Supplemental Essay: Decadence in Western Culture

​

Introduction and history

​In the main essay I said that freedom and anxiety tend to result in decadence as a cultural and aesthetic lifestyle (which subsequently tends to be reflected in Existentialism as a philosophy and Nihilism as politics). So it is useful to start with some history about the beginning of modern western decadence.

 

The genesis of modern decadence

In pre-modern times people lived in communal settings such as tribes or peasant villages. In the Intuition chapter I talked a bit about the dichotomous pairing of collectivism (representing the extraverted side) versus individualism (representing the introverted side). In pre-modern times society was basically synonymous with collectivism. To the degree that each individual might wish to develop individualism as the dichotomous opposite, that was facilitated through initiations at puberty when young teens were taught about hero journeys and encouraged to pick a socially-sanctioned totem or narrative for further personal development. (See the Sensing chapter for more on that.)

 

As I said in the main essay, traditional, pre-modern societies were less free and more rigid than modern times, but the positive side of that rigidity was that society provided guidelines for behavior (in the form of cultural canons, initiation rites, etc.) that kept individuals anchored in the realm of conventional, healthy one-sidedness.

 

Starting in the late 1700s industrialization ended much of the pre-modern collective village lifestyle and drove millions of people into cities to work in factories, where they became anonymous individuals floating around in a highly fragmented state. Industrialization and urban life brought new freedoms; but urban dwellers missed the communal life of the village and they craved a type of "recollectivization." Along with industrialization came modern mass communication: Rising literacy rates, a popular press, radio, and early movies resulted in shared national values. In this manner the masses were able to find a measure of "recollectivization" through the experience of assimilation into mass culture. The formation of modern nation-states gave rise to nationalism, another form of mass collectivism. 

 

However, Europe's artistic communities rebelled against industrialization and the rise of the urban lifestyle. Industrialization sprang from Enlightenment belief in rationality, science, and technology; but Rousseau and the Romantic movement saw industrialization and city life as a dehumanizing influence and fought it. The Romantics increasingly rejected mainstream culture and considered those who supported it (the bourgeois, the middle class) to be "philistines." Instead, the Romantics championed the working poor, the proletariat, the dispossessed, and even the criminal element.

 

In his book The Culture We Deserve, the historian Jacques Barzun says that after the French Revolution "art took over the role that religion had formerly played in holding up to the impure world the divine promise and reproach of a pure one. With the Romanticists, the city of God became the vision of art. It was then also that the bourgeois citizen became an object of hatred and contempt, because he believed in the world--in trade, in politics, in regular hours, a steady life, a safe marriage, sound investments, and a paunchy old age. His moral complacency and artistic philistinism appear the enemy of all generous emotion, the antithesis of everything spiritual and selfless in man."[1]

 

Romantic artists increasingly set themselves apart from mainstream culture. Some used satire, exploration of the underside of life, and abstraction in their art to shock and jar the bourgeois world. Some withdrew from society and established themselves in counterculture Bohemian communities, lived the life of starving artists, and simply turned their backs on the middle-class philistines who didn't understand their art.[2]

 

In turn, mainstream culture and the middle class rejected the Bohemian artist communities with their dissident schools of modernism, Impressionism, and Symbolism. The solid bourgeois mainstream citizen and the Bohemian artist seemed irreconcilable. But the early 1900s and the outbreak of the two world wars changed all that.

 

Under economic and social stress in the lead-up to the two world wars and the Great Depression, mass communication caused populations to coalesce into nation-wide, collectivist political movements: Hence Nazism and Communism arose after World War I, while the allied nations banded together under the banners of democracy and capitalism. However, the two world wars left tremendous devastation in their wake, especially in Europe where the fighting had been worst. After the wars, the middle class ceased to believe that mass political movements and populist governments could save the world; existentialism and nihilism sprung up in the capital cities of Europe.

