Content area
Full Text
The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one's present impotence.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Fauslus, 436
The concept of decadence, especially when applied to a society or a culture but in many cases also when used as a term of aesthetic criticism, is closely related to ideas of temporality and historical change. It rests on a sense of difference between past and present, and a sense of the meaning of that difference. The object of study, whether past or present, is located within a grander narrative of historical development; its temporal location, its relation to other periods and historical phases, becomes in itself the explanation of its particular nature and character. "Decadence" when applied to the present tells us that we are late; and this lateness, this following-on, explains why modern culture has developed features that, partly through contrast and partly through analogy with earlier periods, are identified as "decadent."
In historical discussions, "decadence" is usually treated as a by-product of or a conclusion drawn from a particular grand narrative of history. This is the kind of account offered in the universal histories of Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, and the tradition can be traced back via Giambattista Vico to Augustine and Polybius.1 Historical change in this narrative is seen to be cyclical: civilizations and cultures rise and fall. This repetitiveness-Vioo's cycle of barbarism-heroicism-classicism-barbarism, Spengler's view that "eras, epochs, situations, persons are ever repeating themselves true to type"-is not to be dismissed as merely the product of the historian's romantic inclinations, but lays bare the logic of historical development.2 Societies and cultures are seen as natural objects following the diurnal and seasonal rhythms of nature, or as higher-order biological entities subject to the same life courses as individual animals; inevitably, therefore, they pass through twilight as well as dawn, autumn as well as spring, and periods of decline and decadence as well as periods of growth and maturity. "Let the words youth, growth, maturity, decay-hitherto, and today more than ever, used to express subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics and aesthetics-be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states."3
The idea of decadence can thus appear as the inevitable...