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Title: Decadence Author: Major Bellows Date: c. 1991 Language: en Topics: Black Eye, decadence, progress, history, art Source: Retrieved on 16 September 2018 from https://archive.org/details/BlackEye_201708 Notes: from Black Eye #11, republished by Ardent Press 2015
There is no decadence from the point of view of humanity. Decadence is a
word that ought to be definitively banished from history.
Ernest Renan
The word decadence has been thrown about so much it has become a
banality. Authorities or would-be authorities of all kinds (religious or
political ideologues, the media) lecture to us about the decline of
western civilization. On close examination the meaning of this term,
whether used as an epithet or as a badge of honor, turns out to be
elusive. In a general sense decadence seems to be connected to fatalism,
anomie, malaise, and nostalgia. It describes a falling away of standards
of excellence and mastery associated with a bygone age of positive
achievement; heroism yielding to pettiness; good taste yielding to
vulgarity; discipline yielding to depletion, corruption, and sensuality.
Decadence has connotations of (over-) indulgence in carnal appetites,
derangement of the senses, and violation of taboos. It is supposed to be
a frivolous pursuit of exotic and marginal pleasures, novelties to serve
jaded palates. Decadence makes you think of sin and over-ripeness.
Physics recognizes a law of decay and decline with universal application
to all natural processes. It is called the second law of thermodynamics,
or entropy. According to this law, there is a natural and increasing
tendency in the universe toward disorder and the dissipation of energy.
Efforts to arrest the process of decay and create order are only
temporary in effect and expend even more energy. Through this inexorable
process of entropy, astronomers tell us, the sun will eventually burn
out, and the entire universe may well collapse back upon itself in a
"Big Crunch" that will be the opposite of the theorized "Big Bang" with
which it supposedly began. There's nothing anyone can do about this
cosmic" decadence, but the time frame involved is so immense that
there's no point worrying about it, either. Besides, it's just a theory.
For the purposes of this essay, I will restrict myself to a
consideration of the earthbound and largely historical dimensions of
decadence.
In a grand historical sense, the concept of decadence has been used to
describe epochs of civilization in biological metaphor, as beings that
are born, come to maturity, then sink into senescence and die because
they have been condemned "by History" (or God). In this sense decadence
is connected to a moralistic as well as a fatalistic vision. The word
implies judgment of human experience on a scale of values and measures
it against a "correct" or "healthy" standard. Decadence first appeared
as an English word during the Renaissance (according to Webster's, in
the year 1549) but its use remained sporadic until the nineteenth
century. It can therefore be thought of as primarily a modern concept,
and as such it is inescapably linked to the notion of Progress, as its
opposite and antagonistic complement.
What lies on either side of Decadence, before or after it, is the myth
of a golden age of heroism and (near) perfection. The ancient
civilizations tended to place the golden age of their mythologies in the
past. Judaism and by extension Christianity and Islam also have a golden
age, the Garden of Eden, located in the past. But it is with the
monotheistic religions that the dream of cosmic completion was first
transferred to the future, in an eschatological and teleological,
semi-historical sense. Christian theology underwent a long decay through
Renaissance humanism, the Reformation (in particular its unofficial,
suppressed antinomian and millenarian currents), and the rationalist,
materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment. The French and American
revolutions partially destroyed the Christian time line and opened up
the horizon of a man-made history. The violent irruption of the
bourgeois class into terrestrial political power replaced the
inscrutable cosmic narrative written by God shrouded in grandiose myth
with a historical narrative authored by abstract Man and wallowing in
the Reason of political ideologies. The dogma of determinism survived,
however. Apocalypse, Heaven, and Hell were shunted aside by capitalism,
which offered instead its absurd dialectic of revolution and reaction,
progress and decadence. As the nineteenth century unfolded, liberalism,
Marxism, and leftism continued the practice of identifying progress with
industrial development and the expansion of democracy.
All of the great epochs of civilization (slavery, oriental despotism,
feudalism, and capitalism) are considered by Marxist and non-Marxist
historians alike to have experienced stages of ascendancy, maturity, and
decline. The Roman Empire is one of the chief paradigms of decadence,
thanks largely to the eighteenth-century English historian Gibbon and
the French philosophe Montesquieu, the most well known chroniclers of
its decline and fall. The reasons for the end of the ancient world are
not so obvious, in spite of a familiar litany of symptoms, most of which
are linked to economic causes: ruinous taxes, over expansionism,
reliance on mercenary armies, the growth of an enormous, idle urban
proletariat, the slave revolts, the loss of the rulers' will and purpose
in the face of rapid change, and the most obvious and immediate
reason-military collapse in the face of the 'barbarian" invasions. These
facts don't explain everything. Can it be said that Christianity's rise
to power amid the proliferation of cults was an integral part of the
decay, or was it rather part of a revolution that transcended decadence?
It is not at all clear that the Roman Empire ended according to an iron
law of historical determinism. If that were the case, it is not likely
that decadence could be imputed to "moral decay." The actual collapse of
the Western Empire came centuries after the reign of the most depraved
emperors, such as Nero and Caligula. And should it be said that the
Empire was decadent, while the Republic was not? Both were supported by
the slave-labor mode of production, and both were systems of extreme
brutality and constant warfare. The notion of progress and decadence,
retrospectively applied to this case, implies that the civilization
based on slavery was not only tolerable and acceptable but indeed
healthy, in the bloom of its historical youth, and only later became
poisoned and morbid.
