presented, not as ideals that seek to circumvent a
dominant culture, but as ‘‘heuristic[s] for the critical engagement of discursive
formations that continue to legitimate the oppressive practices of an exclusionary
public under the veil of participatory parity’’ (Loehwing and Motter 228).
Diogenes might have seen ‘‘counterpublics’’ as reifying the dominant with a fix-
ation on the oppositional prefix. Living out the very boundary between dissent
 In Dubiis Libertas 9

and assent was Diogenes’s art, founded on a rejection of dominant foundations

and an affirmation of social betterment.5 If dominant culture was a political argu-
ment, Cynicism was a denial of the premise. For this reason Plato degraded
Diogenes as a contemptible and shameless dog.
Plato’s remark is not merely metaphorical. Diogenes’s alias was ‘‘Diogenes the
dog,’’ and the word ‘‘cynic’’ (or kynic) comes from the Greek word kyon, meaning
‘‘dog.’’ According to Navia,

Cynics and dogs ate and urinated whenever and wherever they felt they
need[ed] to do so, bit and barked at those whom they did not like, lived and
slept in any indiscriminate place, gave the impression of being honest and sin-
cere about their feelings and predilections, and pledged allegiance to no nation
or political group. (Classical 17)

The meaning of Cynicism is also threefold, encompassing civic education, public

performance, and rhetorical piquancy. Following Louisa Shea, kynicism has its
fundament in (1) the Kynosarges, or the gymnasium in which Cynic rhetoric
was taught; (2) kyon, mentioned above, signifying ‘‘dog’’ but also ‘‘the invective
applied by scornful Athenians [and a term that Diogenes owned with pride as
an indication of his guardianship of humanity]’’; and (3) kyon, not simply the
Cynic dog tag but also the designation used to describe satirists—those who, like
satire, ‘‘bite’’ (7–8). There was, in other words, far more to Cynicism than behav-
ing like a dog—there was biting like one, too!
But Diogenes, though a stray dog and not, following Plutarch, a dog on a leash,
was as loyal to biting society as he was to the virtue in doing so. As he pronounced:
‘‘Other dogs bite their enemies; but I bite my friends, that I may save them’’
(Quackenbos 146). There is certainly good-natured viciousness in this statement.
However, while he ‘‘bit’’ at society, Diogenes saw in its entirety a collective of civic
friends. That Diogenes was considered one of the first cosmopolitans is therefore
significant. He was a celebrant of the natural humanity of all people and a denoun-
cer of those who

[relied] on customs and habits instead of thinking about their actions, [who
reduced] morality to set prescriptions to be obeyed instead of understanding
it as a result of a dynamic and self-critical investment in an examined and, as
such, ‘‘artistic’’ life. (Schreier 34)

Furthermore, Diogenes ‘‘rejected concepts of nationalism and citizenship,’’ not to

mitigate difference, but to envisage ‘‘every person [as] a member of a universal
human community’’ (Navia, Classical 101). Diogenes lived out the very

5
In some ways, then, Diogenes—and Banksy—might be what Erik Doxtader dubs a character of middle
spaces in ‘‘Characters in the Middle of Public Life.’’
10 Gilbert

appellation he bore, committing himself to the notion advanced more recently by

Foucault: that civic being is itself ‘‘a mode of life’’ (Fearless 118).
Of course, Cynicism was also tied to the production of truth. Diogenes’s lived
philosophy denied reductions of political being to discrete systems of rules, reason,
or procedures. The feebleness of politics, for Diogenes, was a reflection of the
tenuousness of trust. He therefore ‘‘practiced, as perhaps no other human beings
have, the art of truth-telling,’’ parrhesia, or ‘‘the freedom and commitment to
speak always and only the truth’’ (Navia, Classical 6). As Foucault notes, the
Cynics were the consummate parrhesiastes (Fearless 115–133), performing their
public activities beyond the confines of institutional dictates (101). But Cynical
politics was more than truth-telling. It was a complex of both visual and verbal
rhetorical practices that tested the meanings and applications of truths as they
were situated in their cultural context (i.e., the predominately oral and public cul-
ture of fourth century Athens). Truth is, in other words, a question of broader
social interfaces, not just of epistemological or apodictic certainty. For Diogenes,
distrust was almost a default critical stance whereby politics followed a principal
concern for the welfare of social life. It was through (non)discursive practices that
were at once ongoing (lived) and momentary (emergent in rhetorical tactics) that
he could exercise his Cynicism. Diogenes’s civic art, moreover, has its roots as
much in rhetoric as in a political praxis of showing and telling the truth.6

The Truth Is. . .

