THE CONCEPT OF DECADENCE IN MARXIST CRITICISM

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In 1963, speaking at a Conference of European Writers convened in Leningrad, Jean-Paul Sartre felt the need to dissent from the rigid views on the question of "decadentism" upheld by Soviet writers and critics. By that time Sartre had come to regard himself—and to be regarded—as a Marxist. He was by no means inimical to the Soviet experience as a whole, although he did not identify with some of the basic dogmas of official Soviet ideology. Moreover, he was strongly sympathetic to the process of de Stalinization, which was then in full swing and seemed to justify a good deal more optimism than was actually warranted. So, he may have thought that the moment had come to reject the concept of "decadentism," in which he saw a survival of Zhdanovism, the specifically cultural form of all-pervading Stalinist terror. "Our friends" [the Soviet writers], Sartre argued very politely, are superficial when they deal with the problem of cultural decadence:

            When they speak of Proust. Joyce and Kafka as decadent authors, very often they have not read them....
            However, this is not the problem. The real problem is an ideological one, and it must be stressed. Either we
            accept an utterly naive and simple Marxism, and say: 'such and such a society is decadent, therefore the
            writers who express it are decadent."... Or we say: a decadent society poses new problems for a writer,
            tortures him in his own consciousness and in his creative activity." Otherwise, would there be any
            progressive people in a decadent society? Thus we must certainly consider that

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            this society, which contains and produces the artist, also conditions him; but we are not by any means
            compelled to think of this author strictly as a decadent. On the contrary, he can be recuperated by a new
            society; and there is no certainty that in his struggle against his own contradictions he may not have invented
            the forms of the ideas which will be used by the liberated society. 84

To fight a "naive" point of view can be dangerous intellectually; the polemicist himself can become unwittingly naive and elementary. This is even more likely when the polemicist does not want to annoy those whose narrow-mindedness he is resisting. But, in spite of the simplistic character of his remarks, Sartre was making a valid point insofar as the Marxist concept of decadence was concerned, namely, that this concept could not and should not be indiscriminately applied to the matter of aesthetics. Marx himself had pointed out the transideological character of great art and insisted on the immanence of aesthetic development in a famous passage (in Introduction to The Critique of Political Economy, 1837), where he spoke of "the unequal relation between the development of material production and e.g., artistic production," and where, stressing the backwardness of the civilization of ancient Greece, he noted the permanence and even the absolute superiority of Creek standards of beauty: "The difficulty does not lie in understanding that the Creek art and epos are hound up with certain forms of social development. It rather lies in understanding why they still afford us aesthetic enjoyment and in certain respects prevail as the standard and model beyond attainment."85 Nowhere in Marx or Engels is there any suggestion that would legitimize the view of a compelling parallelism between declining social forms and artistic decadence. On the contrary, as Marx put it, the decline of certain classes "such as the medieval knights, provided the raw material for magnificent and tragic works of art."86

In connection with the idea of artistic decadence in the context of Marxist thought, Sartre made a more complete and courageous statement a year after the Leningrad Conference, at a Symposium on the Question of Decadence held in Czechoslovakia (other participants

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were Ernst Fischer, Edouard Coldstucker, and Milan Kundera). Sartre said on that occasion,

            I think that before anything else we must reject a priori the concept of decadence. It is evident that
            decadence has existed.. . . It is only on a strictly artistic basis that the concept of decadence can be de fined
            and applied. To the question: Can art he decadent? I answer: It can be, but only if we judge it by its own
            artistic criteria. If we wanted to show that Joyce. Kafka or Picasso are decadent we would have to do this
            primarily on the basis of their own works.87

What Sartre's point of view amounts to is a clear-cut distinction between artistic immanence and ideology. The latter can certainly influence art in a variety of ways, but aesthetic value is never entirely determined by ideology; as a matter of fact, aesthetic value deserves its name only insofar as it transcends ideology.