 

After the two world wars and in the ensuing disillusionment with government mass political movements, the middle class increasingly came to view the dissident artists as prescient in their early opposition to mass culture. The bourgeois middle class increasingly took up the banner of the avant-garde artists and their rebellion against national collectivism, cultural assimilation, and mass culture.

 

Barzun describes this reversal in public esteem for modern art: "The nineteenth century may be said to have ended in 1914, and after the murderous war that began then, Western societies had changed. For one thing, it looked as if the philistine had been killed along with the other millions. For another, the newest art was more than ever a criticism of life and a refuge from its horrors. By 1920 art as such was the concern or pastime of a wider public than ever before, and, no matter how weird its latest forms, was accepted without protest. The past had shown that the public was always wrong, so wisdom and snobbery alike dictated humble submission to whatever came. For these philistines in reverse gear everything in a gallery or a book or on the stage was 'interesting.' It was experimental, and who would dare to challenge an experiment?"[3]

 

This anti-establishment aesthetic was the genesis of widespread decadence in modern western culture. 

 

Decadence

To recap the introduction to decadence that I provided in the main essay:

 

Traditional, pre-modern societies tended to anchor society in the realm of conventional, healthy one-sidedness. Modern freedoms, on the other hand, deprive western society of that anchor and allow people to get pulled into ego expansion or contraction and experience anxiety. The result:

• People who tend toward ego expansion drift outward in the direction of extreme extraversion (represented by masochism) or extreme introversion (represented by sadism);

• People who tend toward ego contraction collapse inward toward anomie in the center.

 

Thus in modern times the five-position spectrum looks like this:

Masochism <- Conventional extraversion -> Anomie <- Conventional introversion -> Sadism

 

As I said above, decadence is the cultural and aesthetic manifestation of anxiety. So I'll argue the following:

• In states of ego expansion, masochism and sadism manifest themselves as decadent victimhood and decadent rebellion; and

• In states of ego contraction, anomie manifests itself as decadent disengagement from society.

 

As a result, the five-position spectrum for decadence becomes:

Decadent victimhood <- Conventional extraversion -> Decadent disengagement <- Conventional introversion -> Decadent rebellion

 

So I will divide the following material into two sections (decadent ego expansion and then decadent ego contraction), develop each separately, and then point out their similarities and dissimilarities.

 

Decadent ego expansion: The victim and the rebel

Introduction

Ego expansion represents movement outward on the five-position spectrum, that is, in the direction of extreme one-sidedness. When expressed in terms of the aesthetic of decadence, the extraverted extreme becomes decadent victimhood and the introverted extreme becomes decadent rebellion.

 

Decadent victimhood and decadent rebellion represent extreme one-sidedness, and they have the same problematic nature as any other type of extreme one-sidedness: When people tend toward ego expansion they can expand outward into extreme one-sidedness, where they can get "stuck" in parental castration. In turn, parental castration tends to be accompanied by the daemonic of dichotomous opposite in the form of fears of shadowy "others" who persecute you.

 

As I said above: After the two world wars, people who made up the middle class increasingly lost faith in government and mass political movements; they joined the avant-garde artists in their rejection of collectivism, mass culture, and cultural assimilation. In terms of parental castration and daemonic fears:

• Frustration at big government and mass culture becomes a cause for parental castration; and 

• People project their daemonic fears outward into the collective and view other elements of society (specific political actors, the other sex, other races, other classes) as a threat. 

 

This is a perfect model for ego expansion and decadence. As I said above, decadence typically occurs when society seems at an impasse, for example when an idyllic past is seemingly replaced by a grim, dystopian present and future. When elements of the middle class drift into extreme one-sidedness, have no faith in government and mass culture, and are haunted by shadowy "others" bent on their destruction, then:

• Decadent extraverts focus on victimhood narratives and self-punish; and 

• Decadent introverts fixate on outrage narratives, rebel, and lash out against others.