The problem of truth is not necessarily a problem of politics. The problem of peo-
ple’s relation to truth, on the other hand, is. As a modus vivendi, Cynicism
advanced a ‘‘certain way of considering things, of behaving in the world, under-
taking actions, and having relations with other people’’ (Foucault, Hermeneutics
10). Diogenes’s Cynicism demanded a critical stance toward truth. It was not that
he simply assumed lies or abhorred claims to knowledge, but rather sifted by
‘‘interception’’ through representations in order to facilitate their reactualization
(Foucualt, Hermeneutics 194). It would be foolish to think that rhetoric and par-
rhesia easily coincide. Yet if rhetoric deals in the ways in which people come to
believe (or not), it is telling that parrhesia signals ‘‘an exact coincidence between
belief and truth’’ (Foucault, Fearless 14). Rhetoric is, in this sense, a matter of
coordinating discourses to perceptions and actions. It is about the relations, as
much as the ethics and aesthetics, of thought and expression.7 Accordingly, there

6
I indicate both discursive and non-discursive throughout as (non)discursive because, as Kristen Kennedy
rightly indicates, it was ‘‘[i]n the pairing of their verbal and visual tactics [that] the Cynics [found] their
rhetorical efficacy’’ (‘‘Cynic’’ 32).
7
Here I draw on conceptions of decorum, whereby words and deeds are not only understood according to
social conventions but also to the possibilities of meanings in particular contexts. See Michael Leff,
‘‘Decorum and Rhetorical Interpretation’’ and ‘‘The Habitation of Rhetoric.’’
 In Dubiis Libertas 11

is much to be said for the notion that (Cynic, or cynical) rhetoric is a vehicle for
trust as a function of civic relations.
This does not pin the conveyance of truth to direct speech. Foucault notes three
categories of Cynic parrhesia: (1) critical preaching (or the diatribe), (2) scandal-
ous behavior, and (3) provocative dialogue.8 However, Diogenes was far from dry
in his delivery. His was an ‘‘exhibitionism derive[d] quite literally from the
required mental and bodily exercise,’’ aroused by reason but punctuated by ‘‘quick
and witty responses . . . [and] provocative displays’’ (Bosman 98, 99). As R. Bracht
Branham argues, ‘‘Cynicism originates . . . as the exercise of parrhesia’’ (355). Yet
Cynic rhetoric was a bios (way of life), whereby truth was resultant of practiced
persuasion (Branham 335, 337). It was also an exercise of particular rhetorical
techniques (irony, ridicule, philosophical jesting, religious parody, and so on)
along with physical enactment (begging in the marketplace, sleeping in a tub, defe-
cating in public, and the like). Furthermore, Cynic rhetoric encompassed epicrisis,
biting humor, and loutish performance (Bosman; Mack 54); hence its civic risks
(Foucault, Fearless 15–17). Parrhesia was thus not simply a form of truth-telling
or even civility, but ‘‘a form of criticism’’ (Foucault, Fearless 17). And it was mani-
fest as ‘‘collections of chreiai, anecdotes about and sayings by famous per-
sons . . . that purport to impart an ethical or philosophical teaching’’ (Shea 3).
In ancient Greece, chreiai had a distinctly educative function. Following George
A. Kennedy, a chreia is ‘‘a brief saying or action making a point, attributed to some
specified person or something corresponding to a person,’’ and which is ‘‘useful
for life’’ (15). It can be verbal or visual (or ‘‘actional’’), or a combination of the
two (Kennedy 16). Chreiai could also appear as gnomic sayings, logical demon-
strations, jests, syllogisms, enthymemes, examples, prayers, signs, tropes, or wishes
(Kennedy 17). Perhaps most importantly, they are reiterative not only as an
instructional tool (or, for that matter, only by a Cynic), but as preparation for
the deployment of rhetoric. Chreiai were also part of the progymnasmata, or
rhetorical exercises, which were linked to Cynic philosophy as well as rhetorical
education more broadly.
For Diogenes, chreiai were staples of rhetorical performance. Diogenes Laërtius
writes that ‘‘when Alexander had sent a letter to Athens to Antipater [general and
regent of the empire], by the hands of a man named Athlias, [Diogenes], being
present, said, ‘Athlias from Athlius,’ by means of Athlias to Athlius’’ (232–233).
As Diogenes Laërtius’s annotations indicate, Diogenes puns on the similarity
between the messenger’s name and the Greek word for ‘‘miserable,’’ suggesting
that perpetual war begets perpetual misery. In another instance, Diogenes

8
Note that Foucault, when discussing categories, perhaps too prematurely posits parrhesia as antithetical
to rhetoric. That the three Cynic practices are themselves rhetorics, I think, is self-evident. Moreover, both
parrhesia and rhetoric are essential to democratic practice. For an exemplary discussion on Foucault,
parrhesia, and rhetoric, see Carlos Lévy, ‘‘From Politics to Philosophy and Theology.’’
12 Gilbert

admonishes a man wasting money on decadent treats: ‘‘Not long, my son, will you
on earth remain,=if such is your dealings’’ (Laërtius 236). This, as the annotations
again indicate, is a parody on Homer, altering a line that ends ‘‘if such is your lan-
guage’’ and emphasizing the import of ethical conduct. To bear out such epi-
grams, Diogenes invoked a discourse of good living. For example,

[w]hen [Diogenes] saw an ignorant man tuning a psaltery, he said to him, ‘‘Are
you not ashamed to be arranging proper sounds on a wooden instrument, and
not arranging your soul to a proper life? [Similarly,] [w]hen a man said to him,
‘‘I am not calculated for philosophy,’’ he said, ‘‘Why then do you live, if you
have no desire to live properly?’’ (Laërtius 241)

