For I shall always be concerned, however it may seem, with the apparently lost sovereignty to which the beggar can sometimes be as close as the great nobleman, and from which, as a rule, the bourgeois is voluntarily the most far removed.
— George Bataille
We are supposed to be living in a decadent time. Capitalism is cemented in the global economy, and the old empires crumble and reform. The Queen of England is dead and the social world convulses as another symbol of a world we’ve never known—but somehow still find familiar—passes into history and the opulence of the past is captured in the veneration of normality.
As a child, I always wondered about the Queen, a concept that seemed so foreign to me, raised in the belly of America. My teachers, my parents used the term "figurehead" to explain it away, as if figureheads haven’t always been powerful, totemic, signals of a compulsion that goes beyond laws.
The fading star of the English monarchy and the reactions to it make us aware of an essential bargain that has existed for millennia: in a hierarchical society, the splendor of the rulers is used to motivate all those under them. In ancient Egypt, up through to the contemporary monarchs, the godliness of kings, queens and emperors was an essential part of their validity. Two primary methods bolstered this image—that of military victory and that of splendor. The dynastic instability of Egypt was shored up via the building of pyramids and the gilding of the body of the pharaohs.
Today, the fetishization of royalty, of god-kings, lingers, in the work of the conservatives and neo-reactionaries. They misunderstand that only in the eyes of the people, who are fed histories to quell the starvation of body and spirit, does that old sovereignty hold.
In truth, the death of the queen, with one foot in the modern world, one in the information age, signals a collapse, at least in the West, of the old agreement between the classes: that even with the dominance of the spectacle in culture and media, the representation of the link between the divine and man must be the ruler.
Author Guy Debord began his much-cited book Society of the Spectacle by saying, “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles.”
It is advertising as a venerated object; it is power as the present, as having, or wanting to have. Like value itself, it is formless but ubiquitous, mindless but dictating. It is mysterious, omnipresent and demands devotion.
Under capitalist culture, the spectacle, using old religious dynamics, “is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory.”
Debord went on to write that spectacle orients relationships between people, that it is a dream objectified, dominating the populace and driving consumption. But can the veneration of objects ever truly match the divinity, inexplicable, that has attached itself to figures, to moments, that go beyond all use?
Of course, Debord is referring to the imagistic world that keeps us from ourselves, the propaganda machines that bind us to identities that we have almost no actual relationship with. I believe that all this is true, but as George Bataille linked the expenditure of war with more ancient modes of accumulation and sacrifice, there is something else operating in the way that figureheads function in the social order, a mix of power and aesthetics that is blinding, that transcends the spectacle of capitalism in itself.
For Bataille, sovereignty went beyond titles into the realm of life without utility, a realm in which the beautiful and certain erotic activity also falls.
Debord says that spectacle began with the specialization of power, of the powerful, that it is a “self-portrait of power” that has evolved from archaic times into the stream-lined injection of the spectacle into the electronic byways of our civilization, which are part of the spectacle, feeding it and distributing it.
But, despite the apparent move past it with the domination of the spectacle, the sovereign remains operable. We elect leaders purely for the momentary exhilaration, art remains, as do martyrs, who take a moment and turn it into a crystalline act embedded in history.
The queen will be replaced, but the king who is ushered in is already a man, has already been narrativized by movies and television, and has been absorbed into the greater spectacle of our time. But does the passing of royalty signal a move beyond old royal dynamics into a full-blown era of the spectacle? Power is always trying to centralize, to consolidate itself, and as we move further into the digital era, I imagine that we will have to keep coming to terms with old dynamics that hold us to the new power of the image.
Debord and Situationists’ response to the spectacle was a rehashing of Dadaism with political parkour to transcend the totalizing utility. It amounted to very little. Perhaps that is because people ignore the ancient covenants that drove hierarchies for a long time, thinking that abolishing the spectacle will also erase aspects that sit at the heart of civilization, beyond the mind, in the very teeth of language.
If today we are dominated by the spectacle of capital, it is, at least in its visual representation, a sorry one. Countless essays have been written about the descent into boringness.
In one particularly snappy recent iteration, John Ganz writes: “There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it. There are refreshing exceptions, of course, but they seem to quickly get counterfeited or compromised.”
Ganz toys with the idea of decadence, via conservative columnist Ross Douthat, even offering the off-hand description of a friend who used “decadence without glamor” as an apt descriptor for the current age. Like others, Ganz lands on the projection of the interior and the loss of privacy as the problem and yearns for the modernist spirit of new-making from within the malaise of the spectacle.
“The only people that still have this modernist spirit are from the world of tech, who for the most part totally lack aesthetic sensitivity and understanding of the artistic tradition and whose products further degrade the world into a characterless void.”
Of course, avant-garde modernism isn’t coming back and one could even say, as Lukacs did, that avant-garde art itself is just as much part of the spectacle as Disney or the iPhone.
The last 50 or so years have presented us with exactly the “decadence without glamor” that Ganz’s unnamed friend spoke of, though I would venture to say that it is a decadence without grandiosity, at least for most. When people think about the need, they are fine with adding art as a footnote, but ignore the drive for the grand, for weird, baroque shows of divinity, for the accumulation that marks love letters, declarations, to the future world.