 

As I described above, in the early and mid-1800s Romantics channeled this energy into a condemnation of society. They explored rebellion, counter-culture influences, and things that were bizarre, fetishistic, and shocking. To the extent that they created art for society, the aim was to shock and disgust: To confront the bourgeois "philistines" with their own hypocrisies and shortcomings.

 

In other words, the Romantics embraced transgression. In the book Sexual Personae Camille Paglia says, "Decadent art is ritualistic and epiphanic. Its content: Romantic sexual personae, the hierarchs, idolators, and victims of daemonic nature. [...] Decadent art makes hostile claims on the viewer. Its style is pagan spectacle and pagan flaunting."[4]

 

In modern times, with the emphasis on political expression, the rejection of society becomes more demanding and confrontational. Extraverted decadent victims turn into a constant victim class, crying that society preys upon them and persecutes them; introverted decadent rebels turn into a constant accusatory chorus, raging and condemning society.

 

The two sides eventually feed on and amplify each other: The decadent victims point to the rage of the rebels as one more proof of the evilness and unfairness of society; and the decadent rebels point to the victim class and its sufferings as proof of the evils of society. Each side uses the other side as justification for their own side; the two extreme sides become a horseshoe, bending around to meet each other in mutual condemnation of society. 

 

Together the victims and the rebels generate a continuous narrative of the failure of modern society that keeps both sides locked in a state of rage and grievance. There is even a certain amount of crossover between the two: As I've noted in other contexts, all adults have gone through all the developmental stages and as a result have access to the full panoply of psychological functions. Rebels and victims have so much in common in terms of their rejection of modern society that it's easy for the rebel to play the victim and vice versa. In a way, it's another demonstration of the idea that I mentioned in the section entitled "Extreme One-sidedness at the S Level" that sadist and masochist (predator and victim) share a certain "synergy" and use each other to reinforce their own mentality. Except in this instance they are both working toward the same end; their mutual rage and despair is aimed at society at large.

 

Barzun

The historian Jacques Barzun talks at length about the decadent rejection of mainstream society in his book The Culture We Deserve. Like the Romantics rejecting Industrialization in the early 1800s, modern decadents feel cornered and frustrated: "Thrown back wholly on themselves, men feel their insufficiency. They see more and more clearly that they are not in control of their individual lives or collective destiny, and that many of their practical goals elude their reach. Because of increasing populations, because of the momentum of material things, it appears harder and harder to accomplish any purpose, even one that commands general agreement. To get pollution out of the air, to provide housing or realize the theoretical possibilities of communication and transportation become 'problems' whose solutions recede as time flies."[5]

 

Elsewhere Barzun asks: "[H]ow does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the open confessions of malaise [...T]he old ideals look outworn or hopeless and practical aims are made into creeds sustained by violent acts [...] The upshot is a floating hostility to things as they are. It inspires the repeated use of the dismissive prefixes anti- and post- (anti-art, post-modernism) and the promise to reinvent this or that institution. The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life."[6]

 

Barzun relates it to "the now universal populism" and he calls it "rule by collective resistance and organized menace" and "bargaining by outrage."[7]

 

The youth in particular feel the burden of the times: "Despair, indifference, the obsession with cruelty and death, the Samson complex of wanting to bring down the whole edifice on one's head and the heads of its retarded upholders--those passions seize the souls of the young generations and turn them into violent agents of change, or disabused skeptics and cynics."[8] In turn, they attract the attention of the older intellectuals: "Seeing the poor, the rich, and the middling all contributing their quotas of vandals and dropouts, seeing youth as a new class, commercially important, but in open warfare with the world, the liberal imagination of educators and social philosophers concludes that here is one more witness to the bankruptcy of 'bourgeois values.'"[9]

 

Barzun says that intellectual opinion today "supports local passion against any central authority, and denounces all sanctions. In other words, power has ceased to be legitimate except when the people take it into their hands."[10]

 