The same observation applies, of course, to the other ancient
civilization of the West—Greece, which was superior to Rome in so many
ways because of its democracy and its fine achievements in art,
literature, science, and philosophy. The Athens of Pericles is usually
considered to have been the high point of that civilization, in contrast
to the "decadence" of the Alexandrian or Hellenistic age. But there
would have been no Greek art or Athenian democracy without Greek
slavery. There is the great tragedy; the beautiful things of
civilization have always been built on a foundation of bloodshed, mass
suffering, and domination. The other great classic of decadence in the
grand historical sense is the ancien regime in France. This example
serves as the core vision, dear to the modern Left, of a tiny handful of
identifiable villains: the corrupt, obscenely privileged, and sybaritic
aristocrats, oblivious to the expiration of their heavenly mandate,
partying away on the backs of the impoverished and suffering masses, but
who get their just desserts in the end. This was of course a partial
truth, but it was built into a myth that has fueled similar myths well
into our own time, the classic modern example being that of the Russian
Revolution. The great revolution that chases out decadence has been
multiplied more than a dozen times since. But this dream that has been
played out so many times is still a bourgeois dream, though draped in
the reddest "proletarian" ideology. It is the dream of the Democratic
Republic, which replaces one ruling class with another, and it has
always turned into a nightmare.
Against the decadence of the old world of the feudal
clerico-aristocracy, the Jacobins proclaimed the Republic of Virtue. The
mode of cultural representation with which the revolutionary bourgeoisie
chose to appear at this time—as a reincarnation of the Roman
Republic—deliberately broke with Christian iconography. But it set a
precedent for conservative, and eventually fascist, cultural
ideology—the identification of social health with the classical, the
monumental, and the realistic. The Jacobin regime of emergency and
impossibly heroic ideals quickly fell, and the entire political
revolutionary project of the bourgeoisie in France was rolled back (more
than once) by a resilient aristocracy. But the reign of Capital was
assured, for its real power lay in the unfolding, irresistible
juggernaut of the economy. This juggernaut was already much further
under way in England, while in Germany the bourgeoisie advanced only
under the banner of philosophy and the arts.
The triumph of ascendant capitalism in the nineteenth century brought
forth an unending cultural and human crisis as the bourgeoisie and its
allies in the patriot aristocracy, even while continuing their struggle
with feudal monarchy, fought also to contain the Utopian liberatory
impulses unleashed by their own initial revolutionary impossibilism. The
vaunted progress of the bourgeoisie—technological conquest of nature,
industrial pollution, dull-minded positivist rationalism, and philistine
demand for the proof of usefulness—had resulted not in a best of all
possible worlds, but rather in a massive degradation of human
experience. In addition to the proletarians enslaved in the factories,
there were rebellious souls from more privileged social strata (the
bourgeoisie itself, very often the aristocracy, and the middle classes)
who revolted against the new conditions of alienation, in which
Modernity and Progress were leading to disintegration of the self and
nausea at the corrosion of spiritual values. These people looked to the
demimonde of La Boheme ("the realm of the Gypsies") as an escape from
and protest against bourgeois life. Art no longer in service, as it had
been for centuries, to autocratic and ecclesiastical patronage, became
"for itself." France, and more particularly Paris, became the great
laboratory of social and cultural experiment outside the margins of
respectability began the march of artistic "isms" seeking to negate the
commercial reality of the bourgeois reign and always succumbing to
recuperation by that commercial reality.
The term La Decadence refers specifically to a period of European
cultural history covering roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth
century and sometimes the beginning of the twentieth century as well.
This period, also commonly known as the fin de siecle or the belle
epoque, encompassed such movements as Symbolism, Art Nouveau
(Jugendstil), Post-Impressionism, and the Parnassian poets, as well as
those referring to themselves as Aesthetes or Decadents. The phenomenon
of Decadence is best understood as the continuation and denouement of an
earlier movement—Romanticism. Decadence and Romanticism are of a piece.
The Romantic movement began definitively late in the eighteenth century
as a largely aristocratic revolt against the soulless, destructive
engine of Capital's Industrial Revolution. The countries principally
affected by these developments were England, France, and parts of the
German-speaking world. (The second wave of the Industrial Revolution
occurred later in the nineteenth century and involved Germany, Northern
Italy, Japan, European Russia, and the United States.) Although
Romanticism, and later Decadence, resonated throughout Europe and the
United States, their main centers of activity were always Paris and
London. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century there was a
lively exchange of influence between French and English poets, writers,
and painters. In this essay I am concerned mostly though not exclusively
with developments in France.
The word romantic is often contrasted with the word classical. The
distinction between the two, originally drawn by Goethe and Schiller,
consists basically in this: Classical is associated with naturalness,
intellect, balance, universality, and rationalism; romantic with the
revolt of worldly ideas, passions, and spontaneity against conservative,
ascetic, or chastened ("uptight") ideals. This is strikingly similar to
the distinction Nietzsche was later to make between the Dionysian and
the Apollonian sensibilities. The reference in that case was to the
Dionysiac movement of sixth century BC Greece, which saw itself as a
revolt of mystical, chthonic nature against the solar divinities of the
Dorians. Dionysus was the god of wine and revelry, Apollo the god of the
sun and the leader of the muses. From this example it can be seen that
Romanticism has precursors going back to antiquity. (Another example of
ancient revelry with contemporary survivals was the Roman holiday of
Lupercalia, a time of riotous feasting, fornication, and fun. The
Catholic Church found itself obliged to co-opt many of the pagan
holidays because it could not suppress them. This was the case with
Lupercalia, which persists to this day in such forms as the Mardi Gras
of New Orleans and the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro.) Although there may
be an antagonism between the classical and the romantic, classicism can
be a moment of romanticism (i.e., in the attempt at reviving pagan
antiquity or any vanished civilization). Nietzsche saw both the
Apollonian and the Dionysiac worldviews as essential elements of human
nature.
