For while high technology is omnipresent and unavoidable, particularly in its various religious forms, decadence compels by its absence, like a smell nobody mentions or a thought all the guests are visibly making an effort not to think. One would have thought that the world of headphones and Andy Warhol, of fundamentalism and AIDS, of exercise machines and MTV, yuppies and books on Postmodernism, punk hairdos and fifties' -style crewcuts, the "loss of historicity" and the eloge of schizophrenia, the media and obsessions with calcium and cholesterol, the logic of "future shock" and the emergence of scientists and counterinsurgency strike forces as new types of social groups, would have all the qualifications to pass for ripely decadent in the eyes of any sensible Martian observer; but it is corny to say so, and one of the other tactical achievements of the postmodern discursive system lies in the relegation of the laudator temporis acti to the storeroom of no longer very plausible or believable literary characters. To be sure, where the former norm has become just another "life-style," the category of the eccentric loses its reason for being; but the moderns still had this concept, which they sometimes acted out in a way that in our time only Fellini's great Satyricon recaptures, in the guise of a "nostalgia film" about the late Roman Empire, with this signal difference: that the nostalgia may somehow be real, in which case it must be identified as a hitherto unknown and unclassified species of feeling altogether (unless the whole thing is simply a costume remake of La Dolce Vita; in which case Fellini is just another moralizer without interest, something his film disproves by triumphantly eschewing the narcissistic pathos of its contemporary counterpart). Fellini here manages to construct a time machine in which we can still seize a glimpse not of the world as lived by the decadent Romans of the silver age but of that of high Modernists (at least in their first symbolist stage), who unlike us could still think the concept of decadence concretely and with Flaubertian force. Meanwhile, as Richard Gilman pertinently reminds us, 40 the Romans in question had no such concept, and unlike the character in the costume drama who announces that he is off for the Thirty Years' War, but like ourselves, the postmoderns, were very far from pinching themselves at every moment to remind themselves that they were living "in the Decadence."