Over the last few years, a distinctive sensibility has cut across American culture

-- a fascination with the abject, with the down and out. This sensibility is not
new. There is nothing more basic to popular notions of bohemia than the romance of
the wretched. But it is more pervasive and more various than ever before.

A primary trait of this cult is a celebration of the masochistic man. This type is
most prominent in popular fiction and film, where he often appears with his
sadistic double. In the last few years, a new "Boy Lit" has emerged, full of
stories of damaged men who switch from kindness to killing and back again as if
they were channel surfing. In "Jesus' Son," the writer Dennis Johnson follows
addicts, drifters and brawlers; in "Pugilist at Rest," Thom Gunn profiles guys
battered by war and boxing.

Over the same period, this sensitive-sadistic type has become a staple in Hollywood
as well, especially in movies like Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," where men
slam-dance between S & M. God save the women who get caught in between. In films
like "Bad Lieutenant" and "Naked," when the men go down, women mainly serve to
break their fall.

Related to the celebration of the masochistic man is the success of failure: in the
last few years, an esthetic of the pathetic -- an ethic of the loser -- has emerged
in contemporary art and music. Generally this slacker works hard to avoid the
performance principle drilled into the rest of us -- the one that enjoins us to be
good workers and happy consumers.

The Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley creates installations furnished with used toys
from the Salvation Army. Nirvana, the landmark grunge band from Seattle (whose
leader, Kurt Cobain, committed suicide last spring), turned songs of despair into
top-10 hits.

This ethic of failure slides up and down the social scale. At the high end, there
is the familiar phenomenon of Generation X -- the brand name for yuppies in a post-
yuppie age, for well-to-do kids who delight in a cushioned free fall into the
social underworld. This is slumming in the 1990's, a pit stop at Wal-Mart before
Wall Street.

Obviously, kids in slums cannot slum in this way, and in old working-class
neighborhoods resignation is hardly a pose. To be down and out in these places is
not an affectation.

With its initial contempt for pop success and good looks, grunge music tapped into
this resignation. In this sense, grunge was an echo of British punk, which was also
an art form claimed by working-class kids purged from the social order. And yet
grunge lacked the anger and the anarchy of punk, and its nihilism differed from
"gangsta" rap as well.

At its most radical, grunge was an esthetic of indifference that went beyond a pose
of boredom to a desire to be done with it all. What was the music of Nirvana about
if not the Nirvana principle, a lullaby droned to the dreamy beat of the death
drive?

In the cult of abjection, there is a competition to see who can be the most down,
the most dead -- as if the subject of history, after the Worker, the Woman and the
Person of Color was now the Corpse. This cult thus points to a new politics of
indifference -- or at least to a new fatigue with the old politics of difference,
whether defined in terms of class, gender or race. Not so long ago hip young things
tried on different identities like so many costumes. Today this desire seems
consumerist, and a new ambition has emerged: to be trapped in identity, stuck in
trauma. As the narrator of "Try," Dennis Cooper's latest novel, remarks of the
jabbed arms of the high school junkie: "They legitimize him in a way."

This is what the moralists who decry the violence of American society do not see.
It is a culture of violence, to be sure, but even more it is a culture of
victimization. In part we entertain violence in order to identify with its victims.
For it is there, with the victims, that we think our secret identities lie.

This over-identification with the victim is a problem, and it has long locked the
left into a hierarchy of suffering in which the wretched can do no wrong. Yet far
worse is the nonidentification with the victim, the blaming of the victim, that the
right exploits. In this regard, the cult of abjection sides with the wretched
against the reactionary.

From high theory in the academy to television talk shows, a celebration of trauma
rules the day; from the halls of Yale to the set of "Oprah" the motto is "enjoy
your symptom!" Confess your sin, bear your stain. In this way, the cult of
abjection may be a new version of an old American religion. Stand up, testify, be
saved. But there is this difference: it does not believe much in redemption.

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 30, 1994, Section A, Page 31 of
the National edition with the headline: Cult Of Despair. Order Reprints | Today’s
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