G.W. Trompf 
Post-Modernism as Decadence 
On Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History 
En route to the Ljubljana conference, and as yet unsure what to present 
to it, I made for an historic library at the Stift Klosterneuburg, Austria. My 
taxi was blocked from delivering me, however, since I was enter ing the sa-
cred city of St Leopold and the Babenberg house on the day that half its 
bodily upright inhabitants engaged in a mass running race f rom its precincts 
to the centre. I smiled. The competitors were all expensively clad in athletic 
outfits to disprove »in the long run« what the European originator of this 
»fitness enthusiasm« had first alarmingly bellowed: that Westerners were in 
danger of physical, let alone cultural, »Degeneration«. I refer of course to 
the well-known Jewish, indeed Zionist polemicist Max Nordau, who should 
be ra ther be t te r r e m e m b e r e d for writing a very widely read volume -
Entartung (1892) - about the socio-cultural condition of the West á la fin du 
siecle, at the end of the last century.1 
An early summary statement in that volume speaks loudly of Nordau's 
assessments. What, he asks, does the fin-de-sieclephenomenon amount to in 
his time? 
It means a practical emanc ipa t ion f r o m tradi t ional discipline, which 
theoretically is still in force. To the voluptuary this means unbr id led lewd-
ness, the uncha in ing of the beast in man; to the withered hear t of the 
egoist, disdain of all cons idera t ion for his fellow-men, the t r ampl ing 
u n d e r foot of all barriers which enclose brutal greed of lucre and lust of 
pleasure; to the con t emner of the world it means the shameless ascen-
dancy of base impulses and motives, which were, if no t virtuously sup-
pressed, at lease hypocritically h idden; to the believer it means the re-
pudiat ion of dogma, the negation of a super-sensuous world, the descent 
into flat phenomena l i sm; to the sensitive na tu re yearning for aesthetic 
thrills, it means the vanishing of ideals in art, and no more power in its 
accepted fo rms to arouse emot ion. And to all, it means the e n d of an 
established order, which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, fet tered 
depravity, and in every art ma tu red someth ing of beauty. 
O n e epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and ano the r is an-
nounc ing its approach . The re is a sound of r end ing in every tradit ion, 
1 For background, especially S.Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism (New York: Harper, 
1981), ch. 10. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVI CA Supplement), pp. 75-130 121 
G.W. Trompf 
and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with to-day. Things 
as they are totter and plunge, ... because man is weary, and there is no 
faith that it is worth an effort to uphold them... 
The great majority of the middle and lower classes is naturally not fin-
de-siecle ... The Philistine and the Proletarian still finds undiluted satis-
faction in the old and oldest forms of art and poetry, if he knows him-
self unwatched by the scornful eye of the votary of fashion... It is only a 
very small minority who honestly find pleasure in the new tendencies... 
But this minority has the gift of covering the whole visible surface of 
society, as a little oil extends over a large area of the surface of the sea... 
And thus it appears as if the whole of civilized humanity were converted 
to the aesthetics of the Dusk of the Nations.2 
T h e question compels; have matters changed? or, colloquially, »so 
what's new?« Genuine pejorists and uninformitarians, of course, will have 
already constrained us from expecting anything better from most times. That 
reminds me, I did eventually get into the Stift Bibliothek, only to be de-
pressed by the past. I worked on a late sixteenth century Latin text by Juan 
de Mariana about the history of Spain from her origins to the reign of Philip 
II. Covering page after page of the turbulence, intrigue and venality, how-
ever, all preventing the outcome of a united Spain until nearer his own time, 
the liberal Jesuit is left gasping for a breath of explanation (and his continu-
ator had to face the signs of Spain's decline following the failed, fabled Ar-
mada) . The nearest de Mariana could come to a covering principle - a rather 
pessimistic one - is that humans are caught in an eternally conditioned web 
of causes f rom which they never really extract themselves and which the 
ancient Stoics called fate.3 Perhaps this may resign us to expect »more of 
the same« too concessively, for after all, there have always been voices of 
lament over social dilapidations through the ages, as the clanging of bells 
to slightly different tunes. Yet it is hardly a matter lacking interest that some 
very i m p o r t a n t intel lectuals in our t ime are s o u n d i n g notes very like 
Nordau's, in the twentieth century West's fin-de-siecle, fin-de-millenium situa-
tion. 