"Romantic" first appeared in English around the middle of the
seventeenth century and originally meant "like the old romances." It
looked back with nostalgia to the chivalrous and pastoral world of the
Middle Ages, when the Romance languages were becoming differentiated
from Latin, or, going back still further, to the epic tales of ancient
Greek heroes. The sensibility connoted by the word as used at that time
stood in contrast with the growing rationalism of the Enlightenment,
which, as the brother of commerce, was obsessed with the mundane and the
quantitative. Many of the major themes that were to preoccupy the
Romantics–the fantastic, the macabre, the wild and mysterious, the
satanic and infernal–were also prefigured in the works of Dante,
Shakespeare, and Milton. As a flight of the imagination, Romanticism
found expression in all the arts, but was perfectly suited to the medium
of literature. It is significant that the English word "novel" has as
its equivalent in both French and German the word roman. "Romantic" has
affinities with other words such as "romanesque," "gothic," "baroque"
(all used to describe successive styles of architecture since the fall
of the western Roman Empire and meaning by turns, fabulous, chimerical,
grotesque, and flamboyant); and pittoresque (picturesque).
That last word, French but Italian in origin (pittoresco), described not
only a scene, a landscape in particular, but also the emotions it
induced in the observer. It was the feeling sought by young English
gentlemen of the eighteenth century who were sent by their families on
the "Grand Tour" of Italy to round out their education. (This practice
preceded but may very well have launched the era of mass tourism.) Here
they would admire classical ruins, Renaissance art treasures, and the
wild beauty of the Alps, and perhaps hope to meet an intriguing princess
or countess. Italy was also attractive to German intellectuals and
artists. Goethe, Mendelssohn, and Nietzsche are among those who either
traveled or lived there.
The most influential and archetypal figures of Romanticism were George
Gordon, Lord Byron and D.A.F. de Sade (the "divine Marquis"). These men
pursued with uncommon vigor the beauty of the perverse and explored the
mysterious bond between pleasure and pain. They were the most visible
incarnations of aristocratic monstrosity and excess. The figures of
vampire, Satan, demon lover, sadist, evil genius, and noble bandit they
represented became much-imitated sources of inspiration to later
generations of writers, among whom were Baudelaire, Huysmans, Swinburne,
D'Annunzio, and many others.
There are some distinctions between High Romanticism and Decadent
Aestheticism, in spite of their essential affinity. In Romanticism, Man
is strong and cruel (e.g., the Byronic, Promethean, or Faustian hero)
while Woman is weak and victimized; in Decadence the roles of the sexes
are reversed. Romanticism is concerned with action and furious passion;
Decadence is passive and contemplative. Romanticism often championed
revolutionary social ideals, represented most notably by the English
Romantics' initial identification with the Great French Revolution, and
also by support for national liberation or unification movements in
Italy, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Latin American republics–Wagner
and Baudelaire both turned up on the barricades in 1848-49. These kind
of commitments had largely faded by the time of the Decadence, which
occurred in an unusually extended epoch of relative social peace and
which tended for the most part to disdain politics in favor of l'art
pour l'art. Baudelaire himself disavowed political involvement in favor
of dandyism. Those artists of the later nineteenth century most
concerned with social critique were of the realist and naturalist
schools and identified with socialism, such as Courbet and Zola. This
situation began to change, however, in the 1890s, as I will discuss
later.
The Decadent aesthetic can be summarized as follows: the quest for the
rare, sublime, and ultrarefined; the rejection of natural beauty;
antifeminism; and the celebration of "perversion" and artificiality.
A salient feature of the fin de siecle was the advent of a great
religious crisis that had been building up steadily since the
Revolution. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been losing ground for
a long time (since Copernicus), saw its authority decay more rapidly
than ever before the advances of nineteenth-century positivist science.
The spiritual vacuum produced by this led to what could be called the
first stirrings of the "New Age": the resurrection of heterodox
spiritual practices from previous epochs; such as Satanism, occultism,
and Rosicrucianism. fascination with vampires, werewolves, etc.; and a
burgeoning interest in Eastern doctrines, such as Mme Blavatsky's
Theosophical Society, which was imported into France by way of Britain
and the United States. Many French and English (or Irish) writers and
poets adhered to Roman Catholicism as a purely aesthetic ritual emptied
of faith. Needless to say, they were scorned by the Church.
The spirit of gloom and decline among the Decadents was fed by the
writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of passive nihilism par
excellence who became more popular in France than he had ever been in
his native Germany. Schopenhauer's central concept was that life is
pointless suffering and that the only pleasures are cerebral, fleeting,
and negative. His advice to humanity was to drop dead, literally. In a
strong echo of Buddhist or Hindu doctrine, he said that it is best to
renounce sexual and all other desire: the Ideal is the nirvana of
nonexistence. The Decadents followed this prescription for stone-cold
reverie and agreed with his profound misogyny as well.