Another incident has it that ‘‘Plato defined man thus: ‘Man is a two-footed, feath-
erless animal,’ and was much praised for the definition, so Diogenes plucked a
cock and brought it into his school, and said, ‘This is Plato’s man’ ’’ (Laërtius
241). These are compelling examples of Diogene’s performative ethos, which
was not simply about bitter rants but rather edification and action.
Cynicism, after all, was as much a lived philosophy as it was borne out of the
Socratic tradition and the teachings of the Sophists. Although he came to stand
against all philosophical schools of the time, Diogenes garnered valuable insights
from other philosophical and rhetorical practitioners. Just as Socrates survived on
a penchant for inquisition, and the Sophists employed rhetoric to capture oppor-
tune moments (kairos) and suggest that which could be possible (to prepon), so did
Diogenes use chreiai to enact various forms of cultural criticism.
Still, it is important to note that Cynicism was hardly unbefitting to Greek
culture writ large. Foucault draws attention to civic practices as illustrative of
attitudes toward truth. ‘‘[W]e must . . . recognize,’’ says Foucault,

that the Cynic attitude is . . . just an extremely radical version of the very Greek
conception of the relationship between one’s way of life and knowledge of the
truth. The Cynic idea that a person is nothing else but his relation to truth, and
that this relation to truth takes shape or is given form in his own life—that is
completely Greek. (Fearless 117)

True enough, Diogenes’s ‘‘parrhesiastic practice’’ critiqued ‘‘in a very public, vis-
ible, spectacular, provocative, and sometimes scandalous way’’ (Fearless 117).
His entire way of life, from his discourse to his demeanor, was rhetorically
inflected and subjectively open to evaluation and revision. So while the anecdotes
above animate a certain measure of admonition and education, they also reveal a
key Cynic belief: that truth is as mutable as the civic self.
Consequently, Diogenes’s parrhesia could be at once an ironic exercise and a
genuine search for truth—or, more particularly, for truths. Too much faith in
a truth-in-itself trusts too much. But no faith in any truth distrusts to a similar
detriment. Cynical rhetoric seems to have kept discourse and action honest
 In Dubiis Libertas 13

without putting it under oath. In Diogenes, we acquire a sense of parrhesia as ‘‘so

bound up with . . . choice, decision, and attitude’’ that it more closely reflects the
Latin term libertas, or ‘‘the freedom of the person speaking’’ (Foucault, Hermen-
eutics 372). We acquire a quintessence of critical, democratic free speech, not to
mention liberty, and we find an agent for understanding human intercourse with
truth. We also attain a contact point for questions of responsibility and account-
ability in political relations. It is important, though, to elaborate on the notion of
askesis, since it is so closely linked to parrhesia (and libertas).9
To do this is to acknowledge that citizenship for Diogenes was social before it
was political, was partial to humanity before a polity, and was a lifestyle before
it was a discreet, dissident affair. Askesis in the ancient tradition ‘‘denot[es] any
kind of practical training or exercise’’ (Foucault, Fearless 143). It is a ‘‘practice
of truth,’’ but it also ‘‘equips, it provides’’ (Foucault, Hermeneutics 317, 320). It
establishes paraskeue (equipment) for living ‘‘made up of logoi (discourses),’’
which leads to ‘‘matrices of action’’ (Foucault, Hermeneutics 322, 324). And it pri-
vileges the practice of elegkhein (refutation, accusation, reproach, or suspicion), or
‘‘testing the thing [or object],’’ which encompasses anything from self-diagnosis
to critical public appraisal (Foucault, Hermeneutics 297). Specifically, the test of
elegkhein is the act of analysis, investigation, and diagnosis, attended by the risky
business of propagating antidotes to the ills of public life.
Diogenes’s askesis, too, was more than the (im)pious asceticism we might know
today. He embodied ‘‘faith in experimental action’’ and a mode of truth-telling
that raised questions rather than offering ‘‘direct affirmation of the good or
bad’’ (Cutler 30). His cynicism favored constructive doubt and social dialogue.
It critiqued to know and to cure, performing a stethescopic function as an impetus
for ‘‘relational knowing’’ (Foucault, Hermeneutics 235). Even his chreiai, however
harsh, maintained a ‘‘sense of humor in order to ease the blow’’ (Mack 48).
Although they may have ‘‘appear[ed] at first enigmatic and irrational,’’ his chreiai
‘‘ultimately were carefully staged and well performed, because they proceeded, not
from the mind of a deranged man, but from the very lucid mind of someone who
had a specific message to convey’’ (Navia, Sinope 64). Diogenes’s rhetoric was both
charitable (albeit critical) and humane (albeit acerbic) in its pursuit of a more just
human order.
Nonetheless, his rhetoric was a ‘‘parrhesiastic game,’’ and a difficult one to boot.
As Foucault reminds us, the ‘‘political field’’ was always in dire ‘‘need for a par-
rhesiastes who could speak the truth about political institutions and decisions’’;
the challenge ‘‘was knowing how to recognize such a truth-teller’’ (Fearless 93).

