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Five Faces

Matei Calinescu, the Five Faces of Modernity

Intro

• Modernity: “an increasing sense of historical relativism” in the form of “criticism of tradition.”
  • Tradition “has no legitimate claim to offer him examples”
    • At most, makes “a private and essentially modifiable past”
  • “awareness of the present…appears as his main source of inspiration and creativity” 3
  • Aesthetic value changes from “permanence,” unchanging ideal of beauty; to “transitoriness and immanence,” “change and novelty”
• Histoire
  • First form: Romanticism (versus classicism) 4
    • Stendhal: “which, in the view of the present-day state of their customs and beliefs, afford them the utmost possible pleasure” – Racine et Shakespeare 1823
  • Second form: Baudelaire (not only versus tradition but also versus “bourgeois civilization”
    • “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable” qtd 5
  • Development: the avant-garde AND decadent
    • AG: more in the same direction “with increasing violence” against tradition, try to find “the realm of the ‘not yet,’”
      • Modernity as adversarial
    • Decadence: “modernity turns against itself” and judges ITSELF as decadent.
      • Modernity as crisis
• Main Oppositional Value Systems of Modernity: The Two Modernities
  • “the objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist civilization” (time as commodity)
  • “the personal, subjective, imaginative duree, the private time created by the unfolding of the ‘self’” 5
    • “identity of time and self [which] constitutes the foundation of modernist culture” 5
• The Vicious Circle: Unbounded Relativism
  • Modernity is seen to lack “any moral or metaphysical justification”
  • Aesthetic modernism, b/c it comes from the “isolated self” also has no justification
    • Me: Um, objection: what if the isolated self is instead the more reasonable basis for the social?
• Kitsch
  • Where the two modernities “are confronted…with their own caricature”
  • As modernism’s modernity: modernism relativizes style b/c no one tradition better than another, so bland eclecticism of kitsch comes from modernism
  • As bourgeois’ modernity: as “triumph of immediacy” that capitalism demands and as clearly for sale and obsolete 8
  • “the great psychological discovery on which kitsch is founded lies in the fact that nearly everything directly or indirectly associated with artistic culture can be turned into something fit for immediate ‘consumption,’ like any ordinary commodity. It is true that, unlike the ordinary consumer, the art consumer does not use up that which he enjoys. Mentally, however, the modern philistine can behave like a common consumer and, without materially damaging or even touching the original art work, destroy its aesthetic significance” 247
  • Kitsch as “efficient art”
  • “an expression of the taste of the middle class and of its peculiar spare-time hedonism.” 247
  • won’t accept Adorno and Horkheimer, summing up their viewpoint as saying upper class deliberately creates kitsch to distract working class from revolution.
  • has the taint of the normal, the hackneyed bourgeois taste: trash
    • Why does kitsch come in his mind? “an easy way of ‘killing time,’ as a pleasurable escape from the banality of both work and leisure. The fun of kitsch is just the other side of a terrible and incomprehensible boredom” 248 so kitch goes against “terror of change and the meaninglessness of chronological time flowing from an unreal past into an equally unreal future” 248
    • came out of romanticism b/c it “relativized” taste and b/c promoted sentimental art and b/c romanticism itself “first important popular literary and artistic movement, the main cultural product of the rise of modern democracy” 237
      • de Tocqueville one of the first critics to note that commercialism in art comes from democracy: “a trading spirit into literature” in Tocque’s words b/c writer looks forward to “a meager reputation and a large fortune” w/each cheap editions adding up (want money not fame)
    • sociologically relieves boredom
    • This is the fear, yes
• Calinescu’s Overarching Theme: Time
  • “the concepts under scrutiny, for all their heterogeneous origins and diversity of meaning, share one characteristic: they reflect intellectual attitudes that are directly related to the problem of time.” 9
  • What kind of time? “experienced and valued culturally” 9 (rather than scientifically or philosophically)
• BASIC Definition
  • “aesthetic modernity should be understood as a crisis concept involved in a threefold dialectical opposition to tradition, to the modernity of bourgeois civilization (with its ideals of rationality, utility, progress), and, finally, to itself, insofar as it perceives itself as a tradition or form of authority.” 10