Significantly, neither Marx nor Engels addresses himself to the question of artistic decadence. They do not even use the term. The concept of decadence taken in a broad sense and applied socially, however, is a constitutive element of their historical materialism. This concept is conveyed by a large variety of terms suggesting the decline, decay, and inevitable collapse of ruling classes when they no longer play the progressive role that helped them rise to power. A product of class struggle, history illustrates at every stage the clash between the forces of the new and those of the old. The conflict manifests itself first on the level of material production, which is the determining factor in history: new and more effective means of production appear, promoted by a rising class; the old social forms (institutions, laws, etc.) supported by the ruling class become increasingly incompatible with the further development of the means of production, and when this incompatibility reaches the point of crisis the whole society finds itself in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. As a result a new order is established. Basically, structural change in history is explained within the framework of a dialectic of content and form, implying the transformation of quantity (the means of production that develop slowly and steadily, illustrating the principle of gradual evolution) into quality (the new social

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structure that is brought about by revolution). Evolution leads to revolution, and a declining class opposes both, practically as well as ideologically.

But is the artistic culture of a period of crisis and decay (at least insofar as the ruling classes are concerned) a decadent one? Or, to be more specific, is an artist who chooses to defend an ideologically reactionary position a decadent? There is absolutely no suggestion in either Marx or Engels that such a relationship between ideological content and aesthetic achievement can be established. On the contrary, a great artist remains great even when his conscious options clearly go against the mainstream of history. Here the often quoted statement of Engels on Balzac is relevant:

            Well, Balzac was politically a legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the irreparable decay of good
            society; his sympathies are with the class that is doomed to extinction. But for all that, his satire is never
            keener, his irony never more bitter, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he
            sympathizes most deeply—the nobles. And the only men of whom he speaks with un disguised admiration
            are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloitre Saint Mery, the men who at that
            time (1830—36) were indeed representatives of the popular masses.

That Balzac was thus compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he sate the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found—that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of realism, and one of the greatest features in Balzac.88

Neither the concept nor the term "decadence" played any significant role in the Marxist interpretation of art before the early twentieth century. If we dismiss certain purely accidental occurrences of the word in Marxist critical texts at the turn of the century (when the French epithet decadent had achieved something of an international popularity that went far beyond the literary squabbles of Parisian cultural life), the first Marxist to propose a fully articulated theory of artistic decadence was a Russian, the revolutionary philosopher and critic C. V. Plekhanov (1856—1918). Although Plekhanov's version of Marxism was different from Lenin's—a difference that was under-

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scored by Plekhanov's joining with the Mensheviks and subsequently rejecting the Leninist view of the Russian socialist revolution—his approach to aesthetics and his doctrine of "scientific criticism were readily accepted and later "canonized" by party ideologists in the Soviet Union. Plekhanov's aesthetic writings have been widely published and publicized, and some of his ideas— especially his account of the decadence of Western bourgeois culture—have become standard themes of Soviet criticism, rein forced in the period of Zhdanov's intellectual terror, and accepted as a matter of course even after the collapse of Stalinism. Thus, it should not seem surprising to discover that the article on "De cadence" in the 1970 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is based entirely on the theoretical authority of Plekhanov (obviously, Zhdanov and a host of other Stalinist experts on decadence had to be dropped for cosmetic reasons).89

It is important to point out that, no matter how genuine a Marxist he was. Plekhanov's denunciation of decadence in modern literature was much closer to certain nineteenth-century Russian intellectual traditions (in particular the ethical view of art promoted by such diverse authors as V. C. Belinskv, Chernysbeysky, or Tolstoy in his religious-anarchist essay What is Art?) than it was to the spirit of Marxism. Plekhanov as a theorist of decadence unwittingly brings into Marxist criticism the longtime Russian ambivalence toward Western modernity and its artistic expressions. It seems, therefore, correct to say that the twentieth-century orthodox Marxist critique of decadence is largely if not exclusively a Russian contribution.