Ultimately, the cause of modern decadence is freedom, leisure, and abundance, in fact, the very strength and success of modern western culture. They generate possibilities and opportunities but don't provide answers or guidance, which results in anxiety. Barzun says, "[T]he present spiritual distress and revolutionary surge come at a time of general affluence and high productivity; a time, moreover, when thanks to industry Western civilization has reversed the age-old proportions of rich and poor. It is certainly our shame that fifteen to twenty percent of our most advanced populations are in want, yet it is not by accident that the ratio is no longer what it always used to be--twenty percent in comfort and eighty percent in want. But nothing is harder to bear than the contrast between what is and what might be. The power to create wealth has given mankind a glimpse of universal plenty, and when we find ourselves far from abundance on a global scale, impatience turns into fury."[11]

 

Barzun goes on to say that even if we could achieve "planetary prosperity," it wouldn't matter: "It might make the poor and disfranchised happier, but one may wonder for how long, since those already free from want, tyranny, ignorance, and superstition declare themselves the most oppressed and miserable of men and willingly risk what they have in order to smash the system."[12]

 

In the end, Barzun talks about the future and the way forward for society; I'll discuss that at the end of this supplemental essay. But in the interim, Barzun has a warning for modern decadent victims and rebels based on the fate of similar movements in the past: "Anarchy goes so far; then it generates repression. Such a reversal would bring on a puritanism of the most relentless kind. Artists, free thinkers, and free lovers who currently denounce the Western countries as police states would from their labor camps long for the good old days."[13]

​

Decadent ego contraction: The dropout

Introduction

To recap: Traditional, pre-modern societies kept individuals anchored in the realm of conventional, healthy one-sidedness. Modern freedoms, on the other hand, deprive western society of that anchor and allow people to get pulled into ego expansion or contraction and experience anxiety.

 

People who tend toward ego contraction feel anxiety when they engage in ego expansion. So they get in the habit of hunkering down in their comfort zone, adopting a posture of retreat, and playing it safe in life to avoid anxiety, conflict, and disappointment. People who tend toward ego contraction may collapse inward toward the middle of the five-position spectrum and begin to demonstrate anomie: Disconnectedness from society, alienation, apathy, and cynicism.

 

If decadence is the cultural and aesthetic manifestation of anxiety, then anomie turns into decadent disengagement from society. Many of the Romantic artists of the early 1800s demonstrated anomie and decadent disengagement. They rejected industrialization and urbanization and isolated themselves from mainstream society; they became the decadent dropouts of their time.

 

Theme of the androgyne

Alienated from mainstream society, Romantic decadent dropouts embraced the working poor, the proletariat, the dispossessed, and even the criminal element. The androgyne was one of the chief counter-cultural influences that the Romantic artists championed. In her book Sexual Personae Paglia says that by the late 1800s the androgyne was at the center of the decadent visual arts: She says that by 1893 the androgyne "mushrooms over culture like an antichrist." The decadent art of that period is filled with self-contained, indolent, hermaphroditic figures.[14]

 

So the androgyne was a particularly apt symbol for Romantic-era decadent dropouts. As I said in the main essay, androgyny shares a number of features with anomie and decadent disengagement. Both the androgyne and the decadent dropout are "a closed circle, self-contained." The androgyne represents a nullification of sex; similarly, the decadent dropout represents a nullification of one-sidedness. Neither the androgyne nor the decadent dropout identifies with a set of preferred narratives on either side of a dichotomous pair, and as a result they both have no particular personal agenda or agency. So the androgyne and the decadent dropout both tend to float about on the edges of society, take up a posture of self-completeness, and live in a bubble of detachment and passivity.

 

As I said in the Sensing chapter in the section entitled "Sexuality versus Spirituality," androgynes have no need to seek their other half in marriage or in society at large; they are their own "other half." Paglia says, "Egoism is the androgyne's raison d'être. Self-complete beings need no one and nothing."[15] The androgyne ends up living passively, confined to a very narrow range of action. This becomes decadent closure: Living in a self-contained bubble can turn into a prison. In other words, the androgyne frees himself from anxiety, but that freedom comes at the price of passivity, solipsism, and self-imprisonment. The androgyne backs off and observes the world passively and without empathy or connection, awaiting something to come along and stir him or her, be it a great beauty or a great ugliness.