Modernism Prehistory Lesson

• As a term: developed during Middle Ages from “recently, just now”
  • Why not earlier? B/c only then did we have “the framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible” 13
• First shows up: late 5th century; “modernus,” late Latin
• More popular beginning @ 10th century
• First “full-fledged row about the moderns among the poets,” 12th century
• Evaluation: is modern better than ancient?
  • Bernard of Chartres’ early 12th century maxim: we are dwarves standing on shoulders of giants
    • Has a kind of decadent sense of the inadequacy of the modern in comparison to giant past
    • Montaigne late 16th century also referring to this image sees modernity’s progress as not laudable: we didn’t really DO it actively so don’t be so proud
  • 17th century philosophers incl Newton begin to erase the “dwarf” part out and see moderns as awesome (just giving thanx to the old folks along the way)
    • Peaks w/Pascal: only leaves the positive stuff about moderns seeing further
• Renaissance: the creation of the 3 ages
  • Intensification of the modern/ancient opposition
  • Before, during Middle Ages, time was theological (ultimate death and vanity of all things); love of the stable; quiescence
  • Renaissance, however, a new concept of time comes into competition with the theological one (which doesn’t immediately disappear)
    • Time: now practical entity that must be taken advantage of, not lost: “energy and love of variety” 20
  • Ren adopts Petrarch’s (14th c humanist) formulation of the Dark Ages, from which he wants to escape
    • Inducts Renaissance division of time in distinct periods: antiquity (Golden Age), Middle Ages (Dark Ages), modernity
    • Thus, hint that our time is inadequate, that we need to break with tradition
    • It’s revolutionary time: in my immediate present, we have inherited a dark past that we need to cast off, thus moving towards brighter future 21
  • However, it’s not exactly the modernity we get in modernism: this theory of revolution still “implies a cyclical view of history” (we will induct new Golden Age) 22
    • Petrarch idolizes antiquity, but only b/c that’s the way to guarantee his desired future: revival
    • “history had a specific direction, expressive not of a transcendental, predetermined pattern, but of the necessary interaction of immanent forces” 22 (Marx, hist mat?) (Bergson, Possible and real?)
• Limited Renaissance
  • What does it manage to do? Create “systematic” comparison between moderns and ancients 26
  • It doesn’t guide us to throwing off all forms of tradition, just the one type
  • It REPLACES the church’s authority rather than completely axing authority
  • The 16th and 17th centuries will finish the job and manage to make the “old and lingering quarrel between the ancients and the moderns…gain momentum” 27 b/c of the triumph of rationalism and ideal of progress in science and philosophy
• 16th and 17th century thinkers, Montaigne, Newton, Bacon
  • Destroy Renaissance’s antiquity idolatry
  • Bacon
    • Inducts the sense of linear progression wherein the moderns are the winners of the race
    • Bacon: we are the ancients. From the perspective of the world, they are the boys and we are the old men, wise from old age. We are the smarter ones.
    • My reaction: this shows the perspectivism developed in the 17th century in maps, science, which of course Bacon did much to create: assuming objective position OUTSIDE, observing
• Result of Bacon et al in Art
  • Querelle arguments in French lit: modern champions apply science and rationalism to art
  • Their 3 critiques of antiquity
    • Reason: we’re smarter than antique art b/c we’ve got science
      • Better verisimilitude = fewer mistakes, more perfection
      • The Ulysses dog is too old argument (Swift ridicules the moderns’ position here, implying they’re petty)
    • Taste: we have politeness and decorum
      • Normative, says Calinescu 30 and shows how they really had “deep conformism” and not actually different in any respect to the people they’re arguing against. Both camps agree in permanent beauty that we do see in antiquity and should emulate now. The “moderns” here still have timeless view of beauty.
      • Why can you be progressive and believe in eternal beauty? b/c you just think that progress lets you see and achieve the eternal standards better
    • Religion: we’ve got better religion
      • Why you can be religious and believe in rationalism scientific and otherwise: like Pascal, give realm of suprasensible to God alone, but sensible to science
      • Prefigures Romanticism’s understanding of connex between modernity and Christianity 35
  • Effects of Querelle: 1) “modern” becomes polemical; 2) modern/ancient distinction as basis for aesthetic argument
• Romanticism
  • Emerges at turn of century (Europe accepts the term before England does)
  • During 18th c, beauty becomes historical category 36 rather than universal and immutable: b/c the Romantics say that standards of beauty come from historical experience, what YOU like NOW
    • Now, relativism of beauty: fit for your time period; not just better or worse
  • Romanticism characteristics
    • Supernatural world
    • Sublime, interesting, grotesque: new “categories” to work with and use
  • Stendhal
    • Taste is fashion: what pleases the people of the moment
      • Must give the public the fashion despite the delusions they have b/c of habit b/c of academicism: must force them to like what they like
    • First to label himself “romantic”
    • First to think of romanticism as “an awareness of contemporary life, of modernity in its immediate sense” 38
      • Even before Baudelaire, “a kind of first draft of Baudelaire’s theory of modernity” 39