Plekhanov's views on modern art and decadence are summed up in his essay "Art and Social Life" (1912), where be establishes a direct historical link between the romantic hostility to the bourgeois mode of life and decadent (or neoromantic) negativism; both attitudes are not only sterile and self-defeating but—in spite of their pretense not to be committed to any kind of utilitarian ideal—are definitely conservative and even reactionary. Neither the romantics nor the neoromnantics actually fought the bourgeoisie: in fact, they

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approved of bourgeois society, the former "instinctively," the latter "consciously." Decadence is therefore nothing but a case of duplicity. Plekhanov writes:

            The tendency towards art for art's sake arises and becomes established wherever insoluble disaccord is to
            be found between those engaged in art and the social environment in which they live. Although in revolt
            against the vulgarities of the society they lived in, the Romantics, Parnassians and realists in no way rebelled
            against the social relations in which these vulgarities were rooted. On the contrary, whilst denouncing the
            "bourgeois," they approved of bourgeois society—at first instinctively, and later, quite consciously. And the
            more the emancipation struggle against the bourgeois social system developed, the more conscious became
            the attachments to this sys tem of the French adherents of art for art's sake. And the more conscious the
            attachment became, the less were they able to remain indifferent to the ideological content of their own       
            work.  But their blindness towards the new trend, which was seeking to regenerate the whole of social life,
            made their ideas mistaken, narrow and bigoted. It depreciated the quality of the ideas expressed in their
            works. As the natural result of all this, French realism found itself at a dead-end, out of which were to
            develop. . . decadent and mystical tendencies.90

Plekhanov's approach to the question of decadence not only is rigid and crudely schematic but also involves blatantly contradictory assumptions without making even the slightest effort to reconcile them. The fundamental inconsistency of his theory comes from his treatment of decadence simultaneously as (1) a natural phenomenon, the inevitable form of a dying culture produced by a dying society ("... an apple tree must produce apples and a pear tree pears"; likewise, art in the period of capitalism's demise must be decadent),91 and (2) the result of a free and consciously reactionary choice by writers and artists. The decadents, we are told, "want a movement. But the movement they desire is a conservative movement, opposed to the emancipation movement of our time.. . . This is why even the best of them cannot produce the fine work of which they might have been capable had their social sympathies and way of thinking been different. "92 But such a flat statement amounts to

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saying that, after all, an apple tree might have produced pears if it had chosen to do so! The second point, however, is essential to Plekhanov's highly politicized view of decadence, and it entitles him to bring most serious moral charges against the decadents, a thing that would have been impossible if he had limited himself to the "natural" explanation.

A revolutionary Puritan, Plekhanov accuses the decadents of counterrevolutionary sloth: "What the present-day aesthetes need is a social order that will force the proletariat to work while they give themselves up to elevated pleasures... such as the drawing and coloring of cubes and other geometrical figures." 93 Cubism (which also comes under fierce attack elsewhere in the article), like other manifestations of the early artistic avant-garde, is the object of a blanket rejection, and this direction has been followed not only by the mainstream of official Soviet criticism but also by better in formed and more sophisticated Marxist intellectuals such as Georg Lukacs or Christopher Caudwell. In his blunt style, Plekhanov goes on to point out that, "Constitutionally incapable of serious work, they
[i. e., the decadents] are filled with most sincere indignation at the thought of a social order in which there will be no idlers. 94 The slothful decadent is also greedy and in total collusion with the bourgeoisie, which he pretends to despise: "Art for art's sake... has become art for money's sake.... Is it in the least surprising that, in a generally mercenary age, art too has become mercenary?"95

In Plekhanov, the traditional Russian ethical censure of the aesthetic reaches the stage of unwitting self-parody, a parody that will be carried to incredible extremes during the days of Stalinism. Leaving aside the crude polemical cliches and the dreary quality of Plekhanov's style and thought. we may say that he is perhaps the first notorious representative of vulgarized Marxism in literary criticism. The broad and flexible economic reductionism of Marx be comes explicitly and almost exclusively political in Plekhanov, and clearly announces the total politicization of literary criteria, which will mark both the theory and the practice of socialist realism. Plekhanov's theory of decadence was probably the most important

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single prerequisite for the emergence, two decades later, of socialist realism. The link between the two is so strong that if we dismiss the idea of decadence (as Plekhanov and, then, the cultural Stalinists conceived of it), the label socialist realism becomes simply meaning less. This link (how dialectical) is emphasized in the article on "De cadence" in the latest edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia:

Many motifs of the decadent frame of mind have become the property of various modernist artistic currents. Progressive realist art, and above all the art of socialist realism, develops in a constant struggle against them. In criticizing various manifestations in art and literature of the attitudes of decay and decline, Marxist-Leninist aesthetics pro ceeds from the principles of high ideological content, identification with the people, and party-mindedness in art.