Consider two recent and related treatises. One is by Ernst Gellner on 
the affects of cultural and existential relativism as indicative of the post-
modernist condition: for him we are reaping expressions of fundamental-
2 The Nordau edition used: Degeneration (Heinemann's Empire Library of Standard 
Works 1) (London: Heinemann, 1895), pp. 5-7. 
3 J. Mariana, Historiae de rebus Hispaniae libri triginta (ed. and add. J. E. Miniana) (The 
Hague: Hag. Comit., 1731 edn. ) , vol. 2, p. 377 (Bk. XX, 16). On pejor ism, 
uniformitarianism, etc., G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought 
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979), vol. l , p p . 110-12, 248, 
291-5, etc. 
76 
Post-Modernism, as Decadence On Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History 
ist certainty as a reaction, together with the loss of faith in ideal beauty and 
truth as a symptom of perplexing times.4 The other is very recent, and a 
daring attempt at a general history of Truth by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, 
eminent author of The Millennium. He decided that, given the yawning gap, 
the West desperately rerquired such an account, which includes tracing 
apprehensions of beauty, because a paradoxical combination of consumer-
ism, pluralism and faddish intellectual trends are making it increasingly 
difficult to hold to any such profundities.5 Macrohistorically speaking, both 
analysts smell the corrupting of old socio-cultural cohesions. 
Between the brilliance of late Victorian England, or Dionysian Vienna, 
or Gustave Moreau's Paris, down to our own time there have been more than 
enough traumas, indeed global ones, to make the discourse of decadence 
continuingly viable, even world-wide, in its force. Somewhere in the chro-
nological middle WB. Yeats summed it up poetically. 
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity.1' 
And I am now beginning to ask myself, on your behalf in this context, 
whether »the beast« he imagined slouching »towards Bethlehem to be born« 
was: post-modernism. Or perhaps I should specify »the post-modernist con-
dition«, because in a short space I will obviously have to disentangle con-
cepts and terminology, in fact a lot of semantic confusion. 
I mean, I honestly cannot pinpoint the origins of post-modernity as a 
complex cultural trajectory. Each aesthetic and intellectual sphere will have 
to be revisited time and again to unravel that special issue. I am obviously 
more immediately concerned with post-War figures self-designating as minds 
reacting against the so-called »Enlightenment Project«, taken by them as 
axial modernity. A curiosity arises for me at this stage of the argument in that 
I have remained immensely challenged and mentally invigorated by the great 
protagonists for the post-modern - Lacan, Derrida, Foucault , Iragaray, 
4 Gellner, Postmodernism., Reason and Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 
esp. chs. 1-3, 5. 
5 Fernandez-Armesto, Truth: a history (London: Bantam, 1997), esp. chs. 5-6 cf. The 
Millennium: a history of our last one thousand years (London: Bantam, 1995). 
6 Yeats, »The Second Coming« (1926) in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan 1958 
edn.) , p. 211 
77 
G.W. Trompf 
Jameson, and the like. Quite often I feel as disjointed and as ontically lonely 
as Octavio Paz. I also revel somewhat in the imagic t ransformat ions of 
quirkish post-modern art, although the list of captivating Gestalten would be 
too inordinate to present here: Mark Kostabi's Princess Diana as virginal 
Madonna, a clothed Kate Moss as a beauty model posing in a feminist take-
off of Manet's »Breakfast on the Green« with two male nudes, and so on.7 
Why, I have to admit, I did not get aggravated enough to protest Andres 
Serrano's »Piss Christ«, let alone become implicated in the theft of Tania 
Kovat's »Virgin in a Condom« from the Sydney Museum of Contemporary 
Art.8 Like most of the people reading this paper I have to learnt to place 
such »developments« in the world of aesthetics (which I concede could ac-
tually enervate one into a »lack of cultural conviction«), even if I do reserve 
the right to lament, as I believe you would, what I sense to be »monumen-
tally bad taste«, or, to put a contentious matter cautiously, what is »uncon-
scionably uglifying«.,J 
But here I stand as a scholarly cultural symptomatologist; and in my 
ongoing work on The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western, and now more-
and more non-Western thought, I become increasingly familiar with the 
reflective »sign reading« or »semeiology« of civilizational corruption, decay, 
decline, degeneration, decadenza, Untergang, even disintegration. All sorts of 
interesting things come out of comparative symptomatologies in relation to 
aesthetics. Pursue but one small avenue for an impression. Well before 
Theodor Adorno's analyses of mass culture, for instance, or our very own 
A r n o l d Ber leant ' s res i l ing over the world 's »Disneyficat ion«, Albe r t 
Schweitzer intuited one of the best indices for The Decay of Civilization to be 
the modern billboard.10 Pace my own uncle, Percy Trompf, who was clearly 
one of the world's greatest billboard painters, there is a lot to this assessment. 