The wish for annihilation found expression in a great lament over the
decline of Latin civilization. The Decadents sought to reconstruct
poetically the vanished worlds of ancient Rome, Byzantium, and the
Hellenized Orient. They had a keen sense that Paris and London were the
new Byzantium or Babylon. In France especially the feeling of decline
was acute because of the humiliation of defeat at the hands of Prussia
in 1871, coupled with the knowledge of lagging behind England in
economic power and development.
The use of drugs, which previously had been the exotic vice of a few
(e.g., De Quincey's and Coleridge's indulgence in laudanum) became
widespread at the end of the nineteenth century. Absinthe, also known as
the "green fairy;' was one of the most popular, and for a long time
legal, alcoholic drugs. Morphine had been used extensively for the first
time as a surgical anesthesia by both sides during the Franco- Prussian
War, and the French conquest of Indo-china in the 1870s and '80s brought
in a large quantity of opium. Many literary productions of this time
were concerned with descriptions of drugged, hallucinatory states of
consciousness, though none measured up to De Quincey's Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater (1822).
The Romantics and Decadents emphasized eroticism as the driving force of
culture. The expression of Desire as power, deceit, cruelty, and
unlimited egotism and love of crime was first explored in excruciating
detail by Sade and by his contemporary, Choderlos Laclos. There had been
eroticism in literature since Chaucer and Boccaccio in the fourteenth
century, but it wasn't until the late eighteenth century that there was
a lot of sexual imagery in western culture. From then on, the assertion
of the animal nature, in all its 'polymorphous perversity' of humans
appeared with increasing occurrence to blaspheme Christian dogma,
tweaking the noses of the Catholic Church in France and the Protestant
churches in England (though the great majority of the bohemian rebels in
question, including the English ones, were Catholic, either by
upbringing or by conversion). The themes of narcissism, male
homosexuality, lesbianism, sadomasochism, incest, and hermaphroditism or
androgyny that appear frequently in the literature of Romanticism
sometimes provoked wrath and repression from the authorities. The
Marquis de Sade spent the greater part of his adult life in prison,
having been sentenced repeatedly by both ancien regime and Revolutionary
courts, not so much for his deeds as for his unacceptable imagination;
Oscar Wilde was broken by the scandal, trial, and prison sentence that
resulted from his love affair with another man.
The late nineteenth century was a time of expanding knowledge about
human sexuality (part of a process, going on since the Renaissance, of
recovering the eroticism that had been so freely accepted in the ancient
world), and the art and literature of the time seemed to have an
understanding of the unconscious basis of the sexual drive. In the 1880s
Sigmund Freud was a student in Paris, studying under the neurologist
Charcot, who conducted research on a condition that was then known as
hysteria. Other pioneering efforts at a more or less scientific
understanding of the psychology of sex included Richard von
Krafft-Ebing's inventories of perversions, Havelock Ellis's
classifications, and the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In light
of contemporary views, some of these efforts may seem to have been
fruitful (or at least interesting); others may be seen as faulty or
inadequate due to Victorian, bourgeois, and patriarchal biases. At the
time they served chiefly to debunk romantic love.
The Decadents took a dim view of love between men and women. Much of the
time they made Woman the target of their spleen (nearly all the artists
were male). Women were held in contempt as creatures enslaved to nature
and instinct and incapable of reason. This trend was part of an overall
fascination with and fear of nature as a dark, fecund, and devouring
force. One of the most familiar motifs of the Decadence was that of the
femme fatale, sphinx, and "Belle Dame sans Merci" (Keats), who
victimized men, tearing them to pieces or otherwise luring them to
madness, ruin, and death. Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba, Carmen, Helen
of Troy, and many versions of the Judith/Salome theme were familiar
characters in the art and literature of the fin de siecle. The
connection between pleasure and pain was extended into a bond between
love and death. This eventually reached the point of becoming a mirrored
inversion of Christianity's war against the body and its equation of
sexual pleasure with sin and damnation. Pissing on the altar was another
form of worship, and indeed, some rebels and apostates became prodigal
sons and returned to the bosom of the Mother Church or some other "true
faith" (as was to be the case among the Surrealists as well).
The cult of artificial beauty led the Decadents to prefer plants made of
jewels to real vegetation and to admire the icy beauty of crystals,
metals, and precious stones. The more rare, refined, or fragile
something was, the better, in their estimation. The taste for baroque
ornamentation and metamorphosis inspired the Art Nouveau movement, which
included such works as the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, the posters of
Alphonse Mucha, and the fantastic architecture of the Spanish
(Catalonian) visionary Antonio Gaudi. Art Nouveau cultivated a craft
sensibility, often employing floral designs, that opposed modern machine
mass production. In a similar vein, the Arts and Crafts movement led by
the English artist and Utopian socialist William Morris sought to revive
medieval guild craftsmanship in the arts in a time that saw the advent
of automobiles, cinema, mass advertising, and machine guns.
The Romantics and Decadents loved the fabulous and the fantastic and
considered the dream superior to reality in all respects. Their quest
for artificial paradises included a resurgence of interest in the
traditional mythologies of many cultures: Greco-Roman, Nordic, Egyptian,
Jewish, and Hindu. Arthurian legends-Avalon, Merlin, Guinevere, and the
Holy Grail-were great favorites, as were Shakespeare's fairy-tale
comedies. Richard Wagner, whose operas drew upon German, Nordic, and
Celtic legends for their source material, was the object of a cult of
admiration in the nineteenth century. To many, it seemed, the only fit
remedy for an unpleasant contemporary reality was escape into a medieval
fable world of dragons, unicorns, troubadours, noble ladies, and
chivalrous, heroic knights.