Modernism As We Know It: Early

• “at some point during the first half of the nineteenth century an irreversible split occurred between as a stage in the history of Western civilization—a product of scientific and technological progress, of the industrial revolution, of the sweeping economic and social changes brought about by capitalism—and modernity as an aesthetic concept” 41
  • The first one continues modernity as already begun: progress, science, technology, rationalism, abstract humanism, freedom, pragmatism, “cult of action and success” 41
  • The other, anti-bourgeois w/romantic roots. It’s much more a negation: what keeps modernism together is its opposition to common enemy, rather than any “positive aspirations” which Calinescu says “have very little in common” 41
    • Romantic roots: alienation of modern writer begins w/Romantics’ fight against philistinism (“middle class hypocrisy” 43; crass, stupid, anti-intellectual, materialistic). In Germany, this fight gets political cf Engels; in France, it goes to art pour l’art
• Postrevolutionary France: bundle of aestheticism, l’art pour l’art, decadence, and symbolism, beginning w/Gautier (useful = ugly; art is totally “gratuitous” 45) (even though he was one of the first to think that the images of modern life could be used as basis for beautiful art, thus prefig Baudelaire’s “heroism of modern life” 46
• Baudelaire
  • Though modernity is a word for the English since 17th century, in France modernite doesn’t show up until 1833, Chateaubriand’s diary; letter, Baudelaire 1859; first published 1849 (the Chateaubriand stuff published)
  • “The Salon of 1846:” early work @ what he calls romanticism (what we’d call modernism)
    • Art should focus on “those situations of man which were disdained or unknown to the artists of the past:” emphasis on novelty 47
    • Inventive, active creation, “adroitness, crafsmanship” 48
  • “The Painter of Modern Life” 1863 (on Constantin Guys), which is apparently “a qualitative turning point in the history of modernity as an idea” (49)
    • Modernity = sense of immediacy, “a sensuous past grasped in its very transitoriness,” the opposite of frozen tradition 48
    • Quote from Baud: “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable….almost all our originality comes from the stamp that time imprints upon our feelings” qtd 48
    • Modernity is not a “piece” of the historical timeline; it is not a specific period of time; but instead the now-ness, the “forgetful immersion in the ‘now’”
      • A succession of moments unrelated to each other: it’s invented anew; only about the instantaneous; presentness, immediacy
      • cf Nietzsche’s concept of “forgetting” in “Of the Use and Misuse of History for Life:” memory (history) is against life (action)
    • Baudelaire’s Normativity: he tells you that you SHOULD be modern 50
  • Christian dualisms: Beauty loves both good/evil, comes from God/Satan Christian dualisms
    • Why Baudelaire having Christian themes? To better create the sense of crisis, answers Calinescu: “dramatize a lingering consciousness of crisis” 53
  • Beauty: “ardent and sad, something a little vague, allowing for conjecture” qtd 53: strange, mysterious, unhappy
    • infernal and divine, grief and bliss, happy with murderers too 54
  • Do you copy modernity down to make art?
    • No! He’s no realist. Instead, you find the correspondences, hidden and unseen, between the fleeting and the eternal, “where ephemerality and eternity are one” 54
    • Baudelaire’s emphasis on imagination is here, and Calinescu says that “since Baudelaire” imagination has been seen as key to artistic modernity 55
  • Flowers of Evil: the poet picks out flowers from the realm of evil: the figure for the artist finding beauty in modern life 54
  • Nostalgic for past b/c of terribly gross philistine bourg society seems to kill art; but we just make modernity conscious, and that will create beauty from this mess
  • I’ve had problems with the insistence upon paradoxes and contradictions in this chapter and indeed the whole book.
    • However, she does admit “Baudelaire’s modernite is not cut off from the other, historical and bourgeois modernity” but what about the main definition here, the opposition between art mod and mod mod? He retains that definition by saying that Baudelaire having connex to mod mod (see below example), well that’s a contradiction whoo. I’d say the problem is not B’s contradiction, but Calinescu’s too well defined border between mity and mism.
      • Her example: Baud likes order and method (he doesn’t rely on romantic Imagination in and of itself: you must WILL inspiration to come); and sees paintings as machines

Modernism, Fully Fledged

• Signif of religion
  • Modern conception of time impossible outside Judeo-Christian tradition
  • Christian time: linear, irreversible, straight shot to eternity; definite beginning and end; each event is unique, nothing repeatable
    • “Reason” takes this view of history from Christianity
    • Modernity NEEDS Christianity’s irreversible time
• Phases of Relation to Religion
  • 1) Medieval: Christianity or non-Christianity irrelevant for differentiating antique/modern
  • 2) Renaissance and Enlightenment: Antique becomes pagan, to be emulated by parts of life not related to theology so theology stays a separate issue; but by the end the diff between religion and these philosophers/thinkers comes through
  • 3) Romantic: Comparison of pagan antiquity to Christian modernity—“revolutionary” is this understanding that modern genius is specifically Christian one; they think they’re at “the end of the Christian cycle” both “exalting and tragic”
    • They invent the Death of God
  • 4) 1850 onward: “new era of religious quest” 62 b/c death of God creates a vacuum that must be filled
    • Filled by creation of heterodoxies, and other substitute religions, such as utopia—and anti-utopia
    • Says utopia “pervades the whole intellectual spectrum of modernity” 63
      • Except for the unfortunate fact that if you actually achieved utopia, no more progress possible: history would stop; would be mere repetition 66, which is a problem b/c “modernity came about as a commitment to otherness and change…based on the idea of difference” and hence “balks [at]... infinite repetition and the ‘boredom of utopia’” (hmmm, Stein?)
    • Shows perceived significance of present at cost of devalued past
• Result: paradoxical “modern tradition”
  • We have utopia (creation of a new form that will deserve infinite repetition) and anti-utopia (where stress is put on the “not-yet,” which Calinescu got from Bloch, whose utopian drive didn’t prevent him to realize the “melancholy of fulfillment” and the value of the “not-yet” 67)
    • utopia versus anti-utopia as modernist TIME: translated, the tension between trying to break with the past and the desire to create one’s own tradition
  • “utopia of a radiant instant of invention that can suppress time by repeating itself endlessly” as tradition 68 goes against the destruction of both past and future that they are supposed to believe in as well
  • This, “snarled in a knot of incompatibilities” 68; “torn between his urge to cut himself off from the past—to become completely ‘modern’—and his dream to found a new tradition, recognizable as such by the future.” 67
    • Sounds like a bunch of bunkum to me. You overemphasize the commitment to burn all tradition, then also overemphasize the intent to create a tradition. And that’s how you CREATE this problem. They’re less in tension than you think.
      • The critique of the “past” was very much about the NEAR past: authors who are still alive (Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown).
      • They were more about finding a usable tradition (cf Pound ABCs of Reading, cf Woolf in A Room of… making tradish of women writers). They didn’t throw away their libraries. (How do you reconcile the use of myth with this apparent bonfire of tradition?)
      • Wanting to have your works remembered is far different from wanting to establish a tradition. (cf Eliot Tradish and the… where he pretty much admits that you aren’t in charge of the tradition you leave; I think he solved that little snarl of being torn between either “failing” to be important, thus successfully justifying your concept of the new, or “succeeding” to be importance but thus failing at keeping your concept of the new)
      • Now what contradiction is truly left? Perhaps the lack of articulation about the ways in which past literature is allowably instructive. Perhaps a difference between manifesto or rhetoric and work.
      • Is the adversarial aspect of modernism overinflated? Not in terms of culture (of course they hated it). But perhaps overinflated in terms of tradition capital T.