In spite of its elementary and hopelessly mechanistic (reductionist) character, the Soviet theory of bourgeois cultural decadence, with its arbitrary identification of decadentism, modernism, and the avant-garde, went unchallenged between the 1930s and the 1960s not only in the Soviet Union but also in orthodox Marxist circles throughout the Western world. Even the best intellectually equipped Western communists accepted the banalities implied in the Stalinist view of bourgeois decadence as a matter of course, apparently unaware of its preposterous philosophical simple-mindedness and of the gross misconceptions (even from the Marxist standpoint) that its application was bound to bring about. Some of the writings of the English Marxist Christopher Caudwell offer a good example. Caudwell's concept of decadence (the decay of bourgeois civilization as embodied in the "dying culture" of Western modernity) is certainly not as crude as the one inherited by Soviet criticism from Plekhanov. The author of Studies in a Dying Culture (1938) and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), both posthumous collections, is not willing to accept that Art for Art's Sake is just art for money's sake. He distinguishes between "commercialized art" and the "reaction against such an evident degradation of the artist's task but, because both are products of the same bourgeois decay, he

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denies them aesthetic or any other kind of relevance. In his essay on "Beauty: A Study in Bourgeois Aesthetics," Caudwell writes:

            Because it is not realized that beauty is a social product, there is a degradation even of the "purest" forms of
            art products. We have commercialized art, which is simply affective massage.... Hence wish-fulfillment
            novels and films, hence jazz. The bourgeois floods the world with art products of a baseness hitherto
            unimaginable. Then, reacting against such an evident degradation of the artist's task, art withdraws from the
            market and becomes non-social, that is personal. It becomes "highbrow" art, culminating in personal fantasy.
            The art work ends as a fetish because it was a commodity. Both are equally signs of the decay of bourgeois
            civilization due to the contradictions in its foundation.96

Both the individualist avant-gardists (the dadaists and the surrealists are mentioned)97 and the producers of bourgeois muck have as their objective the destruction of art, an unavoidable consequence of the moribund phase of capitalism. Caudwell's essential model is clearly Stalinist, which makes it all the more remarkable that some of the analyses in Studies, especially some of the aesthetic considerations in his major critical work, Illusion and Reality (1937), manage to escape the helpless obtuseness of the vulgarized Marxist approach promoted by the literary apparatchiks of the international communist movement.

The striking resemblances between the Soviet condemnation of decadence (in the name of socialist realism) and the Fascist rejection of the "sick art" of modernism (in the name of a healthy and beautiful art enjoyed by the people) went unnoticed by communist intellectuals. It was not until the mid-1960s that the crisis of conscience brought about by de-Stalinization prompted certain Western Marxists associated with the communist movement to reexamine the Soviet dogma of decadence and its implications. The case of the Austrian philosopher and critic, Ernst Fischer, formerly a Stalinist, is worth mentioning here. In his book Kunst und Koexistenz (1966), which was translated into English under the title Art

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Against Ideology, Fischer felt the need to revise his earlier view of decadence as a matter of "formalism" versus content-oriented and realistic art, a view that was very much in line with the official Soviet concept of decadence. Fischer's book as a whole is a good illustration of the post-Stalin revival of humanist Marxism within the communist movement in Western Europe. This new spirit was never accepted by Moscow, and the brutal suppression in August 1968 of the Czechoslovak experiment in socialism "with a human face" showed quite clearly that the Kremlin ideologists were not prepared to tolerate anything like a real de-Stalinization. Not surprisingly, Fischer was expelled from the tiny pro-Muscovite Austrian Communist party as a result of his outspoken disagreement with the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Returning now to the question of decadence, we might observe that Fischer's new treatment of it in the early and mid-1960s does not represent an abandonment of Marxism but rather a discovery of certain vital (if highly "unorthodox") aspects of Western Marxist thought. That is why Fischer's revised notion of decadence—with its new insistence on the "ideological" and "false" character of actually decadent art—comes very close to the preoccupation of the Frankfurt School with aesthetic "falsehood" and, more generally, with the various forms of "false consciousness" that characterize modernity. In other words, Fischer's "decadence" stands for much of what we would call "kitsch," and more precisely, as we shall see in the last chapter of this book, "political kitsch."

