Decadence
Usage of the term sometimes implies moral censure, or an acceptance of the idea, met with throughout the world since ancient times, that such declines are objectively observable and that they inevitably precede the destruction of the society in question; for this reason, modern historians use it with caution.
[3] The Decadents praised artifice over nature and sophistication over simplicity, defying contemporary discourses of decline by embracing subjects and styles that their critics considered morbid and over-refined.
This criticism describes the later Roman Empire as reveling in luxury, in its extreme characterized by corrupting "extravagance, weakness, and sexual deviance", as well as "orgies and sensual excesses".
[11] Bristow also notes that "[t]he image [of the painting] summons many qualities linked with fin-de-siècle decadence [alongside his]…queerness[,]" thus "inspir[ing] late-Victorian writers [as]…they…imagine anew sexual modernity.
[12] Thus, the presence of roses within the painting as opposed to the original "'violets and other flowers'" of the source material emphasizes how "the Roman world…h[eld] extra connotations of revelry and luxuriant excess" about them.
[13] Film was making huge technical and artistic strides during this period of time in Berlin, and gave rise to the influential movement called German Expressionism.
Berlin in the 1920s also proved to be a haven for English-language writers such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, who wrote a series of 'Berlin novels', inspiring the play I Am a Camera, which was later adapted into a musical, Cabaret, and an Academy Award winning film of the same name.
Holding decadence to be in any condition, ultimately limiting what something or someone can be, Nietzsche used his exploration in nihilism to critique traditional values and morals that threatened the decline in art, literature, and science.
In art, there have been movements connected to nihilism, such as cubism and surrealism, that pushes for abandoned viewpoints to ultimately tap into the potential of one's conscious mind.
Comparing this piece to Kazimir Malevich's "Black Square," abstract nihilistic art in the Western tradition was only beginning to take shape as the 20th century came about.
According to Will Norman from the University of Kent, the novel makes many references to prominent historical figures related to decadence, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire.
[15] Norman states, "... Lolita emerges as the risky reinstatement of a transatlantic decadent tradition, in which the failure of temporal and ethical containment disrupts a dominant narrative of modernism's history in American letters".
Norman describes that "... Nabokov reproduces the tension between American regionalism and modernist cosmopolitanism in his own 'Edgar H. Humbert', as the European aesthete embarks on his road-trip with Dolores...".
[15] The text exemplifies Nabokov's desire to replicate the many social disparities of American culture while using his character, H. Humbert, to demonstrate a lack of moral judgement.
Norman continues, "Nabokov's text positions itself as the dynamic historical agent, importing Poe wholesale (from caricature through to complex literary intellectual) into the present and facilitating his critique in the hands of the reader".
[15] Leaving the judgement in the hands of the reader, Nabokov uses Lolita to work through the complexities that decadence presents for ethical or moral obligations to society.
Viola Parente-Čapková, a Lecturer from the university in Prague, Czech Republic, argues that women writers following decadent literary structure have been overlooked due to their simultaneous influence of the feminist movement.
Pierre Bourdieu provides some insight into the attitudes of this new sub-class and its relation to post-modern theorists, embodied through students of bourgeois descent.
In the name of the fight against 'taboos' and the liquidation of 'complexes' they adopt the most external and most easily borrowed aspects of the intellectual life-style, liberated manners, cosmetic or sartorial outrages, emancipated poses and postures, and systematically apply the cultivated disposition to not-yet-legitimate culture (cinema, strip cartoons, the underground), to every-day life (street art), the personal sphere (sexuality, cosmetics, child-rearing, leisure) and the existential (the relation to nature, love, death).
With reference to Barzun, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat characterizes decadence as a state of "economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development".
According to Viswalingam, western culture started in 1215 with the Magna Carta, continued to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the founding of the United States, the Enlightenment and culminated with the social revolutions of the 1960s.
[21] Since 1969, the year of the moon landing, the My Lai massacre, the Woodstock Festival and the Altamont Free Concert, „decadence depicts the west's decline".
As symptoms he names increasing suicide rates, addiction to anti-depressants, exaggerated individualism, broken families and a loss of religious faith as well as „treadmill consumption, growing income-disparity, b-grade leadership" and money as the only benchmark for value.
[24] Contemporary left communist theory defends that Lenin was mistaken on his definition of imperialism (although how grave his mistake was and how much of his work on imperialism is valid varies from groups to groups) and Rosa Luxemburg to be basically correct on this question, thus accepting capitalism as a world epoch similarly to Lenin, but a world epoch from which no capitalist state can oppose or avoid being a part of.
On the other hand, the theoretical framework of capitalism's decadence varies between different groups while left communist organizations like the International Communist Current hold a basically Luxemburgist analysis that makes an emphasis on the world market and its expansion, others hold views more in line with those of Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and most importantly Henryk Grossman and Paul Mattick with an emphasis on monopolies and the falling rate of profit.