• “Modernism:” came about adversarially, used by the enemies of it (ism = unfair partisanship): a very polemical word
  • Johnson said Swift first used in in a letter to Pope (“their trash in prose and verse, with abominable curtailments and quain modernisms” 69
  • Only became neutral or positive (legitimacy) after 1920s
• First discussion of modernism: modernismo, in Latin and South America
  • Why not in France? They were split into various schools that fought, didn’t see what they had in common
  • 1888: Ruben Dario uses “modernismo” (Chile)
  • Had to take awhile to see that maybe modernism was a spirit infecting all of Europe and its colonies: “as manifestations of the same interest in modernity, a modernity which is certainly changing…and which is in any one of its major aspects in radical contrast to the stability of tradition” 77
    • B/c it’s only about antitradition, “modernism’s renewed capability of denying itself—its various historical ‘traditions’—without losing its identity” b/c it’s (Octavio Paz’s phrase) “tradition against itself” 78
  • Catholic Church used “modernism” as term versus their values. Made Abbe Loisy say “il y a autant de modernismes que de modernistes” (there are as many modernisms as there are modernists” 79
• Renato Poggioli, _Theory of the Avant-Garde-
  • “It is not in fact the modern which is destined to die…but the modernistic…Modernism leads up to…everything in the modern spirit which is most vain, frivolous, fleeting, and ephemeral…it cheapens and vulgarizes modernity…modernalotry: nothing but a blind adoration of the idols and fetishes of our time” 80
  • Modernism = caricature of modernity (to me, it shows that “modernism” wasn’t as antagonistic as it might have initially sounded, esp to Calinescu
• Modernism in our sense
  • in Anglophone countries, “during the first two decades of our century” 81
  • The Modernist journal, beginning 1919: a political journal, progress and socialism (Shaw, Dreiser, Crane, Duhamel)
    • He’s surprised it’s about politics, but hey that works in my theory
    • Editor wrote: “every tradition, every inherent standard, has been tested; many laws have been destroyed, many pretences have been abandoned.” qtd 81
      • See how that’s not burn it all!
  • John Crowe Ransom in The Fugitive 1924: “we moderns are impatient and destructive” and b/c they have to put such strain on sound and rhythm like no poets before them, have a great difficulty and thus risk “a fatal paralysis of the writing digit” 83
  • Laura Riding and Robert Graves’ Survey of Modernist Poetry 1927
    • We see that “modernism” means something now
    • “free the poem of many of the traditional habits which prevented it from achieving its full significance” 83
    • 94 modernism in the “perverted sense, modernism can become antitraditional ‘tyranny,’ increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry” 84
• Desynonimization of “modern” and “contemporary” occurred early twentieth century
• Periodization: three stages
  • Value judgment: the term begins as a like or not-like indicator
  • Segment of history: attached to moment in time, historicization
  • A type: detached to time; has “characteristics” (can be at any moment in time even if it is focused around one only
• Stephen Spender, 1963 Struggle of the Modern
  • Modern art: “artist reflects awareness of an unprecedented modern situation in its form and idiom”
    • Rimbaud, Joyce, Proust, Eliot
    • “tends to see life as a whole and hence in modern conditions to condemn it as a whole 89
  • Without this idiom—that is without a new style or form that reflects the effects of the modern world on consciousness—they are merely “contemporaries” not “moderns”
    • Shaw and Wells are this: the “Voltarian ‘I’” that “acts upon events” 89 (politics, rationalism)
    • they only react to “the forces moving through the modern world, its values of science and progress” 89
    • Calinescu says this is what he means by the “other modernity”
• Calinescu’s Doubts
  • Modernism’s radical rejection of modernity shows a dependence upon modernity
  • Bourgeois culture has managed to incorporate modernism into the fold
  • “When modernism comes to oppose concepts without which it wold have been inconceivable [“reason, progress, science”], it is simply pursuing its deepest vocation, its constitutive sense of creation through rupture and crisis.” 92
    • He hasn’t really EARNED “crisis.” Berman’s better at that.
• Matthew Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature” 1857 as lectured; published 10 yrs later
  • “A cultural traditionalist, for whom the role of religion was to be taken over by culture, Matthew Arnold enlarged the scope of modernity’s concept to comprise whatever was rationally valid and relevant in the whole cultural history of mankind…universal syntheses of values, a follower of Goethe’s… Weltlitertur…he seems to dismiss all temporal ideas from the word and makes it signify certain timeless intellectual and civic values…Arnold’s ideal of the modern has nothing to do with our sense of modernity as a sense of rupture” 91
  • However, we should be aware that there’s always a pull to normativize modernist literature, to deflate its revolutionary aspects, to make it less antisocial, less subversive