The diverse innovative movements that constitute the broad phenomenon of modernism are no longer considered decadent by Fischer. Significantly, he discovers now the positive justification of the devaluation of the subject in modern painting: "For a long time," he writes in "The Problem of Decadence,"

            I was inclined to see in this devaluation of the subject, in this eclipse of the "what" by the "how," a symptom
            of decadence, and I put forward this view in my book The Necessity of Art. Today I believe I was wrong. .
            . because in this devaluation of the subject we can recognize

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            a certain rejection of "ideology" as false consciousness Are battles. coronations. historical events really so
            much more significant than the "little" subjects "seen under a light." the light discovered by impressionismn? .
            . Impressionism did not represent a decay but a fresh start toward new possibilities.98

And Fischer goes on to ask himself whether instead of considering decadent such artists as Kollwitz and Barlach, Klee and Kandinsky, Becker-Modersohn and Kokoschka (whose works were exhibited in the 1937 "Degenerate Art" show opened by Hitler himself), one should not rather characterize as "hopelessly decadent" the boastful emptiness and routine sublimity of Nazi art. And how about socialist realism, in whose perspective the above-mentioned artists were also typically degenerate examples of bourgeois decadence? There is little doubt for the perceptive reader of this essay that Fischer was perfectly conscious of the troublesome parallels between Fascist art and the Stalinist version of socialist realism, as well as of the analogies between the Nazi and Soviet treatments of the problem of decadence. In regard to the latter point, the only difference is that Hitler saw the decadents as representatives of "destructive Marx ism" whereas the Marxists rejected the same as spokesmen of monopoly capitalism in its last stage of putrescence! Were it not for this difference, the following passage from one of Hitler's speeches (quoted by Fischer) could easily be mistaken for a corresponding denunciation of "bourgeois" decadence by any official Soviet ideologist from Zhdanov to Khruschev:

            Our healthy. unspoilt people will no longer tolerate an art which is remote from life and contrary to nature. . .
            . This degenerate art is destruction, stemming from destructive Marxism, that mortal enemy of everything that
            is natural and folklike. . . . We shall from now on wage a merciless mopping-up campaign against the last
            elements of disintegration in our culture!99

The conclusion of Fischer's essay advances a viewpoint that is tantamount to an a priori dismissal of any general theory of cultural decadence within Marxist criticism:

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            We must distinguish between the decline or rise of mankind as a whole, the decline and rise of classes,
            nations and social systems, and the decline or rise of the arts (or of a particular branch of the arts) within
            classes, nations and social systems. All these things interact with one another, condition and interpenetrate
            one another in a multitude of ways, forming a continual reciprocal process, without ever becoming a rigid
            mechanism. This in itself provides many possibilities of applying and misusing the concept of "decadence,"
            and makes it necessary to concretize it in every particular case.

Like Sartre at about the same time, Fischer cannot help concluding that the concept of decadence should be used very cautiously and only in very precisely defined and circumscribed cases, any generalization being potentially misleading and harmful. Insofar as art is not ideological (and all the more so when it is directly, deliberately anti-ideological), it cannot be qualified as decadent. Thus, only ideological art can be decadent. But ideological art—a characteristic of modernity insofar as modernity is an age of ideology—.can be better described in terms of kitsch. In spite of his excellent intentions, when he speaks of ideological art as decadent Fischer misuses the term "decadence" once again, although the connections—often of the order of contrast—between kitsch and decadence are numerous and significant, and the relationship between the problem of decadence and the problem of ideology should by no means be ignored.

As a matter of fact, it can be said that what makes the orthodox (Soviet) Marxist theory and critique of decadence so unsatisfactory, indeed so obviously crude and cliche ridden, is the totally undialectical use of the concept of ideology. The approach of Marx and Engels to the question of ideology, although never developed into anything close to a full-fledged theory, contained certain highly original insights, which, for reasons that cannot be discussed here in any detail, were simply abandoned by Lenin and then by the whole Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Perhaps the main cause of this veritable intellectual betrayal of original Marxism was, ironically, an ideological one, namely, the need of the totalitarian Soviet state for simple, easily identifiable notions to be used as propaganda—against

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"bourgeois ideology," in support of "revolutionary ideology," etc. The predictable result was that, enforced by the all-pervading censorship of Stalinist terror, this kind of extremely primitive propaganda ended up becoming the official ideological line of the party, and as such it had to be followed in the most literal sense by every body. Any attempt at original thought, even within the dialectical tradition of Marxism, was brutally stifled. The "decadence" of bourgeois ideology and the triumphant assertion of the opposite, "scientific ideology" of Marxism-Leninism became articles of imposed faith.

