Criticizing the Critics: The Modern Politics of Decadence

In 2016’s Sirens, an ambient-electronic masterpiece, Chilean-American composer and recording artist Nicolas Jaar constructs a brooding sonic landscape. Jaar uses Sirens, and in particular “No,” the album’s central track, to express a kind of funereal ennui. Jaar starts “No” by describing:

Un día | One day

De ventana abierta | With the window open

Mi vecino vino a verme | My neighbor came to see me

Estaba lleno de desilusión | He was filled with disillusionment

Me miró en los ojos | He looked me in the eyes

Y me dijo | And he told me:

Ya dijimos no, pero el sí está en todo (1–7) |

We already said no, but the yes is in

everything (emphasis added).

What Jaar captures here, in the centerpiece of a political album, is a politics of disillusioned failure. “No” is a song written about the cultural and political impact of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime as President of Chile from 1973 to 1990. The song references the No movement, a gathering of artists, writers, journalists and intellectuals who encouraged the Chilean people to “say no” to Pinochet and to “say yes” to democracy. Yet, writing almost three decades later, Jaar expresses the sentiment that, while the Chilean people rejected authoritarianism, the “yes is in everything” (7). Here, Jaar refers to the rise and persistence of right-wing authoritarianism and populism (and along with it, white supremacy and nationalism) in recent years and expresses that while Pinochet’s tyranny may have come to an end, “… nada cambia [nothing changes] / No nada cambia [No, nothing changes] / No hay que ver el futuro para saber lo que va a pasar [There’s no need to see the future to know what’s going to happen]” (17–25). In this passage, and throughout Sirens as a whole, Jaar expresses a kind of political resignation characteristic of the broader political movements of recent years, in part as a reflection of the fact that we are more politically polarized than ever (Pew Research). While complex enough to be irreducible to one cause or explanation, Jaar’s dystopian political outlook shares characteristics with a literary movement that predates it by more than a century and that bears striking resemblances to both poles of today’s political spectrum: the decadent movement.

The author Hélène Cassou‐Yager characterizes the decadent movement as a “reaction and an opposition by a marginal group of intellectuals to the optimistic materialism of the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century” (185). This oppositional intellectual movement took the form of a literature of disillusionment, pessimism, and failure. Indeed, the name “decadent” itself derives, according to Liz Constable, from the “Latin de + cadere, to fall away or from… [and] centers on decline, decay, and the loss of traditional values” (2). What decadence explores is not just the loss of traditional values, however; decadence expresses a fundamental belief in the “degradation of the cultural present,” that is, that the culture and social hierarchy of the present moment are deeply twisted, morally repugnant, and must, at all costs, be avoided — if not undone. From this deep-seated disillusionment springs another central aspect of decadence: “belatedness,” that is, the sense that one was born too late in history and missed out on the true golden age of the past, in which humanity reached its peak.

The concept of degradation of the cultural present can be found in one of the defining works of literary decadence: J.K. Huysmans’ Against Nature. At the start of the text, Huysmans describes a protagonist, Des Esseintes, who “[i]rritated, ill at ease and offended by the poverty of ideas… would fly into a rage when he read the patriotic and social balderdash retailed daily in the newspapers… reach[ing] the conclusion that the world… was composed of scoundrels and imbeciles” (Ch. 1). Here, Huysmans introduces an antisocial protagonist who displays a disgust for the cultural present that surrounds him, especially for the politics and social milieu that he finds repugnant. As the novel progresses, this disgust for the cultural present intensifies: Huysmans writes in Chapter 12 that Des Esseintes “was removing himself further and further from reality, especially from the contemporary world which he held in an ever growing detestation” (Ch. 12). Yet it is not just a disgust with the degradation of the cultural present that Huysmans emphasizes through his protagonist: rather, Huysmans also establishes a sense of belatedness throughout the text. Take, for example, the following passage: as Des Esseintes alienates himself more and more from the present,

[he] roves, in full liberty, into another epoch with which, through a last illusion, he seems more in harmony… With some… [this experience] is a return to vanished ages, to extinct civilizations, to dead epochs; with others, it is an urge towards a fantastic future… whose image… is a reproduction of some past age. (Chapter 14)

The passage above, with references to “vanished ages” and “dead epochs,” expresses a fundamental sense of belatedness; it is a literature of nostalgia, disgusted with a present moment that deviates from an idyllic past. It is, at its core, an expression of mixed disgust and lament. In it lies the familiar face, more than a century separate, of the politics of modern America.

The literary movement of decadence was an attempt to articulate a disgust with the fin-de-siècle, a “cultural and aesthetic exhaustion” (Constable 8) with the capitalist excess of the robber barons. In today’s hotbed of cultural and capitalist conflict, a decade after unbridled financial greed nearly collapsed the global economy, a modern politics of decadence asserts belatedness as its axiomatic justification for existence. It argues that, having missed the peak of human civilization, the degradation of the cultural present imposes upon it no alternative but to proclaim, with righteous certainty, that the purpose of politics is to destroy the present establishment; that one has no choice but to abandon the sinking ship and to swim towards the shore of a better, brighter past, in which culture was more enlightened. It is fitting, perhaps, that this image calls Nicolas Jaar back to mind, as Sirens is an homage to Odysseus, who could not help but tempt himself with the promise of alternatives. Yet while Odysseus had the forethought to tie himself to the mast, the current politics of decadence enables a form of political polarization in which a center, a figurative mast that binds the political machine together, is part and parcel of the same cultural degradation that the movement seeks to destroy. In other words, a politics of decadence is, as some critics have written of the decadent movement in general, a politics of undoing and fragmentation of the center, the establishment, the self.