The closest thing to a covenant of grandiosity we have is athletics and celebrity. But this too is dissimulated, kept away from actual power, mere simulations of Rome or Lord Byron. We hash and rehash the bloody altars of the 20th century with wars, with media, with increasing dehumanization and decreasing psychic returns.
In reality, power has gone from being completely diffuse in the eyes of the people to being more concentrated, in the tech overlords, the Billionaires, who now control so much of society. People would say that power is still as diffuse as it was in Debord’s time, and I agree, no one controls the levers of capitalism and the unprecedented complexity of the contemporary makes any actual singular executive function almost impossible and this is where I diverge in both mind and feeling from the neo-Monarchism of someone like Curtis Yarvin, in fact, the only thing that we agree on in the persistence of a desire for monarchy.
This desire in a diffuse society was mitigated by the physical manifestations of the American Empire. But these have lost their shine. The ideological power of skyscrapers has been in decline since 9/11 and the grandeur of the military becomes increasingly abstract, and distant. Trump’s appeal was largely to connect the world of real power with the primary figurehead of American hagiography, the presidency.
In America, the aesthetics of the bourgeois is elevated in the same way the grandeur of the kings, Medicis and popes once were, yet repression remains. Look at the most powerful people in society, Zuckerberg, who dons a t-shirt saying “I’m just like you”, Musk and Thiel with their terrible suits, Bezos with his cult of convenience and all their proffers of rockets and gizmos that differ only in scale and sleekness from the advances of the mid 20th century.
In the eulologic Twitter threads in the wake of the death of Elizabeth II, one thing, in particular, has stood out. That the queen's duration, her stolidness and moral fortitude, have been most lauded. All middle-class qualities. A pretend middle-class queen for the bourgeois world. Of course, the greatest stunt of the Windsors was projecting a sort of normality that covers the deep blood of European royalty that courses through their veins. But perhaps this normality that links the royals and the tech overlords is a signal that that complexity has finally outweighed the power of the figurehead,
Even with superficial modifications, the power remains mostly at the top, while the critics bemoan the loss of “good” art that just covers up their inability to accept the all-too-humanness of social media and their protestant-bourgeois entanglements.
The old covenant is broken, and the spectacle of capitalism that keeps the whole thing going begins to fray. Supposed greats become venal or cloak themselves in mediocrity, offering no sign of connection to the mystical beyond, which even the most ardent materialist can accept in terms of the pure psychic weight of accumulated human thought through time, in language and depiction.
Sure, the veneration of normality worked when we could pretend we were a young, scrappy civilization, but the reality of our culture, its decadence, makes the moral fables and transgression for its own sake seem utterly fake, like everything we eat and wear.
Today decadence proliferates among all classes, creating species of decadence through all the rank-and-file that would baffle the late 19th-century poet, those bestowed with power have not even the courage to play their role, to play Sardanapalus, the Assyrian king who let all fall into disorder around his Bacchanal, becoming godly in the way his time allowed. Dionysian. But the barbarians are all inside, are us, despite the searching for a boogie-man. So the leaders sit in their veils of normality and pray.
Rulers think they no longer need to offer up their image if the hierarchical order is to continue. To be clear, I think we would be better off without it, the grandeur of the contemporary coming mostly from synthesis and the mass of imagination that exists, free, bicycling around to burn off energy. But it would be foolish to think we don’t live under hierarchy, and that we aren’t insulted by the lackluster culture of the highest orders of power and their mediocrity. After all, once you look, the pyramids tell the stories of the underclasses as well; grandiosity congeals the forms that we project into the future.
The paucity of grandeur that is rife in culture is generated by the veneration of the professional in the face of the impossibility of centralized power due to complexity, as well as the waning dominance of American-created cultural syncretism without the lessening of American military dominance abroad—though, given the closing of military theaters and bases under Biden, this too seems to be lessening.
The queen is dead, it’s been more than twenty years since 9/11, and the spectacle still holds. But through this banality, pokes the remaining desire for the sovereign moment, hidden in plain sight. This is not a program, just a note, now that we’ve endured beyond the end of history.
It seems to me that the general movements of history remain, and we will continue to fall into decadence. But in this, something new comes. That decadence is widespread, spurned on by the great forgetting of colonial extermination and the hypnotism of the factory line, the feed, will be art’s salvation. Looking beyond banal avant-garde tropes, beyond the representation of minorities for its own sake, one can mine the staggering degree of intelligence, art, and thought that proliferates under the spectacle, maybe even because of it.
Unless Musk becomes cyber god, adorned in mech-suits half as cool as the most simple anime, the wellsprings of psychic material, vibrating across the globe, must be our decadence if the rulers will give us none of any actual import, cowering in their grifts and the past. They will never capture the sovereign moment because their rule is based on work, on the bootstrap doctrine.
As the symbols of the old world deteriorate, we must find new places to adorn the drive for divinity. Humans crave more than normality and stability; we create it all the time, though our eyes are always drawn away.
We can no longer blame everything on capital with its banal hierarchies. But our rulers insult us with their lack, even as they rob us blind. We can experience decadence without being rich and perhaps this is the secret to breaking through, as the socialists believed, the impasses of the barbarism of the normal.