 

This description of the androgyne is a perfect model for ego contraction and decadent disengagement. As I said above, decadence typically occurs when society seems at an impasse, for example when an idyllic past is seemingly replaced by a grim, dystopian present and future. At such times, decadent dropouts contract down to the point of non-participation in life and anomie as an anxiety-stilling exercise. Like the Romantics in the late 1800s, today's decadent dropouts grow disgusted with contemporary society and retreat to solitary and self-pleasuring pursuits. They stand apart in a bubble of detachment and passivity, observing life but refusing to participate in it. Like the androgyne, they observe the world passively and without empathy or connection, waiting for something to come along and stir them.

 

When they are finally stirred by something, it tends to become a fetish for them; it becomes a monomania. Think of the example of dropouts spending their lives in their parents' basements with no concern for the outside world and having only one or two interests in life: Getting high and playing video games day and night.

 

The result is a Decadent "amoral cult of beauty."[16] Prior to modern times, art was expected to be uplifting and have a moral message. But with decadence, attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their beauty, which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the androgyne. Living in their bubble of detachments, decadents are unconcerned with things that are commonplace; only extremes attract their interest. Paglia notes the themes of High and Late Romanticism: "cruelty, sexual ambiguity, narcissism, fascination, obsession, vampirism, seduction, violation..."[17]

 

Feminine and masculine elements

I said above that androgynes and decadent dropouts represent the nullification of one-sidedness and sex. However, it is more accurate to say that decadent androgynes have characteristics of both sexes: The characteristics don't necessarily cancel each other out; often they continue to express themselves in distorted form. There is a conscious element representing a focus on either the feminine/sexual or the masculine/spiritual influence, and then a separate unconscious element representing the repressed form of the dichotomous opposite.

 

How do these two elements express themselves in the decadent "amoral cult of beauty"?

 

The decadent feminine component

Normally, under conditions of healthy, conventional one-sidedness, the feminine or matriarchal influence is associated with extraversion, immersion in the collective, compliance, and care for others; it is also associated with nature, disorder, chaos, emotion, sexuality, and earth. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia calls it the Dionysian influence. (Dionysus was the dress-wearing Greek god of drink, ecstasy, fertility, madness, etc. who presided over the women's Eleusinian rites).

 

But in the realm of decadent contraction, the feminine influence is represented somewhat differently. I've said in the past that extraverts tend to have a focus on the maternal influence. Decadent extraverted dropouts are often fascinated by women, but at the same time their androgyne self-completeness makes them wary of women's attractions; they don't want to be drawn against out of their bubble of detachment into the world of attachments, love, and anxiety. So they tend to have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the opposite sex; they are "both fascinated and repelled by the mystery of sex."[18]

 

One way for the decadent extraverted dropout to indulge his sexual fantasies and still retain his androgyne distance and composure is to take an interest in cruel, powerful mother figures, who may be represented in decadent culture and art as vampires and femmes fatales. Strong, masculine, vampiric women are attractive in that they offset the dropout's own passivity; and at the same time the dropout's anxiety arising from exposure to the sexual aspect is stilled by making the woman inaccessible or unapproachable. Often the women are portrayed as highly sexual, but the sexual urge itself is blocked or diverted by representing women as cruel and punishing.

