Neo-Decadence: 12 Manifestos

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Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him . . . .” --- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Holstein's destruction of the octopus is a difficult moment in the performance, the ethics of which Holstein is demonstrably cognizant of in a moment that marks a temporary interruption in its destruction. After smashing the octopus on the floor, she kisses it and says ‘I'm sorry … This is not a democratic space’, before she gently, almost tenderly, rips what is left of the creature in two, saying ‘I love you. Thank you for your performance. You are beautiful. Better than on [the audience's] dinner plate’. She then kisses it again several times, and gently casts the two parts of the octopus to either side of the stage, saying, ‘I know, you guys. The whole show is tragic. What can I say?’ The response is typical of Holstein: ‘Let's do that again!’ This time, though, as Minaj's ‘Starships’ is replayed, she is hoisted into the air and pushed from side to side by her co-performers as they whip her with what's left of the octopus in a kind of penance. Drawing attention to the ‘tragedy’ of the octopus's deaths whilst tearing it to pieces is hypocritical, but there is still something to learn from this wanton brutality. Holstein theatricalizes the decadence of capitalist markets, understood here as an attitudinal position that regards living things not on the basis of their own vibrancy, but on the basis of a gradual extraction of value and life. Holstein's witch refuses to accept capitalist exchange as a self-sustaining process of growth and renewal, instead encouraging her audiences to view this process as one of perpetual decay, introducing a typically decadent motif to the work's engagement with capitalism. What has this generation inherited from the Decadent Movement? How has Decadence imagined "catastrophe" in the sense of disaster, of degeneration, disintegration, apocalypse, extinction? What, if anything, comes after Decadence and its catastrophes? What overtures do they make? In an unexpectedly nasal voice, he starts ranting about Post-Leviathanism and Cyber-Gaia Autonomy and Memetic Scorpiology and Indigo Child Discordia and Voudon Gnosticism and the Trans-Belial Singularity. His sermon makes little sense to you: perhaps, you wonder, because you are not a practicing occultist. KRISTINE ONG MUSLIM is the author of nine books of fiction and poetry, most recently The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), a short story collection whose German-language edition is forthcoming from WhiteTrain. She co-edited the British Fantasy Award-winning anthology People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!, as well as Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines and Sigwa: Climate Fiction Anthology from the Philippines. She is also the translator of Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Marlon Hacla, and Rogelio Braga.

When I think of disturbance, I think of the Decadence of the Anthropocene. I think of this passage from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: You’ve spoken in the past about photography not being art. What are your thoughts on photography as art? Can you explain how you see photography as opposed to art? Antoine D’Agata: I respect artists who have the courage to live up to the madness of their art. Céline, Artaud or Rimbaud are geniuses not for the dexterity or subtlety of their words but for their truth. I don’t see art as competition or a spectacle but as a privileged space to give a radical form to one’s perspective on the world. Art has long been the hostage of technique and today the criteria would be intelligence, not to say cynicism. But I look at art when I sense there’s space there for excess and despair. I didn’t have a chance to consider the history of art. I look at Georges Grosz because I find there, instinctively, the monstrosity of society, and in Francis Bacon’s, of the flesh. I look at art when it is shouted or vomited, not conceptualised or marketed. The immense freedom permitted by the Internet and other advancing technologies calls for a truly crosscultural, altermodern artistic movement. Not limiting ourselves to English, we will establish Spanish, Japanese, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and other Neo-Decadent literatures. All writers must now be translators, and monolingual types will be regarded under suspicion of provincialism. Demographics and frontiers must be constantly fractured, and artistic concerns rotated into new contexts. To relieve boredom, Neo-Decadent factions will be established on every continent and, ideally, in every country, always with the aim of undermining the pompous, tendentious, sincere, academic, intellectual, stultifying, risible and outdated impersonators of writers and artists who in most cases comprise the publishing industries and art scenes. Fashion, music, writing, art, cooking, sexuality and all other areas of everyday life will be dismantled and reformulated whenever boredom threatens to constrain us.”

Abstract

The collection ends with “Some of Them Fell”, another affecting and ambiguous story. We follow the narrator on his meandering and unpredictable path over the years, through teenage misadventures, a queer and sometimes troubled love affair, and brief but disturbing supernatural intrusions. Again, a departure that is tender and relatively unsentimental: Considering "catastrophe" in the literary sense as the unraveling or denouement of a drama, what is distinctive about the endings of Decadent texts, Decadent events, Decadent careers, Decadent lives, or Decadent civilizations? What is or was modern or modernist about Decadent conclusions? And Some are Missing” feature the indescribable anti-people; encounters with them are always slippery and unsettling.