Besides the Anglo-French Byzantium of decadent democracy, the "civilized
world" at the end of the nineteenth century included five great
autocratic empires that were all in a much more serious stage of
decline: the Romanov dynasty in Russia, the Hohenzollern-Junker dynasty
of Prussia, the Hapsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman
Turkish empire, and the Qing dynasty of China. All of them contributed
certain features of La Decadence as it was produced and experienced in
western Europe. Berlin and Moscow were, as cultural centers, completely
in the shadow of Paris until the twentieth century. Vienna, though also
subordinate to Paris, was the cosmopolitan capital of a great
multinational Catholic empire and a hot spot of bohemian activity in its
own right at the turn of the last century. (Its political ferment also
served at that time as the incubator of both Nazism and Zionism.) The
Ottoman Empire provided an important source of Romantic and Decadent
imagery, particularly as England and France were in the process of
dismembering it piecemeal and making colonies out of the Arab portions
of it. The occidental fascination with, fear of, and desire for control
over the Orient (Arab and Turkic lands, Persia, India, and China) had
been of long standing going back earlier than the Crusades and
continuing through the Eastern contacts made by traveling adventurers
and merchants from Portugal, Spain, England, France, Holland, and the
Northern Italian republics. This fascination became magnified in the
nineteenth century as the Napoleonic wars extended British and French
imperial rivalry toward the East. The wild and colorful Arabs made a
significant appearance in European art at this time (e.g., in the
paintings of Eugene Delacroix in the 1830s, after France had taken
possession of the Algerian coast). In the nineteenth century there were
also numerous paintings and literary descriptions of harem scenes and
the opulent court life of the sultans, beys, and pashas. These images
were steeped in the mystique of "Orientalism," a colonial vision, either
overtly or subtly racist, of the East as a region cruel, lustful, and
exotic; alluring for its real or potential riches; and populated by
inferior peoples practicing weird religions and customs, who may once
have had great civilizations of their own (which had helped make this
one possible) but who were now in need of the paternal, Christian
capitalist guiding hand of the "white man's burden" or la mission
civilisatrice.
The era of the Decadence or late Romanticism ended approximately around
1900. In the 1890s, reaction to Decadence began to set in. Apparently
the unrelenting pessimism, nostalgia for extinct civilizations, and
indulgence in pure fantasy became wearisome. In their place appeared a
tendency toward pantheism and a rehabilitation of nature and women. In
the work of artists such as Eric Gill, Felix Valloton, and Pierre
Bonnard the female body and sensuality were celebrated. The end of the
last century also produced movements of incipient modernism (e.g.,
Symbolism into Expressionism, Post-Impressionism into Cubism). Paul
Gauguin was one of many artists not specifically connected to
Decadentism who became interested in the culture of the Breton people,
an "Other" society in modern France, which, by retaining its traditional
language and culture and refusing to assimilate, seemed closer to nature
and therefore to authentic experience. Gauguin was to seek his paradise
as far away from civilization as possible (or so he thought), in Tahiti.
The 1890s saw a significant increase in political activity on all sides.
The Dreyfus Affair was a principal catalyst for the awakening from
anomie and revery and a renewed confrontation with history. Suddenly
France was more politicized than it had been since the days of the
Commune of 1871. The Left (which by this time meant nascent Social
Democracy; Jacobinism and Blanquism were obsolete) championed the causes
of parliamentary socialism, trade unionism, anticlericalism, and civil
rights for Jews, a widely despised minority in France. Its leading
literary figure was Emile Zola, who supported Captain Dreyfus. The Right
wing of the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, was becoming fiercely
nationalistic and wanted restoration of French gloire, which entailed a
strong desire for revenge on Germany for the stinging military defeat of
1870-7 1. From the perspective of the French Right, the Third Republic
and the Catholic Church were both weak and contemptible; only a strong
leader in the tradition of Caesar or Napoleon (i.e., a "republican
monarch'') could restore order and greatness.
The revolutionary current, now dominated by anarchism, reemerged from
underground to avenge the bloody destruction of the Commune. Terrorist
acts were numerous in France as they were around the capitalist world.
The most spectacular of these deeds were a bombing in the Chamber of
Deputies in 1893 and the assassination of Carnot, president of the
republic, in 1894. Sympathy for anarchism was widespread in the Parisian
bohemia. Louise Michel, great heroine of the Commune, was friendly
toward the Decadents and Symbolists. But the commitment to anarchy on
the part of the bohemians was, in most cases, in the nature of a
fashion, and (sensibly enough) it did not extend to a willingness to
commit acts of violence that would entail almost certain martyrdom when
the state retaliated with stern repressive measures, which included
executions of attentat militants.
A further indication of the collapse of the Decadent scene was the fall
of Schopenhauer's philosophical pessimism from favor. It was replaced by
theories that stressed life, energy, action, and individualism. The
newly favored thinkers included Henri Bergson (vitalism), William James
(pragmatism), the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Friedrich
Nietzsche, whose writings were just beginning to be translated into
French at the end of the 1890s.