 

An example: Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who directed thrillers and suspense films in the mid-1900s. In her book Provocations, Camille Paglia says, "There is abundant evidence of Hitchcock's insistence on total and sometimes autocratic control of his productions as well as of his leading ladies." Hitchcock was known for supervising every aspect of the costuming of his leading ladies, from fabric choice to style and color, accompanying them to fittings and choosing their make-up and jewelry. Paglia says,  "Hitchcock warned Janet Leigh before Psycho, 'My camera is absolute.' His camera habitually frames woman as a gorgeous cult object whom he loves to dress and drape." But then Paglia goes on to explain: "Simultaneously in Hitchcock, there is a dread of the imperialistic power of mothers, who are often belittling, hectoring, or suffocating. The ultimate symbol of this is the mummified mother's laughing skull in Psycho: horrific Mrs. Bates, with her flapping jaw, is the flip side of Rear Window's chic Lisa Fremont, 'who never wears the same dress twice.' [...] The frightful shower murder is like a ceremonial purification and slaughter, a blood sacrifice to a jealous local goddess who will brook no rivals. Mrs. Bates vampirically lives through her psychotic son, her skeletal face being briefly superimposed over his at the end, as we hear her crotchety voice usurping his inner thoughts." Paglia goes on to list the various femmes fatales in Hitchcock's films.

 

This sounds very much like the love-hate attitude of a decadent androgyne toward women. Hitchcock presents women as beautiful and powerful, but also terrifying or threatening. Paglia says, "Hitchcock's great films of the 1950s and early '60s show the tension between men's fear of emotional dependency and their worship of women's beauty, which floods the eye and enforces an erotic response over which a man has ethical but not conceptual control. [...] The two poles of Hitchcock's erotic vision are woman as objet d'art and woman as devouring mother. One pleasures the eye, and the other assaults it."[19]

 

Paglia devotes an entire chapter of her book Sexual Personae to depictions of women in decadent art. She says,"Decadent art's main mission is to record the modes of female power. Its theme is hierarchic assertion, pure charismatic presence."[20] For example, she says that the decadent artist Edward Burne-Jones painted a single female model repeatedly in his paintings, putting her face on both male and female characters. Paglia says, "Burne-Jones' transexual world is populated by one incestuously self-propagating being. We are in another Late Romantic bower, shadowless under a grey sky. The ritual limitation on his sexual personae is a Decadent closure, denying our eye right of access to other human types." In one painting called The Golden Stairs Burne-Jones depicts 18 women, all with the same face. Paglia says, "We drown in a shower of identical women, eighteen in all, cloning themselves and assaulting the eye. Beauty in excess makes Decadent dyspepsia."[21] (For more on this subject, see my notes on Chapter 19 of Sexual Personae: https://www.functionlevels.com/chapter-19-notes)

 

The result is decadent fetishism and self-enslavement in the orbit of the vampire. Paglia refers to this as "embowerment" or being trapped in a "bower." The reference is to Spenser's The Fairie Queene, where knights are diverted from their quests and trapped by witches or vampires in a "bower of bliss": It's the castrating vagina that steals the knight's energy and traps him in domestic servitude.[22]

 

The decadent masculine component

Normally, under conditions of healthy, conventional one-sidedness, the masculine or patriarchal influence is associated with introversion, consciousness, differentiation, and individualism; it is also associated with order, hierarchy, the building of civilization, culture, rationality, spirituality, and sky. Camille Paglia calls it the Apollonian influence (Apollo was one of the most "spiritual" of the Greek gods, being the god of oracles, prophecy, healing, archery, music and arts, light, knowledge, etc.)

 

But in the realm of decadent contraction, the masculine influence is represented somewhat differently. I've said in the past that introverts tend to have a focus on the paternal influence. Decadent introverted dropouts are often fascinated by focus, differentiation, hierarchy, etc., but at the same time their androgyne self-completeness makes them wary of interacting with the world around them. In other words, these traditionally patriarchal interests aren't utilized by decadent androgynes or dropouts for "civilization-building" purposes but rather serve as an aesthetic with which to perceive the world around them.

 

To spell it out a bit more: In healthy introverted one-sidedness, positive concepts like closure, boundaries, and hierarchy are related to differentiation and analysis: Things are picked apart, isolated, and studied as part of science and the building of civilization. But in decadent form those same concepts turns into passivity, asexuality, and voyeurism. The decadent "amoral cult of beauty" appears as an exaggerated aestheticism. From inside his bubble of self-imprisonment, the decadent androgyne observes, analyzes, and dissects the nature of beauty and ugliness; he becomes an aesthete and perhaps even a dandy--a connoisseur of sophistication and beauty--but otherwise remains a non-actor in life.