You jus t have to travel in the central Canadian countryside, where the 
7 I refer to Kostabi's 'The Sanctification of Virtue' (1997). For the latter case, see W. 
Klauser, »Das Model und die alten Meister: Kate Moss posiert in der neuern YSL-
Kampagne nach historischen Vorbilden«, Gala 35 /4 (Aug. 1998): 30-1. This ploy can 
obviously be taken too far, as in the string of 'spoofs' on paintings in the great tradition 
of the West by the Australian painter Brett Whiteley. 
8 For the latter altercation, The Sydney Morning Herald, 18 Oct., 1997: 1. 
9 Here I preempt issues being raised in F. Speed's work in Aesthetics and Philosophy, 
»The Physics of Ugliness« (Doctoral dissert., University of Lancaster), Lancaster 
(forthcoming). 
10 Cf. Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Cilivization (trans. C. T. Campion) (London: 
Unwin, 1961), cf. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (eds. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann) 
(F rankfur t , Suh rkamp , 1974 edn . ) ; Ber leant , The Aesthetics of Environment 
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 
78 
Post-Modernism, as Decadence On Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History 
wretched things are banned from the landscape, to see the point. And now, 
of course, billboards are becoming trendily post-modernistic, so that even 
today in this very city of Ljubljana, »beautifully decadent« as it is, we have a 
monumenta l mini-piece of bad taste, with two crying so-called »Siamese« 
twins advertising a Pop group. 
But I suppose here we have to take stock of what is being meant by 
decadence, since there is as much a need to dispell confusion in its connec-
tion as with post-modernity. Let us begin with nineteenth century France, 
with notions and artistic articulations of decadence yielding a kind of locus 
classicus, in the nineties, in that fin-de-siècle ambience Nordau sought to di-
agnose. There, with Gustave Moreau and the »dreamers of decadence«, as 
Philippe Jullian introduces them, we find a kind of sickly poignancy that we 
sometimes still hear in more occult art circles. It entailed the conceit that 
Those who see Beauty in their eyes 
Are condemned to death, and 
Can serve no purpose on the earth. 
Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen.u 
The processes in French decadence theory, intriguingly, appear to run 
from an earlier mourning over the loss of cultural cohesion and moral fab-
ric on to this kind of accepting indulgence.12 
Of course focussing on that fin-de-siècle situation could bring up various 
difficulties in terms of paralleling the condition of early décadence with post-
modernity. Certainly, we could take Charles Baudelaire as the great mid-
century French poetic harbinger of the later decadence, and recognize in 
his disdain for his own times a rejection of modernity and its mediocrity. »Je 
deviens tellement l 'ennemi de mon siècle.« The trouble is, however, he him-
self rejected decadence as a literary label, and his intimate fr iends knew of 
him that he completely accepted »l«homme moderne«, and that he was a 
»modernist« in the sense that he »preferred the artificiality and corruption 
of a decaying society to the more robust virtues of less degenerate civiliza-
tions«. 13 
11 Juillian, Dreamers of Decadence: symbolist painters of the 1890s (London: Phaidon, 1971), 
[p. 6 on the quoted 'Tristan' by A. Graf von Platen] et passim. Cf. (recently) L. Ingrisch, 
Das Leben beginnt mit dem Tod (Vienna: Verlag Österreich, 1997). 
12 K. W. Swart, The Sense of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century France (Archives Internationales 
d'Histoire des Idées 7) (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), ch. 6. 
13 Baudelaire, Correspondance générale (eds. J. Crépet and C. Pichols) [in Oeuvres complètes] 
(Paris: Conrad, 1947-53 edn.), vol. 4, p. 99 (first quotation); Théodore de Banville 
(1867), quoted in A.E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature (Toronto: 
University of Toronto Press, 1958), pp. 55-6 (second): Swart, op. cit., p. 114, cf. p. 116. 