Nietzsche believed in individual greatness, human self-power, and the
cult of Dionysus. He declared himself an enemy of decadence and rejected
suffering, sacrifice, and asceticism. After denouncing Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche repudiated his erstwhile mentor Richard Wagner, in large part
because of Wagner's anti-Semitism. Nietzsche had a sweeping definition
for the word decadence–he used it to describe Christian morality,
nationalism, the socialist (and anarchist) labor movement, and to a
large extent rational thought. And nothing was more decadent to him than
the modern democracy of herd-thinkers. His was a definition of the word
that stood its usual meanings and targets upside down while retaining it
as an epithet, a disparaging and abusive term.
Thus, the twentieth century dawned on an increasingly mechanistic and
godless capitalist world haunted by its prehistory. Radical
insurrectionist tendencies with certain common characteristics–hatred of
Christianity and bourgeois democracy, a yearning for rebirth or renewal
(often defined as a return to nature, to the soil, to ancient myth and
community), and a desire to replace the big business commodity economy
with corporatist guilds or syndicates–produced an uncanny similarity of
anarchist and protofascist ideas. The quest for adventure and
aestheticism in the twentieth century led some European artists, like
Marinetti, to celebrate war and fascism; some English and American
writers, most notably Ezra Pound, followed their lead. Already in the
early years of this century the seeds were sown for the great
dialectical modern nightmare–counterrevolution in the name of
revolution, tyranny in the name of freedom.
The Romantic/Decadent currents produced repercussions that have
persisted well into the twentieth century. The most obvious heir to the
tradition was Surrealism. The Surrealists explicitly endorsed and
claimed as forebears (or saints, as some would have it) such figures as
Sade, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Jarry. Like the Decadents, the
Surrealists valued subjectivity, the quest for absolute freedom, dreams,
the perverse and irrational, the transgressive, and the strange beauty
of crystals, minerals, birds, and the vegetable kingdom.
Surrealism had a historical perspective the earlier movements lacked.
Surrealism developed a more coherent and consistent attack on
Christianity and shed no tears for the legacy of the Roman Empire. In
fact, it turned its back on the Latin roots of French bourgeois
civilization (i.e., Gallicanism or Chauvinism) and took its influences
more from English literature and German philosophy; its immediate
precursor was Dada, which had been a thoroughly international movement.
In the 1920s the Surrealists were among first in France to recognize and
make use of Hegel, Marx, and Freud (in that combination). They
identified their project with the proletarian revolution and denounced
the imperialism of the western capitalist powers (such as the colonial
war waged in 1925 on the Rif people of Morocco by France and Spain), but
they stumbled by getting caught up in sympathy for the authoritarian
dogmas of Bolshevism and Trotskyism.
Another significant difference between Surrealism and its forebears lay
in its image of women: however problematic this image may have been
(sometimes in the spirit of Sade, more often in that of Goethe's concept
of das Ewig Weiblich, or the "eternal feminine") it was nonetheless a
labor of love and not of contempt. Women in the Surrealist movement were
obscure objects of desire and representation, but often they were also
active participants and creative subjects as well (if not to the extent
of full equality, then much more so than in previous cultural
movements).
Though saturated with Romantic influences, Surrealism was, as Rimbaud
would have put it, "absolutely modern," and hinted at the suppression of
art and culture as categories separate from life. This is why the
Situationists hailed it, along with Dada (though critically), for having
laid the groundwork for the "revolution of everyday life." The extent to
which Surrealism became, in spite of its better intentions, another art
movement is the best indication of its ultimate failure.
Another major legacy of literary Romanticism are the modern genres of
science fiction/horror/fantasy, which received a major impetus from Mary
Shelley's magnum opus, Frankenstein (1818), and the weird tales of Edgar
Allan Poe; developed further with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and H.P.
Lovecraft; and have continued vigorously in the twentieth century. But
what goes under the name of "romance" in our time is for the most part a
frivolous, cryptopornographic phenomenon of Hollywood, television, and
mass-market publishing.
Thus far I have discussed Romanticism and Decadence mainly as a function
of the legacy of Greco-Roman antiquity and western European feudalism.
These worldviews also made an impression in the USA, which is today the
home of the postbourgeois, real domination of capital in its purest
form. From its early colonial history North America was conceived as a
new Eden. Some of the initial settlers, such as the Puritans, were
narrow-minded authoritarians; others represented the most enlightened
antinomian currents of the Protestant Reformation. Most of the
revolutionary "founding fathers" were Freemasons who, like their French
bourgeois counterparts, briefly rejected Christianity and conceived
their newly created nation as a renascence of the Roman republic and of
Hellenic science.
In the early period of America's existence as a nation, European
Romanticism found its parallel in the romance of the wilderness and the
frontier. The natural beauty of the land was celebrated in art even as
it and the native peoples were made to retreat before the onslaught of
civilization's "manifest destiny." James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville were among the most
illustrious of the American Romantics. As in Europe, the creative soul
and the free imagination found themselves at odds with the reigning
bourgeois society. The United States became the site of various
experiments in the creation of Utopian communities either actual (New
Harmony, Oneida) or planned (Coleridge's and Southey's "Pantisocracy").
But the "flowers of evil" did not seem to grow very well in American
soil, probably because the country remained largely agrarian and because
of the rising tide of evangelical Protestantism. The Southern plantation
aristocracy resembled in some ways effete European absolutism, but its
total destruction in the Civil War, like the destruction of the French
monarchy, did little to establish the kingdom of virtue on earth. The
slaves were indeed liberated, only to become wage slaves, and the power
of the US Federal Government was vastly increased.