The novelty of Marx's concept of ideology and its numerous possible applications to various areas of knowledge went unnoticed for a long period, but the ideas were finally discovered and utilized—not by the Marxist orthodoxy but by thinkers who read and interpreted Marx in an independent and often heterodox fashion, such as Karl Mannheim in his Ideology and Utopia (1929—31) or in his essays on the sociology of knowledge. If the leftist critique of ideologies was slow to develop its original potentialities, on the right the enormous influence of Nietzsche at the turn of the century was responsible for a more profound and more genuinely dialectical attack against the main ideologies of the time (including socialism).* Without directly employing ideology as a nominal category, Nietzsche's theory of decadence as derived from his analysis of modernity clearly implied the notion of "false consciousness." We might also recall that Nietzsche as a dialectician had become aware of the ambiguity of truth itself—truth being sometimes a servant of decay and death, in which case "self-conscious illusion" was the vital alternative.

Ideological deception and self-deception as characteristics of modernity constitute the theme of perhaps the most important

*The distinction between "right'' and 'left' in questions of modern intellectual history as well as in many other respects is often not only arbitrary—like any convention—but dangerously misleading, and it can serve as a justification for the crudest type of political reductionism. It is used here only as a matter of practical convenience.

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philosopher of culture influenced by Nietzsche, that is, Oswald Spengler. It is interesting here to point out that Spengler's Unter gang des Abentlandes (published in 1918) and more generally the right-wing philosophical explanations of Western decline were somehow taken as a challenge by certain independent Marxist thinkers. This seems to be the case of at least some of the members of the Frankfurt School. In an article entitled "Spengler Today" (1941), T. W. Adorno, while being sharply critical of Spengler's "positivist" metaphysics of history, not only recognizes the force of his thought but also makes the following admission:

            Spengler stands, together with Klages. Mueller van den Bruck, and also Jiinger and Steding, among those
            theoreticians of extreme reaction whose criticism of liberalism proved superior in many respects to that
            which came from the left wing. It would be worthwhile to study the causes of this superiority. It is probably
            due to a different attitude towards the complex of "ideology." The adherents of dialectical materialism viewed
            the liberal ideology which they criticized largely as a false premise. They did not challenge the ideas of
            humanity, liberty, justice as such, hut merely denied the claim of our society to represent the realization of
            these ideas. Though they treated the ideologies as illusions, they still found them illusions of truth itself
            ....Above all the leftist critics failed to notice that the "ideas" themselves, in their abstract form, are not merely
            images of the truth that will later materialize, but that they are ailing themselves, afflicted with the same
            injustice under which they are conceived and bound up with the world against which they are set. On the
            right, one could the more easily see through the ideologies the more disinterested one was in the truth these
            ideologies contained, in however false a form. All the reactionary critics follow Nietzsche inasmuch as they
            regard liberty, humanity, and justice as nothing but a swindle devised by the weak as a protection against the
            strong.101

That, just a few lines later, Adorno could characterize this right-wing "critique of ideologies" as "comfortable" and even "cheap," while still considering it superior to what most of the leftist critics of ideology had to say, measures his contempt for the latter's philosophical crudeness. Not surprisingly, then, Adorno feels compelled to reject both the Nietzsche-Spengler and (implicitly) the

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prevailing leftist interpretation of decadence. Bringing in the major theme of his thought, namely, that of negation and negativity—a theme which was later to be developed into one of his major philosophical works, Negative Dialectics (1966)—he goes on to indicate the much-abused—from the right as well as from the left—notion of decadence. It is precisely by its merciless negativity that decadence is the refuge of a "better potentiality" and that it is able to set free the hidden forces of Utopia. The article on Spengler ends with the following passage, which deserves to be quoted in full:

            Spengler has the prying glance of the hunter who strides mercilessly through the cities of mankind as if they
            were the wilderness they actually are. But one thing has escaped his glance: the forces set free by decay.
            "How does everything that is to be appear so ill" ("Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank")—this
            sentence of the poet Georg Trakl transcends Spengler's landscape. There is a passage in the first volume of
            the Decline of the West that has been omitted in the English translation. It refers to Nietzsche. "He used the
            word decadence. In this book, the term Decline of the West means the same thing. only more
            comprehensive, broadened from the case be fore us today into a general historical type of epoch. and
            looked at from the bird's-eye view of a philosophy of Becoming." In the world of violence and oppressive
            life, this decadence is the refuge of a better potentiality by virtue of the fact that it refuses obedience to this
            life, its culture, its rawness and sublimity. Those. according to Spengler. whom history is going to thrust aside
            and annihilate personify negatively within the negativity of this culture that which promises. however weak. to
            break the spell of culture and to make an end to the horror of pre-history. Their protest is our only hope that
            destiny and force shall not have the last word. That which stands against the decline of the West is not the
            surviving culture but the Utopia that is silently embodied in the image of decline. 102

It is important to note here that not only Adorno but all those who were interested in aesthetics among the members of the Frankfurt School moved after 1933 to France, and after the invasion of France during World War II to the United States) were aware of the fact that art (true art) and ideology are mutually exclusive concepts. But ideology can manifest itself, among other things, through

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art, falsifying it to serve the achievement of specifically ideological purposes. The question of falsehood in art and of the consequences of its growing importance in our time (through commercialization, ideological manipulation, etc.) is discussed in many essays by Adorno, beginning with his famous Philosophy of Modern Music (written in 1940—41, published in 1949). Because of this proliferation of falsehood and the ideologically successful (mis)use of practically all known art forms, the genuine modern artist is compelled to look for new means of expression, whose novelty, according to Adorno, is measured exclusively by their negativity, by the ever more complex rejections that their choice involves. This inflexibly negative asceticism is exemplified in the personality of Arnold Schonberg, to whom, in the Philosophy of Modern Music, Stravinsky is opposed as an example of aesthetic compromise. (Stravinsky's case is discussed in the introduction under the unequivocal heading of "False Musical Consciousness. ")103

The dialectical analysis of "false consciousness" (in philosophy, aesthetics, and elsewhere) led Adorno to an increasingly uncompromising and austere pessimism—and this is especially true of his last years, when he felt compelled to admit: "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. "104 The allusion to Marx's famous antiphilosophical the sis on Feuerbach—"So far philosophers have been content to interpret the world; what matters is to change it"—is quite transparent.

Understanding decadence as a culture of negation (which brings it very close to some definitions of modernism or the avant-garde), Adorno suggests the possibility of a revaluation of the concept of aesthetic decadence within the limits of a Marxist and dialectical theory of ideology. The expression of a precise historical moment, decadence no longer appears as a poisonous manifestation of "bourgeois ideology" but, on the contrary, as a reaction against it and, moreover, as a deep and authentic awareness of a crisis to

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which no easy (or even difficult) solutions can be prescribed.105 However, neither Adorno nor any of the other members of the Frankfurt School undertook a more systematic or explicit analysis of the concept of decadence understood along such lines. They were, as cultural critics and sociologists of culture, more inclined to devote their attention to directly ideological phenomena, and in this respect their achievements are remarkable: they were among the first to propose a consistent theory of popular or mass culture (as related to mass society) and to elaborate on the various aspects and functions of the modem cultural market, mass cultural consumption, and what Adorno and Horkheimer called the "culture industry." (These contributions will be referred to more specifically in the final essay on kitsch.)

The fact that Adorno's more or less accidental insights into the question of artistic decadence were potentially fruitful has been demonstrated by the independent but in certain ways similar treatment given the concept of decadence in Italx'. As a result, much of contemporary Italian criticism uses the term 'decadentismo" as a major historical category, sometimes as broad and complex as the concept of modernity. The fact that some modern Italian critics are Marxist or at least influenced by Marxism (although not by the orthodox Leninist-Stalinist kind) is perhaps not unrelated to this specific terminological preference.