9
For a compelling discussion on Foucault’s view on Cynics and their relation to truth, see Edward F.
McGushin’s chapter, ‘‘The Cynic and the True Life,’’ in Foucault’s Askesis. Interestingly, McGushin
discusses truth in relation to aletheia, which Robert Hariman defines as ‘‘truth,’’ but more literally as
‘‘unhiddenness’’—and importantly as a key site of contention in the production of knowledge. See Hariman,
‘‘Status, Marginality, and Rhetorical Theory.’’
14 Gilbert

A truth-teller was at least in part identifiable by his labors in chipping away at

hypocrisy and exposing contradictory speech and behaviors. This, too, had a label:
ponos, the namesake of the god of labor and hard work in Greek mythology. In his
godly form, Ponos was the son of Eris, the goddess of discord. In Homer’s The
Odyssey, ponos is the act of honoring the efforts of battle (also important in Hes-
iod) as well as those made to rejoin the community after combat (Sultan 40). In
his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero acknowledges the Greek’s alignment of labor and
pain in their conception of ponos. However, he distinguishes between the two and
focuses on labor as ‘‘a certain exercise of the mind or body, in some employment
or undertaking of serious trouble and importance’’ (43). The Cynic version
emphasizes pursuits of virtue and labors for truth as goods in themselves whereby,
in a decidedly Nietzschean sense, deeds matter as much as words, especially as they
enable the constitution of values. Civic training, then, served as preparation for
turning heuristics into practices, ideas into action. It was the accumulation of criti-
cal attitudes and discourses by which different truths might be fashioned for
understanding but never disunited from everyday life. Accordingly, we might
imagine Cynicism yielding a more artistic, even if laborious, democratic politics.
As anachronistic as it might seem, there was a particular civic virtue to classical
Cynicism. Ancient Cynic philosophy was, after all, ‘‘as much about embracing a
positive identity as . . . simply cocking a snoot at convention’’ (Cutler 22). So,

when the Cynic speaks in so harsh a fashion, and when he refers to people as
scoundrels and thieves, or when he spits on a certain man’s face, saying that
he could not find a more execrable place to do it, he is often giving an exhi-
bitionist performance: he aims at shocking and awakening his listeners. (Navia,
Classical 30)

This does not imply that such a mode of citizenship, if accepted whole cloth by an
entire polity, would engender a civil society (and it is quite easy to imagine the
ways in which such behavior could be ill-used). It does, however, illustrate how
important are rhetorics of distrust when coupled with humane action (and, per-
haps, a sense of humor). It even suggests that rhetoric itself is profoundly driven
by a deep sense of doubt that necessitates the possibility for multiple truths. The
value of civic trust is thus a test of the strength of human relations, with cynical
distrust serving the purpose of truth-testing. Herein, we might find the fundament
of democratic faith in civic disbelief.
In sum, Diogenes appropriated an artful distrust in hopes for humane speech
and action. His practices where (non)discursive inasmuch as they reclaimed public
spaces for political performance, embodied that which they admonished, and
exemplified a lifestyle as itself a civic ethic. Furthermore, Cynicism attended to
particular rhetorical performances in live(d) moments, positioning politics as sim-
ultaneously ongoing and momentary—as an art of ongoing momentariness—and
therefore capable of being recalled, recollected, and reiterated, much like chreiai.
 In Dubiis Libertas 15

Rhetorics of cynicism therefore need not be pessimistic or apologetic of political

inertia, but rather reframed and restylized as positively negative attitudes toward
artistic citizenship. I wonder, then, if we cannot position cynicism alongside a
revaluation of political critique wherein the health of our own bodies, our bodies
of ideas, and our ideas of other bodies are concomitant to the health of the body
politic.
I now turn to a cynical artist who highlights our collective shortcomings
to remind us of our virtues by engaging people, as did Diogenes, in the spaces
of public life. In the spirit of a late modern diogenic attitude, street artist Banksy
animates a cynical ethos of democratic praxis as that which emboldens participa-
tory citizenship, upholds a universal call to humanity, and propagates an art of
living as the crux of a politics of distrust.

Banksy, and the Writing on the Wall

It might be the primordial irony of democracy that contained in its very principles
of assent and underlying structures of political belief is the faculty for their undo-
ing. As mentioned above, politics is strongest when it can withstand its own
negation. There will never be a fully secure belief or an irretrievably true truth.
Cynicism, though, might ‘‘provide knowledge about the constructedness of nor-
mative systems, about knowledge-production’’ (Schreier 14). Diogenes was a criti-
cal but also comic figure (Bosman) whose lifestyle was predicated upon
self-improvement, social action, critical appraisals of public life, and citizenship
qua humanity. The question remains as to how we might reimagine cynicism as
at once positive and negative. Banksy, I argue, provides a clue.
Graffiti and guerilla artist, Banksy, is a powerful exemplar of contemporary
cynicism. Not only does he embody a cosmopolitan ethos, but he preserves the
potentiality of political spaces and the public production of truth. He approaches
civic action much like Diogenes—as an end in itself—and practices a
performance-centered civic existence that seeks to reconnect people to public
affairs, to politics, and thus to each other. Specifically, his agonistic spontaneity,
theatricality, and creation of (non)discursive spaces serve to redraw the map of
what constitutes political participation (not to mention satirical critique).10 The
irony is that Banksy’s dissident practices blatantly deface the institutions, conven-
tions, and principles of late modern democratic and global capitalist life. Yet his is
a parrhesiastic enactment of citizenship that balances critical negativity with

