From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon Mar 13 2006 - 15:47:16 EST
A few ideas - I suppose decadence could be interpreted as - a moral/behavioural concept, - as an historical assessment of the social decay of a type of civilisation or mode of production (a la Jared Diamond or Joseph Tainter), - or as a cultural assessment. The theme of social decay and decadence is certainly an enduring concern and a source of anxiety in bourgeois society, which is mobilised both for leftwing and rightwing political agenda's, this is the point. I've tried to provide some simple suggestions about the concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_product#Surplus_product_and_decadence An indication of how communists understood decadence in the 1930s can be gleaned from Christopher Caudwell's "Studies in a Dying Culture" (some bits of it here http://www.marxists.org/archive/caudwell/). Gyorgy Lukacs also refers to it in several writings (e.g. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/destruction-reason/ch03.htm ). It was a kind of "conception of the epoch" people had - not entirely unreasonably, given two world wars, numerous smaller-scale wars, and great social havoc. Maybe difficult to understand in retrospect, but at the time it seemed very real. The flavour of it is also captured on film, e.g. Bertoli Bertolucci's "1900" or Bergman's "The Serpent's Egg", suggesting how economic dislocation creates unscrupulous "human dust" with nothing left to lose, and leads to depraved, perverse, licentious, brutal and cruel behaviour, of which full-fledged fascism and the holocaust is the ultimate expression (these days, God-loving Americans talk of "Islamofacism", a sort of Orwellian newsspeak for a new bogey). I would say "the war against terrorism" is really the perfect expression of bourgeois decadence in the above senses - it is a deliberate, reactionary attempt to stoke up fears and anxieties among the public about a largely non-existent enemy, as a way of bolstering public morality and keeping people in their place. It is true, terrorism is an undesirable and morally repugnant act, but point is, the word is indiscriminately applied to any old act of defiance (including self-defence) and there are vastly worse problems in the world, so an obsessive focus on terrorism attests to very warped moral priorities indeed. In the case of Israel/Palestine, the journalistic portrayals become totally bizarre - if the IDF razes buildings, fires rockets on cars or persecutes Palestinians, this is "self-defence" but if Palestinians do it, it is "terrorism". So Hamas is a "terrorist" organisation, but the Israeli state isn't. It's the same in Ireland - the IRA are terrorists, but the Ulstermen aren't. What a load of codswallop. Here in Holland, there is nowadays a mutation of meaning going on as regards "radicalisation" - it comes to mean something sinister, something about bomb-throwing terrorists, and special monitoring units are set up to patrol signs of "radicalisation" (particularly of course Islamic radicalisation). Radicalisation is no longer associated with a popular-democratic mass movement. Whereas to be radical, simply means to go to the root of the matter, and not be content with the superficialities of its symptoms. The way I experienced the "crisis" in my own life was that, in my teens, there was a sea-change in perceptions about where society was heading - in the 1960s, there was this cultural optimism, things could only get better and better, there was full employment and so on. After about 1973, this began to change towards social pessimism, and in the late 1970s, just as I got out of school, there was for the first time a great fear of unemployment, even although the amount of unemployment was still relatively small. I think the '68 generation had this perspective, of the red revolution breaking out within about ten years. The 1980s seemed like an era of economic crisis, there was a lot of fear of unemployment, and in a series of strategic fights the working classes suffered big political defeats. By contrast, the 1990s were often euphoric - stimulated by new information technologies, sexual liberties and booming asset sales, it seemed like there had never been so many possibilities for getting a good life and the goodies of life. All that waned again, after the stock crashes and the collapse of the new economy. I'm left musing though, that the fear of crisis was much greater than the actual crisis, and certainly that fear wasn't conducive to building a good life. As they say in Dutch, a person suffers the most, from the suffering that he is afraid he might suffer. In reality, the way the crisis manifested itself, was through permanent restructuring and increased job mobility. I have not worked in one workplace in my life, that wasn't restructuring or about to restructure. It often seems like a pain in the ass, because the more it changes, the more it stays the same, except that some professionals get rich out of all the restructuring, rewording the same old thing. If there was a "crisis", it was more in the nature of rapid social change which broke up all kinds of traditional institutions, forms of association, social fabrics etc. In the end, you've had so much change and uncertainty in your life you maybe just want some peace and quiet. At least, I often feel that way. But after a while I can't stand that either, maybe I'll write something or do something etc. Sociologically, I tend to think of societal crises as objectively comprising four interlinked "moments" - - an economic crisis (decline of economic growth and productive investment, rising unemployment), - a social crisis (intensified social competition for jobs, opportunities and a "slice of the cake", including increased racism, the fracturing of the old forms of association), - a political crisis (the old solutions do not work anymore, creating an accelerating turnover of political leaders and an inability to find a stable political consensus), and - an ideological-cultural crisis (a crisis of moral norms, due to the breakdown of the old institutions, with the legitimacy of the social order being increasingly called into question, and increased cynicism and pessimism). The question however is to what extent the perception of a crisis is based on an objective assessment, and to what extent it is more an emotional-psychological experience - to what extent crisis talk is actually conducive to anything (including action to resolve problems). It takes real research, to put that in perspective, and go beyond impressionism. The old Ernest Mandel - who mustered an array of statistics to illustrate "the epoch of permanent revolution" - used to say, what typifies modern decadence is that we shut our eyes to the total amount of suffering in the world - if we were fully aware of it, we would not psychologically be able to bear it. But one could also say, well, life is a "vale of tears" anyhow, if thought about profoundly, but we somehow have to find some happiness in it. In reality, possibly the biggest crisis of our time is the growth of a rheumy conservatism and diminished expectations of life, whereas the task of a revolutionary or a radical thinker is to make "the impossible possible", to expand or widen the realm of human possibilities, to inspire confidence in the ability of self-acting individuals to change their world. If people are too afraid or overloaded to dare to do anything, speak out, be adventurous, join together etc. they cannot change society for the better, can they. You might laugh at me, with my humdrum petty existence, for saying this, but at least I'm not afraid to moot the idea. Jurriaan Some things in life are bad They can really make you mad Other things just make you swear and curse. When you're chewing on life's gristle Don't grumble, give a whistle And this'll help things turn out for the best... And...always look on the bright side of life... Always look on the light side of life... If life seems jolly rotten There's something you've forgotten And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing. When you're feeling in the dumps Don't be silly chumps Just purse your lips and whistle - that's the thing. And...always look on the bright side of life... Always look on the light side of life... - Monthy Python
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