French republican politician Jules Francois Camille Ferry stated his aims quite simply: to ‘organize humanity without God and without kings.’ Ferry worked against government of ‘moral order’ and implemented free, compulsory, non-religious primary school education for all French children. In opposition to this kind of hubris and profanity traditionalist counter-reformers identified progress, Republicanism and Social Democracy with ‘decadence’, a position adopted by many writers and poets including Huysmans and Leon Bloy. In 1939, Pius XII, in an encyclical with the English title Darkness over the Earth explained the contemporary dire political situation as the inevitable outcome of the Reformation when so many Christians had turned away from the teachings of Rome.
From the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (seen in Germany as a triumph for Protestantism) to the invasion of Poland in 1939, the cultural life of Europe had been subject to all the currents of turmoil and turbulence arising from a ubiquitous and systemic cultural struggle or Kulturkampf. It was a struggle that effected all artists and writers in Europe. Reacting to these conflicts – between progress and decadence, between the spiritual and the material, between tradition and modernity – poets and artists externalized the breakdown of traditional certainties in radical artworks, forming associations and movements that generated new forms of representation from Pointillism to Free Verse and ‘stream of consciousness’ prose. Clearly these new forms were also a reaction to developments in technology and the media, most notably the invention of photography, the spread of popular journalism and the arrival of the cinema – but all such changes are primarily a matter of cultural politics.
However, cultural politics are a charade, a magic lantern show for politicians, activists and the public, for social policies and political actions are merely epiphenomena – a reactive shadow play enacted in response to more obscure factors. These factors are the deep changes and displacements caused by the seismic impact of evolutionary forces acting upon the cultural structures and emotionally charged sacred symbols that accumulate, store and transmit social values. They are the tectonic shifts and refracted seismic waves of structural violence that disturb the representational margins of l’esprit collectif (Durkheim). They are the tremors and eruptions that perturb the archetypes of the collective unconscious (Jung). They are the awesome aftershocks rebounding along pre-existing fault-lines that trigger moral panic in the fearful, primal herd. They cause tectonic shifts in the colliding crustal plates of adjacent or competing faiths, ideologies and moral norms (dogmatic violence) and – finally – they are the source of that Existential dread (angst), visualized in Munch’s iconic image of 1893 ‘The Scream’. According to the philosopher Heidegger, a member of the Marburg University Graeca group (1923-1928), this dread is a ‘basic state-of-mind’ providing the ‘phenomenal basis’ for explicitly grasping the ‘primordial totality’ of Being.
In broad terms it seems that before 1870 the various occult movements at the margins of bohemia had occupied an ideological space to the political left, whereas in the later part of the century one detects an inevitable drift to the authoritarian right. This move can be clearly detected in the doctrines of Peledan, the ideas of Barres and, perhaps, we find their culmination, the crest of the anticline, in the writings of D’Annunzio and Junger.
As the imperative for purification of expression became a drive to achieve total Abstraction the greater became the need to abandon illusionism and perspective, those coordinates of academic orthodoxy and visual convention. Furthermore, artists and poets at the ‘leading edge’ found themselves both ‘exiled’ to the margins of cultural respectability and undertaking a ‘voyage’ into the ‘unknown’ or ‘The New’ which, as predicted in Rimbaud’s ‘Le Bateau Ivre’, threatened to destroy them in a vortex of personal and social ‘breakdown’. This concept of the ‘voyage’ is an archetypal image of self-initiation both individual and collective. It is present in the imagery of alchemy and is used by C. G. Jung to symbolize the path of individuation – or part of that process. In the modern era the theme is very prevalent from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, through to various poems by Baudelaire which hark back to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. As the decades pass the theme mutated into a darker more nihilistic vision as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) or Celine’s Voyage au bout de la Nuit (1932).
The addiction to drugs, anarchism, crime, perversity and evil espoused by extreme Decadents and Maudits, their willingness to confront the nihilism implicit in relativism and the absurd, provides the basis for a definition of artistic activity as a quasi-alchemical process or discipline of psychic transformation through an ‘experience of limits’. However the Void of Indeterminacy, exposed to view by the very process itself, induced an intolerable tension which also characterized the times. After 1900 the rise of millenarian irrationalism in politics from Italy to Russia and from Germany to Spain became the overriding factor in the West. The Total Politics of ‘movements’ and ideologies became an overwhelming force. Like the doctrine of Total Revolution it transcended all nation-state boundaries. As the nineteenth century drew to a close it is not surprising that these fast-flowing socio-political currents swept along artists and intellectuals. Indeed, far from representing the dying embers of an old, decrepit, order they were in reality the forerunners of a terrifying and inexplicable future.
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A.C. Evans
illustration: Cometographia I, 2002
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