 

Thus the "civilization-building" component of the masculine influence is abandoned, and the masculine influence is diverted into aggressive aestheticism. Decadent aesthetic focus and attention bring clarity by distinguishing and separating details out from their surroundings and hardening their boundaries as objects of decadent fetishism. Decadent art is often ornate, rich, and polished like a fine jewel. In reference to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Paglia says, "Pre-Raphaelite art, like Mannerism, disturbingly avoids pictorial focus. Our eye is not automatically guided to the human figures but is forced to wander over the microscopic detail. Color is unshaded and applied in separate cells, as in Byzantine mosaic or Gautier's gorgeous color units. Flowers and blades of grass are brilliantly lapidary, the paint surface so richly worked that there is only a single step from Pre-Raphaelite naturism to Gustave Moreau's Decadent jewelled artifice. Everything in Pre-Raphaelite painting is seen too clearly. The eye is invited but coerced. Part triumphs over whole, exerting an uncomfortable pressure on the viewer."[23]

 

The decadent aesthete prizes hardness, artificiality, superficial beauty. The aesthete increasingly becomes an elitist and sensualist, obsessed with finding and isolating for his own enjoyment things that are beautiful, extreme, or outrageous. Anything else is simply beneath his notice. Isolated in this manner, attractions are objectified and stripped of any meaning beyond their great beauty, which is measured by their ability to engage the attention or interest or obsession of the aesthete. Paglia notes that this emphasis on beauty alone displaces and shoulders out any other way of regarding things and people, such as meaning or morality or depth: Paglia says, "The aesthete is an immoralist."[24]

 

Decadent aestheticism also applies to social relations. Paglia devotes two chapters of Sexual Personae to Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his play The Importance of Being Earnest. Paglia considers Wilde to be one of literature's most famous examples of the Decadent aesthete. 

 

The emphasis in decadent art is on beauty; in decadent literature, on the other hand, the emphasis is on form and ritual. Paglia says, "Wilde's play is governed by the formalities of social life, which emerge with dancelike ritualism. The key phrase of the English fin de siecle was Lionel Johnson's maxim, 'Life must be a ritual.' In Dorian Gray, Wilde says, 'The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality.'"[25]

 

In the decadent "amoral cult of beauty," the only thing that matters is appearance. The passive androgyne simply watches life from his bubble of detachment, so the premium is on how one looks to an admiring audience. Paglia says, "Matters of form are uppermost, in life and death. Emotion is nothing, the public impression everything. [...] Every event occurs with naked visibility on a vast, flat plain. Life is a play scrutinized by a ring of eyes. Dorian Gray contains a major Wildean principle: 'To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.'"[26] In other words, when you master public form and ritual you make yourself impervious to censure by others and thus avoid anxiety that causes ego contraction.

 

A corollary of form and ritual is hierarchy. Paglia says that hierarchy is "the secret subject of Dorian Gray."[27] Everything in the novel becomes about pecking order, rank, class, and so on. Paglia says, "Beauty, appealing to the pagan eye, is Apollonian hierarchy, Greek divinity. Dorian Gray makes complicated use of the western idea of hierarchies. Beautiful persons are aristoi, 'the best.' They are Dostoyevsky’s 'extraordinary men,' who have the Sadean 'right to commit any crime.' The ugly belong to a lower order of being."[28] Paglia suggests that this sense of beauty as a marker of hierarchy probably relates to the charisma of narcissistic people or the glamor of celebrities.[29]

 