10
Many critics, such as Robert Hariman, Paul Achter, Geoffrey Baym, Amber Day, Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey
Jones, and others have been increasingly attentive to the role of satire in political discourse. Figures like Jon
Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and texts like The Onion—which tend to be the focal points of these studies—
certainly expose the falsity of contemporary politics and work to reveal truths (although the two endeavors
are certainly not mutually exclusive). But Banksy seems to offer a more radical instantiation of political satire
that is both more far-reaching and less embedded in (and supported by) the very institutions he critiques.
16 Gilbert

positive critique and recreates spheres of interaction with clever art and potent
chreiai. For those not familiar with Banksy, a brief discursion about his character
and works is in order. I will note, however, that while Banksy has published
numerous anecdotes that mirror classical chreiai—as captions to photographs in
his books, but also as poetic diatribes in public spaces—I pay particular attention
to his grander and, to be honest, more recognizable displays.
Banksy’s entire persona is, like Diogenes’s, somewhat mythical insofar as it is
shrouded in anonymity and secrecy. Since his start in Bristol in the early 1990s,
he has been defined only by his artwork (his identity is heretofore unknown),
which has been both hailed and rebuked for its audacious revelation of truths
about democracy, capitalism, human rights, racism, war (and peace), imperial
power, corporate ethics, and environmental degradation. What is more, Banksy’s
work appears in some of the most prominent public spaces around the world,
including the United Kingdom, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans,
Barcelona, Paris, and even the West Bank. He also has a strong, albeit strange,
‘‘commercial’’ presence, from print books (Banging Your Head Against a Brick
Wall, Existencilism, Cut It Out, Wall and Piece), a recent documentary film (Exit
Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for a 2011 Academy Award for best
documentary), an active website (on which he posts his latest works), auction
sales, celebrity customers, museum exhibits, plus a myriad of news articles,
exposés, blog posts, and so on.
One might read his critical practices as a fundamentally perverse allegory of
late modern American citizenship, which seems to be epitomized by exclusion
and evasion, and even a desire to elude attention, tarry social boundaries, accuse
without being blamed, or cause without necessarily being effected. Banksy, how-
ever, goes further, contributing to a constructive global discourse while doing
his work ‘‘locally’’ in particular public spaces. This contribution enables audiences
of his art to look upon fissures in discursive orders and, rather than gape them
wider, fill them with new orders of meaning. As such, his works are persuasive
vehicles for reimaginations of social and political change, and likewise a collection
of both verbal and visual chreiai. His innumerable graffiti artworks range from
images to installations to poetic verses to amalgamations of the three. Some of
the more popular and provocative are discussed below.
A particularly acclaimed stunt came in February 2011 during the lead-up to the
Oscars in Los Angeles. In town due to the aforementioned film nomination,
Banksy made short work of leaving his imprint. A simple allusion to Cynicism
appeared in one graffiti image of a dog urinating up a wall in Beverly Hills. Most
notable, however, was his defacement of a billboard on Sunset Boulevard, which
allegedly exposed the truth of what really goes on at the Oscars. In its original
form, the billboard depicted a woman modeled in a seductive trance, clad only
in a black bra and jeans. To her right read the tagline ‘‘Combining the right people
with the right environment’’—‘‘livin’ the dream.’’ After Banksy took to it, an
inebriated Mickey Mouse and a stoned Minnie accompanied the woman. Mickey
 In Dubiis Libertas 17

posed with his left arm wrapped around the model, his left hand grasping her
breast. In Mickey’s right hand was a martini. From his mouth protruded a devilish
tongue. Opposite the woman, Minnie stood stiffly with wide eyes and a dazed
smile, a cocaine straw in her right hand. Clearly, Banksy’s defacement was a crude
deconstruction of (Disneyesque?) decadence. It was also reminiscent of Diogenes
in its criticism of broader cultural problematics. A perverse reminder of the com-
mercial underpinnings of American life, the image mocks our inability ‘‘to
imagine the world—that is, ourselves—from the perspective of a future, liberated
condition’’ (Leslie 300). This reminder is all the more ironic considering The Light
Group’s express discontent with the city’s decision to tear it down. ‘‘We were flat-
tered Banksy tagged on our ad,’’ said its representatives. ‘‘[I]t was epic’’ (Pulver).
Perhaps more appropriately, it was eponymous.
Banksy marked the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina (and thus the federal
government’s bungled recovery efforts) in August 2008 with a series of graffiti
works in New Orleans, including: an image on the side of a dilapidated building
of a dejected black man seated in a rocking chair and holding a miniature
American flag underneath the words, ‘‘NO LOITERING’’; a representation of
American troops looting an abandoned warehouse, with one unloading a
television into the hands of another who stands beside a grocery cart filled with
consumer goods; an allegorical rendering of a young girl reaching her hand out
from under an umbrella to feel the dry air about her while pouring rain plunges
from inside; an image of a homeless Abraham Lincoln pushing a basket cart; and
an image of a lynched Ku Klux Klan member hooded and bedecked in a white
robe. Diogenes frequently censured those who exploited their power to determine
the (mis)fortunes of others. Banksy similarly calls attention to the hard luck of
victims, not simply of Hurricane Katrina, but of a society that might have rescued
them from despair. More than a commemoration of victims, the works are
condemnations of political victimizers.
In April 2008, Banksy assailed both the (pervasiveness of) urban surveillance
and the compliance (read complacency) of police. ‘‘[U]nder the cover of dark-
ness,’’ as well as ‘‘a sheet of polythene,’’ Banksy scrawled the following words in
bright white on the walls of a post office near Oxford Circus in London: ‘‘ONE
NATION UNDER CCTV [Closed Circuit Television]’’ (‘‘Graffiti’’). Below the
words was a young boy sporting a red hoodie and a backpack, holding a roll-on
painter. To the left of the boy: a canine cop—complete with an acquiescent dog—
capturing a photograph of the boy in the act. A cluster of security cameras pro-
truded from the wall to the right. The critique seems obvious, but it does well
to illuminate the blatancy of the mundane (as well as its incapacity to catch all)
in the illusion of liberty.
Banksy reimagined peace and conflict when he tagged the West Bank barrier in
August 2005. He painted a total of nine images, all of which portrayed idyllic visions
of unoccupied life. One displays a young (Palestinian?) girl in a pink dress patting
down an Israeli soldier. Another shows an immense dotted-line-and-scissors icon.
18 Gilbert