After the Civil War, heavy industrialization, the closing of the
frontier, and the beginnings of global empire, the focus of romantic
sensibility among educated Americans of the Northeast shifted even more
to Europe. Such artistes as Mary Cassatt, James M. Whistler, and Henry
James elected to spend most of their time in western Europe (Paris,
London, and Northern Italy) to escape the staid small-mindedness of
utilitarian bourgeois society at home and also to participate in the
artistic ferment of the European Symbolism, Impressionism, Aestheticism,
and so on. The practice of voluntary expatriation continued on a
significant scale through the 1930s (and again, less brilliantly,
through the 1950s) , though by World War I New York City was emerging as
the home of America's own cosmopolitan bohemia.
The 1960s and 70s produced the most recent mass explosion of the Utopian
as well as dystopian elements of the Romantic legacy in the western
world. This can be seen in the spiritual movements of that time, as well
as in the political movements. As in France of the late nineteenth
century, the power of Christianity in the US began to decay rapidly and
become replaced in some quarters by cults derived from Eastern religion.
This, combined with elements of popular psychology (particularly a la
Carl Jung), became the basis of the contemporary New Age movement, which
has become an expression of flaky, confused upper-middle class liberals.
In the political (or antipolitical) realm the 1960s saw a significant
resurgence of romanticism in the back-to-the-land hippie communes, as
well as in the naive tendency, among students especially, to idealize
the Third World peasant guerrilla movements. Many young leftists were
all too eager to follow Mao's injunction to "serve the people" in a
self-abnegating tradition that went back to the French revolutionaries'
submission to Rousseau's concept of the "general will."
Much of what we have come to hear spoken of in the twentieth century as
decadent has come from those calling themselves Marxists. For decades it
was routine to hear the Soviet or Chinese leadership pontificating about
the decadence of the West. They use(d) the word in a definitely
moralistic sense, usually to condemn popular music from jazz onward or
to attack the most blatant contradictions of modern capitalism, those
attributes left over from its prespectacular stage, such as the
grossness, ostentatious display and consumption of the idle rich
contrasted with poverty in the ghettos of the metropolis and starvation
in the Third World. This brand of condemnation coming from
Marxist-Leninists recalled, in however degraded a fashion, the Jacobin
Republic of Virtue, and boasted that red bureaucrats were somehow
morally superior to the non-Stalinist bureaucrats of the West (a lie
even on that level). The moralism of Leninist bureaucrats is a class
ideology, and as such it is an inheritance of Judeo-Christian (or in the
case of the Chinese, Confucian) moralism and bourgeois positivism.
But, some will protest, this is not real Marxism at all, it is
vulgarized, perverted, recuperated. They have a point; in some ways
Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, etc. are departures from the original
communist project. Very well then, let us cast aside the "false" Marxism
and consider Marxism at its best, in its Western variants. These
currents would include (besides the work of Marx and Engels themselves)
a tradition coming out of the ultraleft of German and Dutch Social
Democracy (Rosa Luxemburg, the council communists), Italian communism
(Bordiga), and in more recent times, the Situationist International and
its imitators. Of these currents, only that represented by Luxemburg
promoted the theory of the decadence of capitalism. Her views were
paralleled to some extent by Lenin during the early period of
Bolshevism. These two leading theoreticians of the left of international
Social Democracy in the early twentieth century saw capitalism as a
historically decadent mode of production. Marx himself had been for the
most part an amoralist and had never spoken explicitly of "decadence,"
although he had hinted that capitalism had a potential to destroy
humanity. The theory of capitalist decadence, building on Marx's study
of the economic crises of capital as "fetters on the development of the
forces of production," was tied to theories of imperialism as the
"highest and final" stage of capitalism, completing the global expansion
of the system, liquidating precapitalist economies, and saturating the
markets, leading to intensifying competition and war between the great
powers.
The decadence, or stagnation, in the development of productive forces
was thought to lead mechanically to stagnation in the total life of
society (following Marx's theory of the determining relationship of the
material productive base of society to its cultural and ideological
superstructure). Here is a concept of decadence that appears furthest
from morality, though it is still moralistic, because it offers an alibi
for the work ethic and for the development and socialization of
bourgeois society during its early, "historically progressive" phase.
The theory of a new historical period beginning sometime in the years
before the world war of 1914-18 (seen in the catastrophist view as the
definitive onset of decadence) and requiring "new tasks" for the
proletariat rescues a glorious past for the Social Democratic reformism
of the Second International. It even defends a progressive role, albeit
however briefly, for the Third International.
In reality both the Second and Third Internationals ultimately served to
strengthen and extend capitalism. This outcome was an entirely logical
outgrowth of progressivist ideology in the founders of "scientific
socialism." Marx and Engels saw democratic reformism as a necessary
transitional phase (i.e., building of the productive forces by
capitalism laying the groundwork for socialism and communism). Marxist
defense of the labor ethic became an apology for its continuation during
the transition stage. The ultralefts broke with the parliamentarism,
social patriotism, and trade unionism of mainstream Social Democracy,
nonetheless they defended the principles of organization, discipline,
and political consciousness that were carried to fetishistic extremes by
the Bolsheviks. The mystique of the Proletariat was preserved. The
original theorists of capitalist decadence, such as Luxemburg,
underestimated Capital's subsequent ability to expand; it has in fact
expanded more in the twentieth century than ever before in its history.
Economic crises recur (we are certainly living in one now) , but it
remains to be seen whether this is the final and fatal plunge.