79 
G.W. Trompf 
Thus it is that tricky issues spring to light for one who would link post-
modernity and decadence in our own latter-day context, when meanings and 
values put upon human developments can very easily slip f rom one side of 
the interpreter 's anvil to another. Why, amid post-War uncertainties of the 
Western bloc's future, did not the French political theorist Raymond Aron 
deem it respectable to defend a »decadent Europe«, if it meant that she 
happened to combine instability and the richness of civilization against the 
culturally-stable military powerful societies?14 Then there is the imputation, 
obviously begging attention, that decadence is a modern /modern i s t condi-
tion. After all, if, as many tacitly deem him, Nietzsche was the first of the 
philosophic post-modernists, how resounding are his evocations against »the 
[current] decadents«, although one admits this only by also conceding that 
his views are highly idiosyncratic. Europe's Untergangis for Nietzsche extraor-
dinarily deep-inured, a long-term wastedness reaped from imbibing Socratic 
metaphysics and Christian slavischeMorale.15 He denounces at a time, though, 
when others can use him as legitimation for indulging in death, or succumb-
ing to neo-pagan temptations, and flout the rational Aujklarung.u' 
Nietzsche's peculiar orientations and context aside, it remains pal-
pable that acclaimed protagonists of post-modernity through the last gen-
eration have set themselves up as analysts of decadence, which inevitably 
entails them pronouncing over the inadequacies and demise of the mod-
ern. Consider Jacques Lacan handling the malaise de la civilisation, or Michel 
Foucault's diagnosis of Western humanity as the product of totalizing struc-
tures, both institutional and intellectual.17 And such scholars are good at 
guarding their own backs by evading the implication that, in deconstructing 
traditionalist and Enlightenment procedures for organizing societies, they 
may be part of the problem of decline they believe they comprehend. That 
last matter is the suspicion, to return to very recent critics, of Gellner and 
14 Aron, »My Defence of our Decadent Europe«, Encounter 4 9 / 3 (1977): esp. 29. 
15 Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols [1889] (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Harmondsworth, 
1968, esp. pp. 32-4, 39, 43, 45-6, etc. 
16 Cf., e.g., W.J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven and 
London: Yale University Press, 1974);Jullian, op. cit., pp. 32-4, 164. 
17 For guidance, P. G. Gueguen, »Lacan and the Malaise of Civilization« (Seminar paper, 
Melbourne Centre for Psychoanalytic Research and the Department of General 
Philosophy, University of Sydney, 3 Aug., 1993) (Sydney, 1993); D. Eribon, Foucault 
(trans. R. Wing) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 
18 Start with S. Morawski, The Troubles with Postmodernism (London and New York: 
Routledge, 1996), cf. B. Fetz and K. Kastberger (eds.), Der literarischeEinfall (Profile 
1/1998) (Vienna: Profile, 1998 (on literature in particular)). 
80 
Post-Modernism, as Decadence On Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History 
Fernandez-Armesto; and it seems built into the reactions of the »New Aes-
thetics« as well.18 
Yes, even post-modernist decadence theorists can be very much part 
of the Western predicament. If influential provocative and profound-look-
ing questions are ever asked of any encyclopaedic-globalist kind about 
»where we are at« - and most well known post-modernist thinkers hardly 
eschew macroscopic evaluations1 ' ' - we would be foolish not to consider 
seriously: »by whom« and »for whom« are these questions being put? Take 
one of the most fetching statements of perhaps the most gifted contempo-
rary American post-modernist rhetoricians Frederic Jameson. »Never in any 
previous civilization«, he asserts, »have the great metaphysical preoccupa-
tions, the fundamenta l questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed 
so utterly remote and pointless« (and he means aesthetic ideals as well).20 
This seems like a sound recognition of a depleted sense of absolutes and the 
problem of the paradoxically subjectivist closure (which reactives Gellner 
and Fernandez-Armesto also cunningly identify); but for Jameson the new 
condition is the making of a philosophical agenda. And one must ask »by 
whom?« and »for whom?«, first, because the broad claim only makes sense 
in a very limited Western (ized) intellectual forum, and second, because for 
the overwhelming part of global humanity - and I say this as a published com-
parative ethnohistorian - Jameson's statement is nonsense. Actually never 
before have so many people been posing traditional (and strikingly West-
ern-looking) questions of Ultimacy and Existence than in our own time, and 
yet been so ill-deserved by irresponsiblyjargonistic and culture-bound philo-
sophical »sets« in the West. 
The general implication of the argument has been looming enough. 