A handful reveal imaginary utopias: one, a pair of children holding pales and
digging in the dirt with shovels before a large hole that reveals a pristine oasis with
swinging palm trees, a tropical ocean beach, and a clear blue sky; another, two
cartoonish lounge chairs divided by a window beyond which is a forested sanctu-
ary surrounding a quiet lake backed by snow-covered mountains. Yet another
offers a silhouette of a young girl floating over the wall by the buoyancy of a bunch
of balloons. Another still presents a peace dove equipped with a bulletproof vest
and an olive branch in its mouth—covered by red crosshairs. All, it seems, dem-
onstrate a cruel alliance to the imbalance of reality and imagination, freedom and
occupation. All also seem to announce a sad truth embedded in one of Diogenes’s
jests: ‘‘An alliance is made after the war is over’’ (Laërtius 235).
Among these famous works are many others. One image exhibits a rioter set to
heave a bouquet of flowers instead of a Molotov cocktail. A crude depiction of
Condoleezza Rice as a maid shows her sweeping an indiscernible substance under
a cement wall. Another image displays a monkey draped by a sandwich board which
reads ‘‘laugh now but one day we’ll be in charge.’’ This is akin to a famed series of
rats in revolutionary garb, some holding signs that tersely declare, ‘‘You lie,’’ and all
dispersed throughout various cities. As Banksy remarks, ‘‘They [rats] exist without
permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation
amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations [sic] to
their knees’’ (95). An analogous image depicts a homeless man holding a sign that
declares, ‘‘Keep your coins, I WANT CHANGE.’’ One popular impression shows
two male police offers sharing a passionate kiss (which appeared on a wall of the
Prince Albert pub in Brighton in 2004, was transferred to canvas by an art resto-
ration company in 2008, and shipped to the United States to be sold in 2011).
And so on. Each to varying degrees reenacts Diogenes’s ancient admonitions about
the social detriment that follows a weak commitment to just politics.
Banksy has also earned a reputation for infiltrating public spaces with ersatz
statuary and faux fine art. In September 2006, he planted ‘‘a life-size replica of
a Guantanamo Bay detainee’’ within the grounds of the Big Thunder Mountain
Railroad ride at Disneyland in California (‘‘Artist’’). It stood, dressed in the
unmistakable orange jumpsuit and black hood, for ninety minutes before being
escorted out (‘‘Artist’’). ‘‘[T]he stunt was [ostensibly] intended to highlight the
plight of terror suspects at the controversial detention centre (sic) in Cuba’’
(‘‘Artist’’). But it takes little to imagine the figure as a scathing critique of the costs
required to preserve the American way of life, especially if one notes that the
installation appeared on September 11.
In October 2003, Banksy installed sham paintings and stuffed animals in elite
museums. For example, ‘‘he produced revisionist oil paintings (Mona Lisa with
a yellow smiley face, a pastoral landscape surrounded by crime-scene tape) and,
disguised in a trenchcoat and fake beard, installed them, respectively, in the
Louvre and the Tate’’ (Collins). Accompanying the painting in the Tate was the
caption: ‘‘This new acquisition is a beautiful example of the neo post-idiotic style.
 In Dubiis Libertas 19

Little is known about Banksy whose work is inspired by cannabis resin and
daytime television’’ (Morris). Later the same year, ‘‘[f]or the Natural History
Museum, it was Banksus militus vandalus, a taxidermy rat equipped with a
miniature can of spray paint’’ (Collins). The pomp of elitism, the travesty of social
privilege, the revelation of artifice—all are fused by this succession of ironic acts.
The more important point is that cultural productions of truth are exposed as
contact points for reconsiderations of civic relations.
Banksy’s labors continue as he risks everything from public unmasking to crimi-
nal prosecution in order to speak—or spray—the truth as he sees it. Indeed, for
many, Banksy is, like Diogenes, a persistent public pest. In June 2009, he reinvi-
gorated his home turf and infiltrated the Bristol museum with paintings, ‘‘anima-
tronics, installations and sensory display’’—and this to offer his ‘‘vision of the
future’’ (‘‘Banksy’’). In October 2010, he gained (or, was given) access to Twentieth
Century Fox with a feature opening sequence for ‘‘The Simpsons.’’ Unearthed and
encouraged by producer=writer Al Jean, Banksy created an extended ‘‘couch gag’’
‘‘that took viewers on a hellish tour of sweatshop labor in Asia. Workers [were]
shown toiling away on animation cells and merchandise tie-ins for the hit Fox ser-
ies’’ (Ng). Oh, and ‘‘[i]t just so happens that ‘The Simpsons’ outsources much of its
animation to South Korea’’ (Ng). When questioned on the cost of revealing such
truths, Jean avowed: ‘‘I think that we should always be able to say the holes in
our DVDs are poked by unhappy unicorns’’ (Itzkoff). Just as Diogenes exercised
a certain arrogance in the face of power, so does Banksy do so to offer a call to
humanity in the exposition of its absence.
Echoing James C. Scott, Roland Bleiker expounds an evocative sentiment. While
‘‘[t]here is a clear target’’ in clandestine dissent, there