Paglia also relates this to Wilde's witticisms. Paglia says that witticisms are used to assert caste relations in a hierarchy: "The persona latent in the Wildean witticism is a hierarch, the androgyne as social despot. [...] Rhetorical energy is devoted to social differentiation and segregation."[30] The characters in The Importance of Being Earnest trade barbs as a form of social combat, and it's all for appearances: "[O]rder is admired not because it is right or just but because it is beautiful. In fact, order here makes no intellectual sense at all. [...] Aristocracy in Earnest satisfies aesthetic and not moral demands."[31]

 

Paglia notes that Wilde's witticisms are alive and well today in the gay subculture: "From Wilde's life and work came the aesthetic of high camp, an Apollonian mode of comedy and connoisseurship." She notes that even today the gay world "follows a vanished aristocratic code: class consciousness, racial stratification, amoral veneration of youth, beauty, and glamour, love of scandal and gossip, and use of the stinging bon mot and theatrical persona of the androgyne of manners. Thus Wilde's English epicene has secretly transmitted British hierarchism to other lands and other times."[32] (For more on decadence in Oscar Wilde, see my notes on Chapter 20 of Sexual Personae: https://www.functionlevels.com/chapter-20-notes)

 

Summing up the feminine and masculine influences together in decadent ego contraction

The decadent androgyne is keenly aware of beauty; but feminine sexuality, changeability, Dionysianism, and chaos (which Paglia condenses under the umbrella term of "liquidity") are dangerous to the decadent dropout--they threaten his bubble of detachment. So the feminine component is made hard and unapproachable by isolating it and turning it into an objet d'art, a fetish. Paglia says "All art, as a cult of the autonomous object, is a flight from liquidity. The Decadent swerve from sexual experience is identical with the Decadent creation of a world of glittering art objects. Both are responses to the horror of the female liquid realm."[33]

 

Paglia says, "Art supplants nature. The object d'art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. Person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. Decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality. It is drenched in sex, but sex as thought rather than action. Decadence is an Apollonian raid on the Dionysian, the aggressive eye pinning and freezing nature's roiling objects."[34]

 

As a result, the art and culture of the decadent androgyne taunts and teases, it shocks and disgusts, and it is sexual but also serves to block any kind of emotion or connection as dangerous to the principle of decadent detachment. This is the point where art and culture of the decadent androgyne differs from the art and culture of decadent sadomasochism: The decadent victim and rebel attach themselves too much to a cause or outlook, whereas the decadent dropout detaches himself from everything and keeps the world at a safe distance. Or to put it another way:

• Decadent ego expansion and sadomasochism are the result of parental castration, which gives rise to the daemonic of the dichotomous opposite in the form of fears projected out into society;

• Decadent ego contraction and anomie consist of an aesthetic of deliberate passive observation that is supported by a repressed version of the dichotomous opposite.

 

However, as I suggested in the supplemental essay on anomie, decadent detachment with its lack of healthy narratives and one-sidedness leaves dropouts prone to sudden bursts of ego expansion and sadomasochism, usually to their own dismay and detriment. This is exactly the kind of involvement in the world and anxiety-ridden adventure that they are trying to avoid by dropping out. But with no narratives and no personal agenda or agency to serve as guide or guardrails in their life, they can get ambushed by their own repressed needs. A random masochistic victim narrative or sadistic outrage narrative seizes their attention and draws them into drama and conflict despite their own attempts to stay disengaged. To regain their decadent disengagement, they may need to destroy the thing they love; or the alternative is that they themselves are destroyed by the resulting conflict.

 

This is probably the mechanism behind a lot of anti-hero plots in modern movies. An ordinary person is minding his own business, but he gets pulled into drama and confrontation by some force outside his own will: A great love, a great rivalry, sympathy for an underdog, or perhaps just some absurdity of modern life. But the confrontation quickly spirals out of control and leads to tragedy and martyrdom. 

 

The message of such movies is that the world is a dangerous place, and one wrong step can precipitate a catastrophe. And sometimes life genuinely seems like that: We all claim to want peace and communication; but one look at social media on the internet shows that conflict is always just a wrong word or a misinterpretation away. (Or at least, that's the way that decadent dropouts see the world.)