ABSTRACT
Mapped on to controversies about 'modern civilization' itself, this is central to that mix of the grandiose and the pessimistic that characterizes the fin-de-Siècle 'structure of feeling'. There is a conflict between two divergent models of the civilizing process, a conflict with profound implications in fin-de-Siècle thought, and beyond. One can see how terms like dissipation, dispersion, and dissolution can be used with widely differing implications in fin-de-Siècle discourse, allowing for radically divergent positions to be occupied in the ideological terrain of the time. The luxuries of civilization emerge as a dissipation of energy, its extravagance as self-destructive. This chapter describes the possibility of that fertile zone of convergence and coalescence between science, spiritualism, technology, and the civilizing process that is so characteristic of fin-de-Siècle culture. This is described in terms of 'dematerialization', the realm of the ethereal, the 'ether' itself being a nebulous term, hovering between the material and the spiritual, the scientific and the imaginary.