is no visible author, no agitator that could be persecuted [or prosecuted]. The

audience is potentially limitless. . . . [S]uch a politics of hidden dissent, of dis-
guise and anonymity, is neither empty posturing nor a substitute for real resist-
ance. It is resistance of the most effective kind, for these subversive gestures
eventually insinuate themselves . . . into the public discourse. (203)11

Banksy has a long and well-traced history of insinuating his criticism into public
culture. His political acts now have global reach (not to mention consumer appeal),
and his anonymity provides him a cover to cleverly instigate with overtones what
often remains understated in civic life. Banksy’s art is a creative and charitable
embodiment of a diogenic attitude, challenging and correcting people’s relations

11
Scott’s notion of ‘‘hidden transcripts,’’ conceptualized in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden
Transcripts, harbors dissident discourses that counter ‘‘public discourse’’ but no less require a public for
their efficacy. It is invoked here to illuminate the constructive work of negation in Banksy’s work, but also
because it necessarily stands in for a direct assault on an individual or an institution. Moreover, it can move
in and out of various cultural spaces, rather than confine itself to one.
20 Gilbert

to truth. Graffiti can be painted over or washed away. Fixtures can be removed. But
parrhesia can be an ongoing tool ‘‘used to question and critique not only social
injustices and unethical practices but also the political authority of leaders’’
(Kennedy, ‘‘Cynic’’ 33). Ways of thinking and acting need to be no less momentary,
particularly if they enliven politics and serve that which is a primary function of
Banksy’s chreiai: to ‘‘prod the popular conscience’’ (Collins). No doubt this makes
the work of cynicism more difficult, but then again democracy itself is a compli-
cated practice of ongoing momentariness, ever fleeting and ever in need of renewal.
As rhetorical critics, a sort of intellectual ‘‘prodding’’ should be our primary
function. The intent, after all, is to strengthen the relationship between citizens
and our modes of political life—to broaden the available (or expose the unavail-
able) means of participation in truth production, and to challenge institutions of
power that (seek to) stifle them. A diogenic attitude can openly acknowledge the
fact that freedoms of interaction and inquiry may come from a politics of distrust.
It can also revive a reciprocal engagement with others in order to transform doubt,
if not into trust, at least into some measure of political confidence.

(Dis)trust in Cynicism
Banksy once quipped: ‘‘If you want to say something and have people listen then
you have to wear a mask. If you want to be honest then you have to live a lie.’’ On
its face, the seeming scorn for politics might be a reason to debunk Banksy’s
artwork as anything but truthful, to doubt that his graffiti is anything more than
vandalism. But as Banksy himself has numerous times expressed, street art is a
surface tool to convey deeper political attitudes.
Most accounts of cynicism are too narrow because they emphasize certain polit-
ical actors as practitioners of ‘‘counter-cynicism,’’ or a sort of insurgency against
the inveterate pessimisms of an entire culture (Hariman, ‘‘Defense’’ 275). Put sim-
ply, I do not think we need to move beyond cynicism. Nor do I think that cynicism
is in essence a bigger threat to democracy than, say, a specious media, an unreliable
government, or a corrupt political climate. If anything, we should continue calling
for the latter to change before the former. This is not to say, following Hariman,
that ‘‘we are [not] awash in cynicism’’ (‘‘Defense’’ 273). We are. But cleansing our-
selves of it will not necessarily wash us clean of dirty politics. Indeed, if politics is a
sullied public bath, Diogenes’s pun is apposite: ‘‘I wonder where the people, who
bathe here, clean themselves’’ (Laërtius 234). For my part, I wonder if cynicism
itself cannot be the route for ‘‘communication scholars [to better] understand their
subjects and [for] citizens to know who they are’’ (Hariman, ‘‘Defense’’ 276).12

12
Consider how well, after all, Hariman illustrates the constructive potential of a sort of truth-be-told
cynicism, and this despite the fact that it might beget more cynicism.
 In Dubiis Libertas 21

