Decadence, Asceticism, Virtue and Frivolity

I have been considering the shift in styles of decadence from the French revolution to now, and the nature of revolutionary movements from then till now.  I have also been considering the concepts of “trashiness” and “tastefulness” as they relate to class struggle, and class values.  Also there is the interesting concept of “classiness” which has relevance to class struggle in and of itself.

In the French revolution the upper class was indulgent in obvious decadent ways, peacocks everywhere, massive dinners, giant wigs, and the revolution opposed all that frivolity and frippery and what not, ditto the Russian revolution.

You had a fetishization of the “virtuous and simple” ways of an idealized proletariat.  

Today classy is clean minimalist lines, juice cleanses, simple elegance, an absolute lack of “clutter”, neutral colors, ascetic diets, and a faux virtue in this fetishized simplicity.  They have taken the clothes of the peasant from an era before and made them their symbol.

Trashy is faux gilt, bright colors, excess, a desire for and love of goods born of material scarcity.  Poor people spend significant percentages of their income on weddings, elaborate gowns, and such for these events because showing one can makes one feel more human in a world bent on dehumanizing, simplicity is a virtue for the rich.

Take goth as a style it is often a proletarian youth’s fantasy of aristocracy, it is decadent, but it is also free from the mandatory cheeriness of the bourgeois.  The bourgeois are the ones who moralize about health (making being unhealthy immoral, because they can afford diet, and medical attention and other things to assure them of this state and even go off on absurd health fads to achieve some form of imaginary super health) and moralize happiness, unhappiness under Capitalism, like all bad circumstances in this system must be moralized and considered to be caused by their victim, as otherwise the inequity of the system is exposed.

Goth is dark, gloomy, a rebellion against the cheery veneer of capitalism, it is also decadent, self indulgent, in opposition to the virtues imposed by the bourgeois on the proletariat, as it is languid rather than hard working, refusing the “virtues” of thrift and self denial.  It is about pleasure.

The bourgeois sneer at their abandoned symbols, the Louis XIV style mirror with a plastic frame lives in a prole’s living room, not in their clean modernist cube or charmingly rustic country house, they the eschew gilt frames and sparkling clothes of their predecessors, now made widely available by mass production.

Gaudy, garish, ostentatious, vulgar all of these are words of bourgeois disgust at these delightful things appropriated by the proletariat.

Classy is an interesting word, it is aspirational, it is the word used to describe bourgeois morality, bourgeois aesthetics and so on from a proletarian viewpoint (through a positive lens of course) but of course the reality and the presented reality of the bourgeois are very different.

Similarly “serious” media is often difficult to get through if you do not have a lot of spare time and demands more emotional energy than “lighter” fare which is more enjoyable if your own life is hard and you require escape, and so a claim to find “virtuous” happiness in ascetic or essentially unpleasurable experiences (like eating kale) is now what the bourgeois do.

We will cast off asceticism when we cast off our chains.