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Memory, temporality, the very thrill of the "modern" itself, the New, and innovation are thus all casualties of this process in which not only Mayer's residual ancien regime is obliterated but even classical bourgeois culture of the belle epoque is liquidated. Akira Asada's proposition is thus even more grimly profound than it is witty, that the usual figuration for the stages of capitalism (early, mature, late or advanced) is a misnomer that ought to be reversed: the earliest years now being designated as senile capitalism because it is still the affair of boring traditionalists from an older world; mature or adult capitalism would then retain its characterization, in order to reflect the coming into their own of the great robber barons and adventurers; whereas our own, hitherto late, period can henceforth be known as "infantile capitalism," inasmuch as everyone has been born into it, takes it for granted, and has never known anything else, the friction, resistance, effort of the earlier moments having given way to the free play of automation and the malleable fungibility of multiple consumer publics and markets: roller skates and multinationals, word processors and overnight unfamiliar postmodern downtown high rises.
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."
damn
Whence, then, this strange inner shadow or opacity within the modern of the decadence itself? Why should proud modern -- or modernist -- people, at best merely apprehensive about their insufficient modernity, harbor this secret fantasy of languid, neurasthetic difference, with which they then go on to tax the more ancient provinces in their empire, not to speak of their own "most advanced" artists and cultural intellectuals? Decadence is clearly something which both resists modernity and comes after it, as a future destiny in which all the promises of the modern go slack and unravel. The concept fantasizes the return of all the weirdest religious sects and foods, after the triumph of the secular, of homo economicus and of utilitarianism: it is thus the ghost of the superstructure, of cultural autonomy itself, that haunts the omnipotence of the base. "Decadence" is thus in some way the very premonition of the postmodern itself, but under conditions that make it impossible to predict that aftermath with any sociological or cultural accuracy, thereby diverting the vague sense of a future into more fantastic forms, all borrowed from the misfits and eccentrics, the perverts and the Others, or aliens, of the present (modern) system. In history, finally, or rather in the historical unconscious, "decadence" comes before us as the ineradicable otherness of the past and of other modes of production -- an otherness posited by capitalism as such, but which it now, as it were, tries on, as with old costumes, since these ancient decadents (who have no concept of decadence themselves) are the others of an other, the difference of a difference: they look at their own surroundings with our eyes, seeing nothing but what is morbidly exotic, but complicitous and finally infected by that, so that the roles slowly reverse and it is we moderns who become "decadent" against the backdrop of the more natural realities of the precapitalist landscape.
Where nature has vanished, however, and along with it the very "otherness" that one can find offensive in the hubris and the exceptionalist ideology of modernity, the concept of decadence must then itself fade away, no longer available for characterizing and expressing our reactions to the postmodern. What seems to persist, on the other hand, is the historiographic stage set of all those "ends of the world" that lent the decadent moment its peculiar resonance and, as it were, its silver note. Late capitalism is in that sense a misnomer, insofar as "late" now yields none of the fin-de-sibcle or late-Roman overtones we associate with it, nor are its subjects fantasized as being faint and listless with too much experience and history, too much jouissance and too many rare and occult intellectual and scientific operations. We have all those things, indeed, but we jog afterward to refresh the constitution, while by the same token computers relieve us of the terrible obligation to distend the memory like a swollen bladder retaining all these encyclopedia references.
The hermeneutic task of theological modernism emerges from the desperate requirement to preserve or rewrite the meaning of an ancient precapitalist text within a situation of triumphant modernization, which threatens scripture along with all the other relics of an agrarian past in full-scale liquidation. Peasants at the time of the English Revolution had a life experience of the land and the seasons that was probably not very different from that of the characters of the Old Testament (or of the New Testament either); it is no wonder it was still possible for them to stage their revolution in biblical terms and to conceptualize it in theological categories. That possibility no longer exists for a nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie within a life-world of factories and artificial streetlights, railroad trains and contracts, representative political institutions and telegraphs: what can stories about pastoral peoples dressed up in exotic costumes possibly mean for such modern Western men and women? A modernist hermeneutic then intervenes to save the day: the biblical narratives, including the gospel itself, are no longer to be taken literally -- that way Hollywood lies! They are to be taken figuratively or allegorically and thereby stripped of their archaic or exotic content and translated into existential or ontological experiences, whose essentially abstract language and figuration (anxiety, guilt, redemption, the "question of being") can now, much like the "open works" of aesthetic modernism, be offered to a differentiated public of Western city-dwellers to be recoded in terms of their own private situations. The central hermeneutic difficulty is then clearly posed by the anthropomorphism of the narrative character of a historical Jesus; only intense philosophical effort is capable of turning this character into this or that christological abstraction. As for the commandments and the ethical doctrine, casuistry has long since settled the matter; they also need no longer be taken literally, and confronted with properly modern forms of injustice, bureaucratic warfare, systemic or economic inequality, and so forth, modern theologians and churchmen can work up persuasive accommodations to the constraints of complex modern societies, and provide excellent reasons for bombing civilian populations or executing criminals which do not disqualify the executors from Christian status.
ahhhhh
This identification of the class content of postmodern culture does not at all imply that yuppies have become something like a new ruling class, merely that their cultural practices and values, their local ideologies, have articulated a useful dominant ideological and cultural paradigm for this stage of capital. It is indeed often the case that cultural forms prevalent in a particular period are not furnished by the principal agents of the social formation in question (businessmen who no doubt have something better to do with their time or are driven by psychological and ideological motive forces of a different type). What is essential is that the culture ideology in question articulate the world in the most useful way functionally, or in ways that can be functionally reappropriated. Why a certain class fraction should provide these ideological articulations is a historical question as intriguing as the question of the sudden dominance of a particular writer or a particular style. There can surely be no model or formula given in advance for these historical transactions; just as surely, however, we have not yet worked this out for what we now call Postmodernism.
I have gone through my own practice and tried to identify the things I tend to do. The first is recurrences. I’m sort of an auteur critic in the sense that if I find a writer interesting, I try to read all their work. I do the same thing with musicians and painters. And when you do that, what you begin to notice are recurrences. As I say, I began with style studies, where one paid close attention to tics—not themes but peculiarities, eccentricities, recurrent expressions in a writer’s style. And from there one began to deduce a Weltanschauung. Spitzer calls it a kind of hermeneutic circle. Doesn’t matter what you call it, but Spitzer’s idea is that you find some stylistic peculiarity in a writer and then you begin to find other ones, and when you connect them they form a distinctive worldview. I take style as the central thing. Style meaning precisely this recurrence of certain forms and certain idioms—idiolects, if you like.
<3 a treasure
In fact, another maxim I have offered myself at certain moments is that ideological critique has to end up being a critique of the self. You can’t recognize an ideology unless, in some sense, you see it in yourself. Making critiques from the outside is like reading books you don’t like because you want to denounce them. Sometimes that can be politically important, and I would never knock that. There are political things one has to do, judgments one has to make, quarrels one has to have. But with literature, it’s much better to deal with things that you like, that you associate yourself with. And then, if there are ideological nuances to that association, it becomes a self-judgment. That is to say, you recognize the role of the ideology in yourself, your own racism or something, and then, from that, you evolve a judgment, if you like.
[...] this is the way I want us to consider Wal- Mart, however briefly: namely, as a thought experiment—not, after Lenin’s crude but practical fashion, as an institution faced with which (after the revolution) we can “lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus,” but rather as what Raymond Williams called the emergent, as opposed to the residual—the shape of a Utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the Utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.