This essay has sought to revisit Diogenes’s Cynicism as a means for revising how
we might understand the positive potential of those cynical attitudes that animate
our late modern democracy. I hope to have shown how a diogenic attitude might
be incorporated into a cynical rhetoric that is at once critical and charitable,
embodied and (thus) human(e). While acknowledging both the debilitating forms
of democratic practice in which cynicism is presently situated, as well as the rela-
tively severe political tactics of Diogenes, I hope to have illustrated some of the
possibilities of a politics of distrust. Banksy, like Diogenes, typifies a cynical art
of living, and although ‘‘[f]ully convinced that the seamy aspects of life are inevi-
table,’’ he ‘‘do[es] not grieve that there is no possibility of change for the better’’
(Govier 238). More importantly, both exemplify the fact that the problem of dis-
trust is not new. For Diogenes, parrhesia was a political practice predicated upon a
conception of trust as a contact point for understanding cultural practices. Cynic
distrust was not a means for securing truth and excising the perceived falsity of the
present, but rather for testing the fitness of social life through rhetorical perfor-
mance and promoting durable, humane civic relations. That such a politics is
manifest in the art of Banksy is but one indication that conceptions of both truth
and trust are, following Danielle S. Allen, enduringly fundamental to how people
live together.
‘‘To understand trust,’’ says Allen, ‘‘one must begin with distrust’’ (143). For
Allen, trust production is a function of rhetoric, which works to counteract del-
eterious obstacles to civic practices. I have tried to expand this with a revived sense
of the relationship of trust to social organization, of which our political discourses
and actions are constituent elements. Allen argues that the end of trust production
is social stability. I argue, by way of Diogenes and Banksy, that cynical distrust
enables us to grasp a more complex understanding of what Allen calls ‘‘citizenly
relations,’’ or what I take to be a deeper sense of reciprocity. As Diogenes and
Banksy illustrate, ‘‘trust is not entirely a rhetorical accomplishment; deeds corre-
sponding to words matter’’ (Hauser and Grim 9). Of course, deeds themselves
can be rhetorical. Cynicism, as I have presented it, is therefore not a condition
to overcome, but an attitude through which different truths might be told in order
to develop commitments to the complexity of civic relations. A diogenic attitude
seems to embody such a commitment, balancing affirmation and rejection as a
means for developing doubt into a critical lifestyle. Specifically, Diogenes estab-
lished cynicism as a political attitude that, while it appears to throw a wrench in
the spokes of civic life for its own sake, actually calls for a better social world.
Banksy, too, promotes cynicism not as a committed dismissal of politics but as a
means for celebrating the liberatory potential of democracy. Cynicism is thus con-
structive for interrogating the tensions of social divisions and our relations to truth.
It is not a fault line of the political. What follows is a brief rumination on how cyni-
cism might contribute to both rhetorical criticism and a deeper politics of distrust.
First, a diogenic attitude understands human motivation together with political
decisions (and thus embedded in both collective rationalities and affectivities).
22 Gilbert

It likewise realizes a politics that not only gestures toward sociality, or the tend-
ency to form power blocs, but is at its base social, or attendant first and foremost
to modes of human organization and relation. Politics might thereby come to
encompass a more complex understanding of human interactivity, of moments
in which tendencies to both commune and divide are manifest in social relations,
of organizations of social groups around particular knowledge claims within spe-
cific historical contexts, and consequently of human welfare. Moreover, it is
impossible for a society to be depoliticized however anti-political (in today’s par-
lance, cynical) it becomes. Conceptions of citizenship guided solely by theories of
deliberation, political activism, or even counter-publicity perpetuate a reductive
view of what counts as politics, and tend to contribute to us–them dichotomies,
rituals of in-and-out membership, and pendulous games of ‘‘when we do it it’s
right, when they do it it’s wrong.’’ They also undermine the sociality—and thus
complexity—of democratic politics, making painfully obvious the lament that
(strong) democracy is, in Robert L. Ivie’s words, ‘‘the unrealized ideal of our time’’
(Dissent 157). Critiques of political life qua sociality might therefore root politics
back in community, but also in a deeper sense of responsibility over political
choices. These critiques might also require that we revive a willingness to speak
humanely to, with, about, and against one another, even if they ridicule.
Second, a cynical rhetoric attempts to meet people in their daily lives, to
move the political beyond television screens, voting booths, opinion polls,
and picket lines. A diogenic attitude can enable people to be both constructive
and destructive, adversarial without being hostile enemies, different without
being indifferent, and aggressive without being violent. As C. Jan Swearingen
argues convincingly, truth, and the value thereof, resides within an appreci-
ation of multiple ways of knowing (Irony 251). Banksy’s cynicism might there-
fore be a better mode than, for instance, conventional forms of satire for
revealing what Hariman rightfully dubs ‘‘the second truth’’: the capacity ‘‘to
know ourselves as we are most human, speaking and scheming, always fallibly’’
(‘‘Parody’’ 265). More importantly, it recognizes that if democracy is to
continue as a humanizing mode of social governance, any conclusive truth
constantly awaits its correction.
Perhaps the media will suddenly become responsible (again?), politics will
become amenable, political operatives will civilly contest truths rather than spread
smear, campaigns will encompass veritable platforms instead of sham propa-
ganda—but I doubt it. Still, cynicism as a critical lifestyle can work to preserve
democracy as a social activity of human existence and alternative to outright pre-
sumptions of political failure. To say that this is the sine qua non of rhetoric would
be an understatement. We might then heed the fact that a diogenic attitude, while
distrustful, maintains the capacity to balance affirmation and denial as a means for
upholding a critical art of living, even while it attempts to take sides. We might
heed cynicism itself as an antidote to anti-politics. And if this is a way to a more
just political order, to tell the truth, I side with the cynics.
 In Dubiis Libertas 23

Acknowledgments
The author thanks Robert L. Ivie for his criticism and guidance in early drafts of
this essay. He also thanks James Jasinski and the two anonymous reviewers for
their encouragement and advice.

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