Random

• Modernism as a “minority culture” that defines itself as against the dominant culture
  • Actually from article “Avant-Garde, Neo-Avant-Garde, Post Modernism: The Culture of Crisis”
  • Lionel Trilling: “adversary culture”
• Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism in which you have to be two selves: the buttoned-up worker and the fast n loose consumer: too hard to reconcile
  • Source: capitalism “could develop only by encouraging consumption, social mobility, and status seeking, that is, by negating its own transcendental moral justification” that we’d seen in Prot work ethic
• I’ve just thought: maybe what these cultural studies works do is bring the reality of the lived experience of capitalism to life
• Marcuse and the rest of New Left: tried to find utopian strain in Marx himself (despite Marx’s dislike for utopian projects of Saint-Simon etc): “hidden utopian core of Marx’s thought” 66
• Potential comps q
  • “If we think that modernity came about as a commitment to otherness and change, and that its entire strategy was shaped by an ‘antitraditional tradition’ based on the idea of difference, it should not be difficult to realize why it balks when it is confronted with the perspective of infinite repetition and the ‘boredom of utopia.’” 66
• Me: just as Marx says that the bourgeois’ own tools will react against them, rising in revolution, the tools created by scientific rationalism will be turned against them (by people like Shaw, Wells, etc)

Basic on A G

• Marxism
  • “all the future-oriented sociopolitical doctrines thought of themselves as being in the avant-garde. Saint-SImonians, Fourierists, anarchists…Marxists…disputed the term and accommodated it to their own kind of rhetoric” (Calinescu 114)
  • by 1880s Marxists use A G as political term
  • Lenin truly made it happen, calling Marxism the political A G : the avant-garde of the working class, 1902 What Is To Be Done (although he did soon say that all literary A G must be in the service of his own political A G)
• Lukacs: modernism is “expression of the historical predicament of the bourgeoisie” 115 so A G needs to be looked for in realism
• Concept of literary A G
  • Began in 1870s, but the term crystallizes ONLY when a new style is born (that is develops in last quarter of 19th c
  • 1913 Apollinaire, L’Anti-tradition futuriste, A G is “esprit nouveau”
  • By 1920s “designate…all the new schools whose aesthetic programs were defined, by and large, by their rejection of the past and by the cult of the new….novelty was attained, more often than not, in the sheer process of the destruction of tradition” 117 Calinescu
    • “the avant-garde does not announce one style or another; it is in itself a style, or better, an antistyle” of opposition, rupture, revolutionary
      • Why is this not just ANY art that is oppositional? B/c grounded in opposition against bourgeoisie (as Barthes said, when “bourgeoisie appeared as an esthetically retrograde force, one to be contested” qtd 120 for “resolving a specific historical contradiction: that of an unmasked bourgeoisie which could no longer proclaim itsw original universalism except in the form of a violent protest turned against itself…the duty of a life style to contest the bourgeois order…but never by political violence”
• Said to be dead over and over during 1960s
• Negative: “often ends up forgetting about the future… [which] can take care of itself whne the demons the past are exorcised:”
  • So that its futurism is chiefly polemicism and excuse for “Subversive artistic techniques”
  • “ultimately they are committed to an all-encompassing nihilism, whose unavoidable conclusion is self-destruction” 96
• Esp in France and Italy
• Elitism?
  • Yes but nonetheless still “committed to the destruction of all elites, including itself” 143
  • no hierarchy