To engage with politics in 2019 is to engage with the same notions of belatedness and degradation of the cultural present expressed by the decadent movement in the latter half of the 19th century. One need look no further than Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” to find the suggestion that there is a bygone past in which a Great America existed, a global paragon of virtue and vitality; and moreover, that this once-great paragon is now in need of resuscitation. This same call for resuscitation exists on both political extremes. Take, for example, the decision by The Washington Post to adopt the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness”: first, the slogan implies that there is a degradation of present democracy such that it must be protected; next, the decision to adopt the slogan implies that, at some point prior to its adoption, there was no need to proclaim the importance of media as a source of light defending the principles of a bygone (or dying) democratic era.

Under the assumption that Donald Trump and The Washington Post occupy different ends of the political spectrum, the slogans above suggest that both political poles are experiencing an institutional ennui that drives them towards a politics of decadence. How can it be possible, though, that both sides of the spectrum are simultaneously experiencing the same ennui? I contend that each side of the political spectrum has constructed a politics of decadence in response to what it perceives as a politics of decadence on the other side of the aisle, and in doing so, both parties have drifted away from the political center. That is to say that if a politics of decadence is a fragmentation of the self, relying on what Arthur Rimbaud called the “derangement of all the senses,” (371) that is, the destruction of all of the tendencies that society teaches as “normal” and “proper,” then what is being fragmented today is the tendency to view political centrism as an important element of sociopolitical stability.

Yet here another question arises: how could a politics of decadence be constructed in response to another, different politics of decadence? One answer lies in the writings of anti-decadent scholars, most notably Max Nordau. Examining Nordau’s writing about his decadent contemporaries, one finds similarities to the manner in which today’s political parties have taken to describing one another. In Derangement, for example, Nordau writes, “those degenerates, whose mental derangement is too deep-seated, must be abandoned to their inexorable fate. They are past cure or amelioration. They will rave for a season, and then perish” (551). This bears an eerie similarity to the arguments made by both political parties today, whose first instinct is to label their opponents delusional and hopelessly misguided. This tendency to deride and delegitimize the opposing perspective reflects and produces the very same ideology as the thing criticized — thereby creating a brand of political righteousness that begets an opponent shaped after itself. As Liz Constable points out:

[D]isparaging characterizations of decadence have become so common as to seem mere received wisdom, [and] yet their very prevalence is perhaps telling — indeed symptomatic — of a problem lying within criticism itself… in their attempts to distance themselves… from their object of study, critics of decadence inadvertently become decadent critics of sorts, deploying the same oppositions and the same evaluative categories that they find problematic in their subject matter.” (4)

What Constable demonstrates here is the tendency of the critic to assume the behavior of their subject of criticism. In relation to modern politics, this tendency plays out as follows: each political party points to traits, ideological stances, and political gamesmanship of the opposing party as proof of the degradation of the cultural present. Having done so, it proclaims the need to return to a “triumphant past,” namely a past in which it retained political and social authority. And yet, in doing so, it employs the same ideological tendencies and gamesmanship as it degraded in the subject of its original criticism. This, in turn, provides fuel for the party that it once criticized to, in righteous indignation, point out the critic’s hypocrisy and expose it for what it really is: its own self-serving machine of political decadence. This game of criticism and counter-criticism can be seen, almost invariably, in a quarter-hour’s worth of watching Fox News and MSNBC side-by-side — indeed, it is how both networks profit. As each party responds to the other, they both destroy the stable, centrist self that tells them to seek compromise. Compromise, vis-à-vis the politics of decadence, is a value to be deranged, to be undone; to become a Voyant, a true seer of the future, one must destroy the illusory promise of humanity within the political opposition. Only then can one arrive at the promised shores of the belated past.

The politics of decadence is not a movement to utterly destroy the self. It is a movement, in expressing unabashed disgust for the cultural present and a nostalgia for an imagined or real past, to undo the wholeness of the self. It is a movement of fragmentation. As Christine Ferguson writes, “instead of simply providing an ideal model of radical identity, decadence exposes the deep contradictions and schisms inherent in all models of pure identity… The price of wholeness, decadence suggests, is disintegration: therefore, the only course is to accept partialness” (477). As it relates to modern politics, what Ferguson suggests is that there can be no hope for a politics of wholeness, of understanding and compromise with political opposition. Instead, there can only exist a politics of schismatic fragmentation. As it were, then, perhaps Nicolas Jaar’s emblematic statement must be flipped on its head: we have already said yes — to democracy and reliance on compromise — but the no, the lurking fragmentation of the politics of decadence, pervades everything.

Works Cited:

Cassou‐Yager, Hélène. “The myth of salome in the decadent movement: Flaubert, Moreau, Huysmans.” The European Legacy 2.1 (1997): 185–190.

Constable, Liz, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Ferguson, Christine. “Decadence as scientific fulfillment.” PMLA 117.3 (2002): 465–478.

Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against nature. SCB Distributors, 2011.

Nordau, Max Simon. Degeneration. Vol. 1. London, Heinemann, 1895.

Jaar, Nicolas. Sirens. Other People, 2016. Digital.

Pew Research. Political Polarization. https://www.pewresearch.org/topics/political-polarization/

Rimbaud, Arthur. “Letter to Georges Izambard.” Oeuvres de Rimbaud (1871).