Descendants of the Decadents

 

One of my earliest memories of drawing aged about 8 is the thrill of inventing grotesque faces with a classmate and passing the resulting scarred and deformed phizogs between each other to make the time in Miss Palmer’s English lessons somehow more pleasurable. I can still remember the surprise and wonder I felt that this capacity to produce such horrific countenances was available to me through the readily accessed felt tip pen and paper. Now I wonder if this actual felt intensity was none other the feeling of the proximity to creative emergence itself. I have recently begun to wonder if these glimpses of the mental quality woven into the cosmos might not be responsible for all instances of creative inspiration, where one feels a deep sense of meaning within an event. This event might be the reading of a cheap horror comic inside a disused concrete water pipe on a hillside scrubland or it might be the moment that the green fuse visited Dylan Thomas or Blake found heaven in a wild flower. 

A point that Mark Fischer makes in the Weird and the Eerie is that the very nature of colonial extractivist thought systems automatically produces the alien or something outside the known because it insists on verifiable data as the sole means of knowing. Ok this is obvious enough but the point he might have also have made, if he had become part of the burgeoning discussion about affect, is that the means by which we decide something is known is limited. If we limit our sense of what is known to what is conveniently repeated and made analogous then, yes unsurprisingly we will keep encountering the unknown. The visceral tapestry of the weird and eerie weaves us into an extra-sensory realm of affect. It seems interesting to me that as a child I was seeking this hyper-aesthetic experience found in the weird and its absolute proximity to creative emergence itself. This emergence is always happening - always emerging in the middle. It struck me as a child that Miss (not definitely not Mrs) Palmer, an ex-nun, was somehow reinforcing something institutional and staticized, just as, come to think of it, so was the teacher, Mr Royston, who first introduced me to letters, by way of an educational tool that resembled scrabble. As I was hard of hearing I never really cottoned onto what we were supposed to do with the hard edged black and white cardboard symbols (around the same time I remember putting together random letters and asking my family what they spelled). I like to think I was a rhizomatic anti-genealogical descendent of the Decadents, seeking an opening onto the feeling of actual meaning in immanence. Or perhaps I was just being a facetious schoolboy? What makes me doubt the latter explanation is the thrill of wonder I can still remember feeling at the emerging weirdness on my exercise-book cover. 

 

In creating this seminar article I was acting on a hunch that the Decadents were woven into a rhizomatic realm of hyper-aesthetic experience that could be seen to act as a hidden underground history of art. Hidden because it is both off the radar and largely inside printed matter but also because it explores the region of extra-sensory encounters, which are, as we discussed not part of the know universe. According to popular science such as Particle Physics Brick by Brick: Atomic and Subatomic Physics Explained... in Lego, the known universe is made up of fixed matter that can be analysed and decided upon, this being the way we extract value in the colonial control room of the Empire of Like. This of course is the institutional propagation of power by the rapid distribution of the pregiven ideas, even in micro-decisions, but the rhizome knows no such branching or computational gatekeeping because it is everywhere all at once in a state of constant becoming. 

When I was reading Baudelaire’s quote to illustrate how the weird and the eerie gives us a means of validating the unknown as a methodology, I was suddenly struck by the French version of his line The only difficult work is that which we dare not begin. It becomes a nightmare.*

Il n’y a de long ouvrage que celui qu’on n’ose pas commencer. Il devient cauchemar.

Devient is deviant I thought. Perhaps the decadents themselves are descendants of the misericord artists who sought to make a hidden subculture underneath the arses of the state but the thrill of deviancy persists and the spirit of creative emergence is there in the title of the popular website “Deviant art” although by now, it could be argued, any actual deviancy is of homeopathic strength – a vestige of the idea of the weird, but never the less still an opening onto the hyper-aesthetic region outside of brutal sensory data. It becomes a nightmare Il devient cauchemar, said Baudelaire. Now a linguist might disavow me of the proximity of becoming to deviant but it still functions as a useful foot hold for understanding how thought in becoming can only ever be deviant to the staticized thinking of pregiven analogy that underpins the means of controlling knowledge shaped by an agreed upon culture of equivalence called late capitalism. 

 

What also makes the decadent rhizome so intriguing is its quiet subversive quality. Whilst there are always those who seek out the weird as a means of standing out such as Salvador Dali (not in my opinion a Decadent) there are those for whom the weird is the only means by which they can access their capacities and pleasures in creating. Yes, there are echoes here of my school boy scribbling episodes but I’m also thinking of artists such as Jonny Hannah who invented a realm called Dark Town to accommodate all of the thrilling felt intensities he experienced around film noire, jazz music and all manner of pulp genre comic publications. Dark Town seems to me to be the feeling of being at home even when you’re far away that the nineteenth century flaneurs were questing for. It is the change and the fleeting that we need to feel awake. In an interview Jonny Hannah describes how essential it is to him to create work before he has had a chance to tell himself not to commit ink to paper. It is easy to go back to sleep and post rationalise why something is a bad idea but the weird and eerie are free passes on the bus to Dark Town and this is where the hidden history of creative emergence is living like the Town of Cats in Murakami’s IQ84. Yes, it is a nightmare but it is also our chance to experience ourselves as complete multi-organisms of extra-sensory hyper-aesthetic meaning makers.

 

Fisher, M (2016) The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater

Hannah, J interview available here: https://www.heartagency.com/artists/jonny-hannah/video/