Decadence

• “myth of decadence was known, in one form or another, to nearly all ancient peoples” 151
  • “Destructiveness of time and the fatality of decline…corruption and sinfulness…living in a malignant world that was approaching the dominion of absolute evil” 151
  • present “deemed inferior to earlier and more blissful times” (cf Platonic, we’re in corrupt world of shadows)
• So, how’d it get modern
  • decadent as adjective, mid 19th c
  • decadentism, few decades later
  • within Judeo-Christian tradition the concept of modernity develops to create “decadence”
    • eschatology (time linear, irreversible, going to an end, and time of Judgment will be “announced by the unmistakable sign of profound decay…according to apocalyptic prophecy, by the satanic power of the Antichrist.” 153
      • “decadence…prelude to the end of the world” 153
  • seen as millennialism, even secularized versions ie Marxism (he says Marxism is thus a kind of decadence b/c it requires the decay of capitalism first
    • decadence as crisis: urgency: “time is running short” and you must secure salvation for yourself quickly: “restlessness…self-examination…commitments…renunciations”
      • was even felt in Renaissance, for example (Leonardo w/visions of end of the world, Savanarola’s widespread dissatisfaction and judgment) 155
• Modernity and progress NOT incompatible w/idea of decadence
  • 1) “dialectical complexity” ie Bernand de Chartres we are dwarves standing on shoulders of giants shows progress and regression
  • 2) decadence as tendency, motion; “decline, twilight, autumn, senescence, and exhaustion” 155 “organic decay and putrescence” actually are “natural cycles” and hence we’ll get to rebirth, dawn, spring
  • 3) however, “after centuries of close association with scientific research and technological advance…progress came to be regarded as a concept having more to do with mechanics than with biology” 156
    • hence people perceive the RESULTS of progress via loss, alienation, anguish
    • “The critique of the myth of progress was started within the romantic movement, but it gained momentum in the unscientific and antirationalist reaction that marks the late nineteenth century and prolongs itself well into the twentieth”
      • so that whenever you see progress, you have people crying Decadence at the same time
• During 19th c, new concept of “cultural decadence” develops, culminating in creation of “Decadentism” as “aesthetic-historical category”—and this process is “complete reinterpretation and reevaluation of the concept of decadence” 157
  • in France as neo-classicists blast romantics
    • Nisard, a critic: on decadent style: “normal relationship of a work’s parts to its whole is destroyed, the work disintegrating into a multitude of overwrought fragments” 158;
      • 160: “unusual state of exhaustion in which the richest imaginations can do nothing for true poetry…only the power to destroy languages scandalously”
      • 161: applies it to Hugo, “profuse use of description, prominence of detail…elevation of the imaginative power, to the detriment of reason” so Nisard is “against imagination and novelty” (remember Baudelaire called imagination “the queen of faculties”)
      • 161: you lose “focus” on the whole, hierarchy, so you go to details; “power to seduce” and “Deception”
  • England, 1837, Carlyle, History of the French Revolution, with decadence as times in which “no Ideal grows or blossoms”
  • still developing in France over 19th c, esp with their defeats against Prussia and the uprisings of 1848 and 1871, feeling that their world power is declining: while some people pointed to regeneration, others “relished the feeling that the modern world was headed toward catastrophe” b/c they wanted to destroy bourgeois modernity and replace it w/aesthetic modernity
    • what’s wrong w/modernity? you say it gives us progress and democracy, but we say it brings alienation and dehumanization 162 so they “develop the consciousness of their own alienation” and “resort” to “antihumanism”
      • many of them support revolutionary efforts
• Baudelaire: decadent : “systematic attempt to break down the conventional boundaqries between diverse arts” 166 rather than specialization…and he SUPPORTS it as total art, praises Wagner b/c he combines art (his music is visual)
• Delacroix: decadence “more complex, more refined, and more analytical” time period than any others 167…so it’s a progression of consciousness: we need refinement
• 1850s-60s
  • Goncourts, “modern melancholy,” mind under “unbearable strain” b/c of society’s emphasis on production “in all senses”
    • B/c progress also includes the “Acquisitions…of the order of sensibility,” then “becomes nervous, hysterical”
    • “Sadness of the century…from overwork, movement, tremendous effort, furious labor…from overproduction in every domain” qtd 168
  • Zola: “sickness of progress” “We are sick, that’s certain, sick with progress.” “triumph of nerves over blood” 168
  • when “Decadent” can mean “someone who is decadent” comes into being
  • 1870s: Paul Bourget first to accept “unwaveringly…both the term and the fact of decadence” including as “philosophic and aesthetic theory of decadence as a style”
    • THIS IS THE FIRST FULL BLOWN USE
    • “decadence from within” “prefigured Nietzsche’s treatment of decadence a few years later” 169
    • “superior” to all else b/c of its “intensity” so that even tho’ it’s “uneven” it is “daring”
• 1881: Bourget’s article on Baudelaire, “Theorie de la decadence”
  • Begins w/sociological: evolutionism, heredity, biologism to interpret the social
  • Then as moment in time of society: “growing degree of anarchy…loosening of the hierarchical relationships among the various elements of the social structure” so “individualistic”
  • Then as art: individualism, “unity of the book breaks down to make place for the independence of the page, in which the page breaks down” for sentence and the sentence for the word so decadence is good for art.
    • not-decadence is barbaric, violent
    • to like decadence is to “indulge in the unusualness of our ideal and form” “we imprison ourselves in an unvisited solitude. Those who come to us will be truly our brothers, and why sacrifice what is most intimate, special and personal to others?” hmmm its a social individualism