Nostradamus and Chicken Little have been wrong before. Socialism or
barbarism? The specter of nuclear holocaust has faded, but the prospect
of global environmental devastation looms ever larger.
There is no proof that human beings necessarily have to be prodded by a
precipitous drop in material living standards in order to struggle for
freedom. The experience of Paris in 1968 is the best example of this.
Nor is there any proof that the conquest of bread in itself brings
freedom, or that a vanguard leadership with correct or advanced ideas
can raise the moral and spiritual condition of "the masses." The revolt
against work is anathema to Marxists because they cannot understand why
humans should want to rebel against their "essence" as producers. The
"revolutionary party" can exist only to control and thwart the human
revolt against Capital. For more complete, detailed arguments against
Marxist theories of capitalist decadence, I refer the reader to the
writings of John Zerzan, Jacques Camatte, and the French group
Interrogations (for the Human Community). It is true that not all
Marxists speak of "decadence" or defend "scientific socialism:' Debord,
for example, stated in Society of the Spectacle his view that what was
best in the theory of Karl Marx was beyond scientific thought (i.e.,
beyond scientism or the naturalistic evolutionism that Engels, Kautsky,
Bernstein, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Labriola were so fond of). The
situationists too, it should be remembered, were of all Marxists the
most in tune with the great Parisian tradition of decadence.
The meaning of the word decadence seems to change considerably depending
on who uses it. Decadence used as an epithet has been harnessed by both
Right and Left ideological camps to attack bourgeois democracy. In the
twentieth century the term has been employed by totalitarian ideologies
to condemn and justify the suppression of libertarian mores and
modernist cultural experimentation. Fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist regimes
all described as "decadent" thought, behavior, and culture that, far
from being stagnant, was actually the most vital and interesting of its
time. These regimes, after exhibiting an initial toleration of or even
flirtation with modernism, all settled on a preference for neoclassical
architecture and the kitsch realism of genre painting with its banality,
literalness, and mandatory good cheer. Subjective imagination, on the
other hand, became a matter for the police. For the Nazis (and not for
them only) war was healthy and virile; pacifism effeminate and decadent.
The contemporary society of the spectacle, whose "end of ideology" is
officially democratic but contains strong residues of fascist influence,
permits all artistic movements of the past, including the most critical
and negative currents, to coexist as co-opted cultural commodities to be
consumed, cafeteria style. Christianity, though moribund, staggers on
and remains the bedrock belief of broad sections of society in modern
capitalist states, particularly alas in the United States, but the
instauration of an "age of faith" is out the question (even after the
fall of Stalinism). The operative justification for the "new world
order" will probably continue to rely as it has for much of this
century, on technorationalism and various conflicting, recycled, and
ever more vulgar modernist ideologies.
Is there any sense in which decadence is a valid concept? This rotten
civilization, the "air-conditioned nightmare," is certainly not going
anywhere and indeed appears to be dying. If decadence can be defined as
a function of the human species' increasing separation from nature, then
ours is definitely a decadent age. And true enough, mediocrity reigns.
But if we must speak of the decay of the system, the question arises,
was not the decadence built right into it from the start? When was this
society ever "healthy"? Do you yearn for the days when law and order
prevailed, authority was respected, and the reigning ideology was
vigorous and unchallenged? Do we really need masterpieces in our own
time if we don't need God, the Pope, the Emperor, the Republic,
Democracy, Socialism (or any other abstraction of alienation) to
dedicate them to? It wasn't "revolutionary preservation'' of the
cultural achievements of past epochs of domination that dadaist Marcel
Duchamp had in mind when he suggested using a Rembrandt as an ironing
board! The collapse in the modern era of the distinction between high
and mass culture is among other things an indication that the proles
either want, or think they want, their own "decadence." After all, the
fetishism of commodities in a mass society operates through a large
degree of complicity from its victims, the worker-consumer citizens.
Even if workers achieved the kind of leisure that was previously enjoyed
by aristocrats or ancient Greek citizens, they might very well decide
that the "good things in life" that industrial society has to offer
aren't worth it. And then of course they wouldn't be workers (i.e.,
domesticated human animals) any longer. Everyone can indeed live in his
and her own cathedral (or mosque, for that matter). But this Arcadian
idyll of anarchic, universal human community can probably only come
about through the supersession of civilization along with its cultural
blandishments. Is this really possible? Who knows, but look not for
another renaissance.
Counterculture and aestheticism as means of fighting or escaping from
the system apparently reached the point of historical exhaustion decades
ago, and as I have attempted to show, there was much about Romanticism
and Decadence that was contradictory: it could be for either revolution
or reaction, freedom or unfreedom. But everyone dreams of the love,
adventure, and authenticity that the world of work and commodities can
never fulfill and the world of art and literature as well as the modern
spectacle of pop culture can only represent. As long as the false
community of Capital, indeed civilization itself, continues to exist, it
will continue to generate multifaceted modes of revolt, many of them in
the tradition of bohemian decadence. Whatever the shortcomings of that
may be, it is nonetheless more fun and more real than the public of
Virtue or the posturing of secret societies of spartan heroes. Decadence
can be a good thing if it gives us breathing space against biblical,
socialist, or feminist moralism. Romanticism, one of whose definitions
is the desire of overcivilized and domesticated humans to recapture a
feral existence, will never be suppressed until it is realized in the
social insurrection. It's time for a real Roman holiday, so bring on the
barbarians!