It is now necessary for philosophers and aestheticians to recapture basic and 
more traditional apprehensions of decadence while faced with the intellec-
tual turbulence and conceptual muddles under our very noses. A sound 
philosophy of history in particular can hardly let the self-inscriptions of 
modernists, post-modernists and the like close them off f rom access to the 
extraordinary wealth of Western reflection on the causes of cultural demise 
developed through many ages. The Western tradition as an unt runca ted 
cont inuum waits to be tapped for truths and warnings. Admittedly some 
traditional models can drag entirely new sets of problems in their train. It is 
a shared value old military realists f rom Sallust through Machiavelli and 
19 Start with F. Rella, The Myth of the Other (PostModern Positions 7), (trans. N. Moe) 
(Washington DC.: Maissonneuve, 1994). 
20 Quoted in the introduction to R.P Scharlemann (ed.) Theology at the End of the Century 
(Charlotteville and London, University Press ofVirginia, 1990), p. 14. 
81 
G. W. Trompf 
beyond, for example, that societies enjoying too much external peace will 
dissipate their energies in luxuriating expressions of internal achievement, 
and both competing voices of theoretic discourse and aesthetic impetus, on 
this reading, will reflect and partly generate a threatening social dissonance 
(as they do now).21 The new problématique entailed here, I hasten to point 
out, is that social health only comes by a fostering a sufficiently strong de-
gree of external aggression, which is a more persuasive stance than most 
contemporary philosophers and aestheticians would like to recognize, and 
rather too »close to the bone« when one considers the resurgence of eth-
nic nationalism next to Slovenia and the over-readiness of a hegemonic 
United States to intrude into the Yugoslav region! The arresting and endur-
ing external / in ternal paradigm has to be noted, nonetheless, as part of the 
rich repertory available to any traditionalist who wants to fa thom the con-
nected lakes of symptomatologies (ancient, »Occidental«, even Eastern), and 
thus develop a more balanced perspective on our current dilemmas. 
Among the many aetiologies, one more per t inent and carrying less 
political burden concerns interests, that when private interests decidedly 
outweigh public ones, a society enters decadenza. This was an important in-
sight of the Scottish Enlightenment,2 2 yet it has obvious twentieth century 
relevance. By the significant year 1918 the American sociologist Edward 
Alsworth Ross repeated the dictum, with the supplementary not ion that 
»decay sets in after the we-feeling [corporateness of a people] has died«. He 
also gathered up the complex French story of décadence into a covering state-
men t of more conventional wisdom. 
Late in the last century the French passed th rough such a critical epoch , 
du r ing which artists relentlessly dissected, no t only all e lements of reli-
gious faith, but , as well, all moral , social, and civic ideals. The result was 
a movemen t of unb r id l ed individualism cu lmina t ing in a widespread 
mora l disorganization, the symptoms of which were so plain early in the 
ninet ies that the French got the repute for be ing a »decadent« and neg-
ligent people . About this time the g roup sense of self-preservation took 
alarm, the intellectuals realized that negativism had gone too far, and 
21 Sallust, CatiL, ii, 1-iii, 2; N. Machiavelli, IstorieFlorentine (Rome: Blado, 1532), V, 1. 
22 [A]. Ferguson, »Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile«, in (G. Deyverdun and E. 
Gibbon eds.), Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne pour l'an 1767 (London: n.p., 
1767), esp. p. 68. 
23 (Although Ross resorts to the external/ internal classical model by affirming that 
France's rebirth of solidarity was nowhere better illustrated than during the War!). 
Ross, »Social Decadence«, The American Journal of Sociology 23 /5 (1918): 6328-9, cf. 
631 (earlier quotation). 
82 
Post-Modernism, as Decadence On Aesthetics and the Philosophy of History 
the re was a reaction in the direct ion of the bui lding u p of sound ideals 
in the rising generat ion.2 3 
The awareness of the pitfalls in (over-, hyper-) critical theories and 
their disorganizing effects is strikingly relevant for the late 1990s;24 the no-
tification that intellectuals and the creative avant-garde do and can acrtually 
intuit that they have gone too far (or become irresponsibile) is momentous. 
The intelligentsia, hopefully the least culturally forgetful lot in society, are 
supposed to be teachers, not nihilists. They do what they do so that others 
learn, and if, latterly, they are coming to abandon tradition in this sense, 
never will their social vacuousness have presented itself so terribly. Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn made a related point, in his Nobel Speech, about the passage 
of Art (even but »one word of Truth«) from one country to another. He had 
Eastern Europe on his mind in maintaining that art f rom one context can 
perhaps save a »second nation ... f rom taking an unnecessary, mistaken or 
even ruinous path ... Art can straighten the twisted paths of man's history«.25 
But at the bare minimum one has to defer to the basic tradition that Cul-
tural Artculaters do teach (even if some ostensibly spurn the didactic), and 
what they pass on will either aid the world constructively, or misdirect it in 
lessons it can ill afford. 