      • decadence “relativism of modernity has resulted in the theoretically unbounded, anarchic individualism of decadence” that helps art even though it’s “socially paralyzing” 171
    • Hence, both decadence and modernity “coincide in their rejection of the tyranny of tradition” 171
• 1880s: decadentism and A G are “closely related” tho’ not quite synonymous
  • 1883 Verlaine publishes sonnet “Langueur” which ends up being manifesto for “short-lived movement” Decadisme with its magazine Le Decadent
  • 1884 Huysmans A Rebours: “a summa of decadent, an encyclopedia of decant tastes and idiosyncrasies…a psychology…and an aesthetics of decadence” 172
    • modernity = artificiality = decadence
    • “cult of artificiality” “exclusively negative-destructive imagination”
    • wants to “humiliate nature” not get away from it, a “violation of nature” not an escape hence “perverse” 172
    • believes the abnormal will point to a new beauty
    • des Esseintes’ literary taste: antiromantic, but rather likes Baudelaire and Mallarme
• After this novel, decadence will increase, climax, but not as tyrannical (ie less sure that decadence itself will solve modernity)... it becomes quite popular as a topic
  • “not longer cut off from the various concerns of practical life” and is more “critical-polemical” 174
  • So, after Huysmans, decadence is NOT a total neglect of the extra-aesthetic
    • It even gets closer and closer to revolutionary politics (and remember Mallarme always inclined to anarchism; and remember Wilde’s “defense” of utopia and of socialism)
  • So, continuing with 1880s onward: becomes a way to shock the bourgeoisie: Scandal, becoming avant-garde, has manifestoes
  • Le Decadent magazine then begins to say decadence is “simply an awareness and acceptance of modernity” 176; in which “decadence is nothing but the ascending march of humanity towards ideals with are reputed to be inaccessible” qtd 176 “We ought to have a language and a literature in harmony with the progress of science.” Odd. (but remember he thinks it’s still compatible w/epater le bourgeoisie and overthrowing their culture…and shows way for Marinetti and futurism)
    • What does Baju want? “attacked ownership, religion, the family, others would have ridiculed marriage, and advocated free love….praised the benefits of cosmopolitanism and of universal association…synthesis of revolutionary action” but he gets sad b/c he says his friends turn out to be “reactionary” and will only “mishandle” bourgeois prejudices rather than “destroy” them
    • And the magazine’s head, Baju, stops it and runs for Socialist member in the National Assembly. So by 1899 Decadisme is fading, gone, a fad, and people instead replace with “symbolisme”
• 1890s: “Decadent” still with “positive artistic connotations” 177
• Nietzsche and Decadence
  • 1888 The Case of Wagner: “Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence….’Good and evil’ is merely a variation of that problem.” qtd 179 so that the big idea is “Morality negates life.” and creates “the will to the end, the great weariness”
  • You need sickness b/c you don’t realize self-consciousness if you’re completely healthy
  • Hates Wagner, the arch-decadent: Wagner is a “sickness” he is grateful for: Harmful And Indispensable. You have to GO THROUGH Wagner (“there is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian” b/c “Wagner sums up modernity”)
    • Sickness gave him “Dialectician’s clarity” so that dialectics itself “a symptom of decadence” 180 b/c the only reason he can “reverse perspectives” like transvaluation of values is b/c he has fallen ill and recovered, fallen ill and recovered (sick man’s view of health, healthy man’s view of sick)
  • Decadence a sophist: makes its lies look like truth, more truthful than the truth (On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense), always looks like its opposite (weakness appears as strength)
    • decadents like Wagner make their “corrupted taste” look like “higher taste” 181 and make it look like “progress” and “fulfillment”
    • What do you do with decadence? Must “become conscious of it” and “resist being misled” by it: it is “unavoidable” and “necessary” part of every age and culture, but you have to avoid WANTING sickness and weakness: avoid “sickliness” 183
      • sickliness: “resignation and meekness in the face of the enemy” 183
  • Nietzsche as “first attempt at a comprehensible and radical critique of ideology in general, with a particular emphasis on modern bourgeois ideologies…including the ideologies of modernity” 194
• Decadence and Marxist Crit
  • Marxism never about the coincidence of “declining social forms and artistic decadence” b/c of the uneven development of art vis a vis society, b/c artistic development has its own immanence (1857 Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy)
  • Sartre in 50s rethinks the Marxist damning of “decadent” literature, saying that it needs to be judged in and of itself (by its own standards, not by any Lukacsian standards), and also saying that we shouldn’t believe the “naive” idea that a decadent society produces decadent art, but rather ask if these authors have created something interesting in the way to answer the problems of a decadent society: decadence creates problems that the artists answer; the author not automatically decadent but can be “recuperated by a new society” qtd 196 b/c his study of the “contradictions” of the decadent society will show the way for the new society
    • aesthetic value “transcends ideology” 197 even within a Marxist viewoint
  • For Marx and Engels, “decadent” never referred to art, but actually refers only to a society moving w/in hist mat
    • “decline, decay, and inevitable collapse of ruling classes when they no longer play the progressive role that helped them rise to power” 197
    • hist mat: historical progression driven by class conflict via old ruling class fighting w/new ruling class
      • “a conflict manifests itself first on the level of material production, which is the determining factor in history: new and more effective means of production appear, promoted by a rising class; the old social forms (institutions, laws, etc) supported by the ruling class become increasingly incompatible with the further development of the means of production, and when this incompatibility reaches the point of crisis the whole society finds itself in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. As a result a new social order is established.” Thus, a “dialectic of content and form” 197