Literature is not a guild system. Academies and workshops: a parade of inbred dogs with each generation more unfit than the last.” Conference Committee: Ellis Hanson, Elisha Cohn, Jane Desmarais, Kate Hext, Caroline Levine, Kristin Mahoney, Alex MurrayAnd here I am again, in the same hotel. Alone. I need to remember what happened, get it clear in my head by setting it down. If I can set it down. Memory is an infection: you can pass it on, but you can’t get rid of it. Still, I need to pass the time somehow. I buy a drink at the bar, a vodka and cranberry juice. That’s what Nathan used to drink. It seems important to remember him somehow. There are five men and two women scattered around the bar, all drinking alone. I don’t feel like breaking the mould, but there are no free tables left. So I take my glass upstairs. You’ve talked before about photography as a language—do you ever feel trapped by the way in which you have communicated in the past, or do you enjoy having a unique voice? Kublai Khan was a modern. Things fell apart a long time ago. We are already living in the ruins of civilisation. There’s nothing to celebrate. When you toast, make sure you smash your glasses together. This kind of writing should be the same. Harmony is overrated.” I saw him again — the old man, that is — a few weeks later. By then it was autumn, and a bitter wind was blowing in from the iron sea. He and a younger man were walking towards the harbor. As they passed me, deep in conversation, I avoided catching the old man’s eye. I didn’t want to interrupt his work. Or make him think I was jealous. Or, to be honest, know him. The writer S.D. Stewart on Lane’s first collection (most of these observations are just as appropriate for Lane’s later fiction):

Fig. 1 Lauren Barri Holstein appearing in ‘adolescent drag’ in Notorious, by Lauren Barri Holstein. Fierce Festival, Birmingham, 2017. Photograph by Manuel Vason. Image courtesy of Lauren Barri Holstein. Ballard’s fiction as an indication of sub-scenes with an insider’s code to placing tomorrow before today, occupies no categorizable genre, except the eponymous term Ballardian. His novels explore the collapse of the distinction between vision and madness, most often in the socially acceptable as carriers of the potentially emergent psychopath. His visionary subversion of cultural forms in fiction arguably finds its interface in synthetic biology that attempts to redesign organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. Ballard re-treated fiction, having briefly trained in medicine, as a biomedical module that could incorporate near-future technologies, in the same way that synthetic biology seeks to create new biological parts, devices and systems, or to redesign systems already present in nature. Genetic engineering in the modification of an organism’s genome through biotechnology could appropriately be assigned a Neo-Decadent context within science, little different in its textual applications to how Huysmans, the author of the seminally decadent Against Nature (1884), plays with altered states through the introduction of synaesthesia. The two occupy a similar resonance, separate in time, but ultimately not so different in their design to re-edit the body’s capacity to experience the new real through enhanced cellular discourse.” I think when Nan was really high she saw and photographed the world very differently. Do you think that your work is shaped in a similar way?The image of a field of flowers in a poem alone isn’t Decadent simply because it is an image containing many flowers. There has to be too many of them. An obscene number. One must consider them a nuisance. A threat to Taste. Threateningly kitschy. Too much. When Dorian Gray heaved a French sigh over not merely the fin de siècle, but also the end of the planet, could he truly imagine it or the way his own culture was already causing it? When Baudelaire describes his readers' laying waste to the world with an opiated yawn, how do we take up now his invitation to recognize ourselves in this monstre délicat? What does it mean for us now to enjoy, teach, and even create Decadent literature, Decadent visual arts, criticism about Decadence, in an age when global warming and climate catastrophes have become our most urgent political crisis? What are the Decadent art forms and theories that speak to the current century and its numerous catastrophes? How does Decadence signify differently now, along with other related terms of the fin de sièclesuch as Aestheticism, Symbolism, Impressionism, and Modernism, as we contemplate our own fin du globe? How has Decadence figured globally in the political crises and aesthetic migrations of the past two centuries? This conference will consider the phenomenon of Decadence from its emergence as a social theory and an aesthetic movement in the 19th century to its current resurgence and refiguration in the art and criticism of our present moment and environment. Our holy books will be legion and of staggering variety: instruction booklets for console games that never reached the market, infomercials for sketchy investments recorded onto Betamax cassettes, wallpaper motifs culled from 1960s Belgian catalogs, and blueprints drafted by architects whose ambitions eclipsed their means. In these ephemeral relics can be found the gates to hidden palaces of initiatory splendor. One needs only be so clever as to find the means of ingress.” Do you know, I can’t remember the name my mother gave her? All I can remember is my secret name for her, Sara. Without an “h”. It was my sister’s name.

The Neo-Decadents, those Post-Naturalist culture sluts of the 21st Century Empire of Ruins, present eleven new international tales of Altermodern dissipation: the rot, rutting, riots and resignation linking India, Japan, Iran, Romania, Italy, England and other glittering jewels of our tedious global capitalist hegemony, all detailed in prose with more convolutions than the shell of a venomous marine snail. Lull yourself into a synthetic opioid stupor of the literary consciousness with these stories of fashion, self-absorption, drugs, murder, Internet anomie and excessive retro gaming, penned by some of today’s most attractive, well-dressed and impolite young authors.Formal considerations of style when time has run out: Baudelaire or Verlaine or Huysmans on the style d'or at the end of empires, the crepuscular Debussy, late James, Wilde after the trials, Aschenbach at the beach, Don Fabrizio at the ball, time regained in Proust, final cigarettes in film noir, Djuna Barnes or Jean Rhys or Lawrence Durrell or Tennessee Williams or Thomas Pynchon or Martin Amis after the lover has left in a taxi, you see where this is going. From Susan Sontag’s ‘camp’ to the notorious Decadent Handbook for the Modern Libertine (2006), from manga renderings of fin-de-siècle themes to Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde’s murder mysteries, this interdisciplinary conference aims at investigating Neo-Victorian manifestations of Decadence. By looking at fiction, poetry, film, and other media from the Interwar period to the present day, this event hopes not only to expand our understanding of Decadence but interrogate and offer fresh insights into the nature of Neo-Victorianism itself.