The »traditionist« position I hereby espouse (and it is not tradition-
alism or reactive conservatism)20 involves a call to blunt the heavy accentua-
tion of a contest between the Modern and Post-Modern, and engage with 
the extraordinary scope of the Western tradition as a whole (including its 
various interfaces with o ther socio-cultural zones). It is going to be the 
broadly-based capacity to tap various and relevant resources f rom far Antiq-
uity up to the immediate present that will count for our future.27 It is hardly 
going to be productive for global survivaljust to »kill off the Enl ightenment 
Project« and read books published only after 1985. The positive reorienta-
tion, indeed, will involve deliberately avoiding misreadings of the world that 
lack depth, though they have come to have such surprising, if superficial, 
24 For the close connection between critical theory and postmodernism, e.g., M. Poster, 
Critical Theory of the Family (London: Pluto, 1978). 
25 Solzhenitsyn, 'One Wordof Truth ... ' (The Nobel Speech on Literature 1970) (London: 
Bodley Head, 1972), pp. 14-15. 
2r' Thus Trompf, »Croce and Collingwood on Primitive Classical Aesthetics«, Literature 
and Aesthetics 7 (1997): 131-6. 
27 In aesthetics, E.H. Gombrich has set a useful tone for the future by avoiding as many 
arbitrary periodizations as possible, cf. R. Woodfield (ed.), The Essential Gombrich 
(London: Phaidon, 1996). On architecture, note intelligent conclusions by D. Erskine, 
»Democratic Architecture«, in D. Lasdun (ed.), Architecture in an Age of Scepticism 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 73. 
83 
G.W. Trompf 
influence over a mass of people who do not understand them, like »a little 
oil«extending »over a large area of the surface of the sea«. 
Which brings my to point of a daring pedagogy, in conclusion, that 
circumstances are fast compelling aestheticians who have not lost their so-
cial conscience and educative sensibilities to make a mature deference to-
wards pert inent social scientific (or »social studies«) insights. To cope with, 
and avoid ent rapment in, what is sapping our vitals and wishing us away into 
an indulgent cultural narcissism and a defrauded spirituality, we need to do 
some »sociology of knowledge and aesthetics« to discover and plot jus t how 
rampant is the disjunction between Western intellectual or creative life and 
the world's social and environmental needs. There is too much in post-
modernism that is despairingly irrelevant and irresponsible vis-à-vis the Third 
or Two-Thirds World. The extent of jargonism and the increasing lack of 
communicability have been clear symptoms of the disease. Aesthetic impov-
erishment in the West has been bad enough: for, outside the photographic 
(and the »domestic-mediocre« genre), the landscape has all but d ropped 
out of painting, with nature rendered apparently boring. Recovering conti-
nuity, or retracing humanity's ideas and techniques along the long »Rhodian 
Shore« has become a matter of imperative, as against wrecking the (cultural) 
dunes and paranoically always spotting dung in the water.28 
We need to train ourselves in basic anthropology as well, to pinpoint 
that all too frequently appearing »intellectual set«, especially among post-
graduate students, calling themselves post-modernists (in America of ten 
be ing dubbed or self-inscribing as »pomos«). I write as an exper ienced 
fieldworker, and inter alia as a well-seasoned traveller from one campus to 
another. I can only confirm what many fellow academics report a round the 
Western world: on a burgeoning of disaffected, arrogant, jargonistic, dog-
matic, self-consciously troublemaking and everdispleased coteries of young 
people who, as »second-generation imbibers« of post-modernism, I have to 
imagine being among the intellectual leaders of the future. Perhaps I am 
getting old, but I expected better; and I look longingly to a newer and more 
inspiring breed: a »new Man«. To combine post-Nietzschean aggravation 
with post-post-modernism, I presume to direct the future with a bold ges-
ture: Ecce homo. Exit porno. 
28 See C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: nature and culure in Western thought from 
ancient times to the end of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley and London: University of 
California Press, 1976 edn.) , cf. C. Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American life in an 
Age of diminishing expectations (New York and London: Norton, 1979). 
84