      • quantity into quality: the slow transformation of processes leading to new society (gradual evolution, but then revolution brings new society, which is quality)
  • Engels on Balzac, one of most famous moments of Marxist aesthetics, which is nifty for me b/c it shows against the prescriptive tendency of Lukacs that good realism happens in spite of its author, unconsciously
    • Balzac “politically a legitimist” b/c it’s an “elegy” for the class that’s decaying
    • However, the bitterly satirizes them
    • And he presents the republicans as the real heroes
    • Thus Balzac “compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the real men of the future….one of the greatest triumphs of realism”
  • Says he is himself “a decadent and a beginning” 180
  • Plekhanov, Russian critic (d. 1918) first to have “fully articulated theory of artistic decadence” who accdg to Calinescu is the “first notorious representative of vulgarized Marxism in literary criticism” 201
    • who is trusted by Soviets despite his Menshevik (anti Lenin) ness
    • denounces decadence, therefore “brings into Marxist criticism the longtime Russian ambivalence towards Western modernity” 199
    • “Art and Social Life” 1912: decadence (decadent neo-romanticism) is sterile, self-defeating, conservative and reactionary despite hostility to bourgeois
      • Art for art’s sake comes about b/c “insoluble disaccord” between artists and their social environment
      • They didn’t revolt, he says, “against the social relations in which these vulgarities were rooted” 200 so they “approved of bourgeois society”
      • Why? B/c aesthetes NEED the working class to leave them free for pleasure “such as the drawing and coloring of cubes and other geometrical figures” 201
      • Why? B/c art for art’s sake became art for money’s sake: art now “mercenary” like the rest of the “mercenary age”
    • Can’t be surprised to learn, then, that his ideas were “single prerequisite for the emergence, two decades later, of socialist realism” 202 (ie social realism is known b/c it resists decadence; b/c you have ideology working in it, you sympathize and see the working class, and you go with the Party)
    • Unfortunately this unnuanced idea “went unchallenged” 1930s-60s in USSR, Western world’s Marxist circles 202 (Lukacs, Caudwell: Studies in a Dying Culture: damning “commercialized art, which is simply affective massage” qtd 203, art products made by bourgeois, so therefore art MUST become personal, non-social to avoid it, becoming “high-brow” and thus becomes fetish…art is one of two things, a commodity or a fetish; this is Stalinist)
      • mid 60s Western Marxists finally see relationship of Stalinist marxist aesthetics and fascist “rejection of the ‘sick art’ of modernism” 203; cf Ernst Fischer, Art Against Ideology: where changes his old ideas of decadence as formalism (whereas good art is socialist content) which is a sign “post-Stalin revival of humanist Marxism within the communist movement in Western Europe” 204 but still very controversial and not accepted by all
      • More on Fischer: rejection of the subject in painting is “a certain rejection of ‘ideology’ as false consciousness” b/c it makes reevaluation of what is important—classical myths, political battles? no! instead, we care about little subjects of everyday life (referring to Impressionism) 205; says that Nazi art was what is decadent; and so rediscovers the gap between the decline of art and the decline of a society, that Marx had long ago said
• Meanwhile, ideology discovered by non-Marxists, usually via their interaction w/Nietzsche’s critique of ideology (Nietzsche, Calinescu notes, does identify a false consciousness)
  • Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 1929-31
• Adorno on Spengler’s Decline of the West
  • he is against Spengler and Nietzsche (b/c he rejects Spengler because of Spengler’s Nietzschean influence)
  • reclaims decadence: “by its merciless negativity that decadence is the refuge of a ‘better potentiality’ and that it is able to set free the hidden forces of Utopia” 209
  • Adorno’s words: “forces set free by decay” “refuses obedience to this life” “our last hope that destiny and force shall not have the last word”
  • Like the other Frankfurt School members, Adorno knows art and ideology “mutually exclusive” 209; however, false art can be made through misuse of art forms, so that “genuine modern artist is compelled to look for new means of expression, whose novelty, according to Adorno, is measured exclusively by their negativity, by the ever more complex rejections that their choice involves.”
  • Schoenberg does it, negative aestheticism, in Adorno’s Philosophy of Modern Music: Stravinsky is false consciousness;
  • Adorno’s thus led to pessimism: “increasingly uncompromising and austere pessimism” 210 ie philosophy is belated, only comes to consciousness b/c it has failed to change the world: they have failed to carry out the final line of the Theses on Feuerbach: “So far philosophers have been content to interpret the world; what matters is to change it.”
  • For Adorno, unlike other Marxist thinkers of that time (the ones pointing towards Socialist realism), decadence not the “poisonous manifestation of ‘bourgeois ideology,’ but, on the contrary, as a reaction against it, and, moreoever, as a deep and authentic awareness of a crisis to which no easy (or even difficult) solutions can be prescribed” 210-1
  • On the Frankfurt School: “cultural critics and sociologists of culture…among the first to propose a consistent theory of popular or mass culture…and to elaborate on the various aspects and functions of the modern cultural market” (culture industry) (kitsch)
• Italian Marxist critics always saw decadence as something complex and subtle and not just bourgeois product: Petronio, Salinari, de Castris: artists now are opposition to bourgeois and have a “consciousness of crisis” which in itself is kind of Marxist b/c it’s an awareness of alienation (solitude) (leads us back to Brecht…)