STEVEN CRAIG HICKMAN

Decadent art is the flower of late civilizations, the sign of the end lies within its apocalyptic beauty which offers only the most morbid and beautiful enrichments, an excess of sensual cruelty that annihilates self and other in a languid tempest of enervating desires.

Brian Stableford,
                                                        Glorious Perversity

More and more we see a new type of weird and horror literature challenging us with that tissue of flesh within which we are encased. There is a violence that moves from our de-sensitized worlds of the unnatural artificial virtuality within which we’ve lived like schizorats in a maze and toward a realm in which the only shock that can awaken us from our cold zombie worlds is that of an erotic-violence that (dis)members us from our quotidian lives of boredom and de-sexualized anamorphic existence. Lost among our de-programmed environments we’ve become shaped by algorithms and propaganda to believe this world of capitalist pleasure is the Real. It is not of course and the cold emotionless, even listless existence within its artificial paradise has turned us into sleepwalkers who can only touch based with that older more primitive sensual being through the shock of violence coupled with erotica.

The Medusa sisters emerged from Greek myth as part of that deep fear of the sensual darkness within us that must be emblazoned on our protective shields to fend off all that would tear down the wall of our civilized minds and bodies. Their tales of these sisters and the stone-eyed gaze that turns all who ponder their beauty into stone is as old as civilization itself. Nature at her erotic best is this dark power to turn all our artificial dreams into nightmares. Yet, there is a longing, a nostalgia for this power that is both our danger and our temptation. We long to return to the serpentine gaze of the natural world and yet we dare not for to do so would unmake everything we are and are becoming. We are the unnatural creatures who have evolved beyond the animal we once were and into the artificial beings we are becoming. Humanity was a transitional creature caught between the natural and unnatural.

For decades Western culture and identity have eroded to the point that even its defenders know the game is up. The latest trend in horror and the posthuman is the fusion of Sade with the ancient Paganism of Greece, Rome, India, Africa, and all those cultures that were not a part of the Christian inversion and invasion. For long the nihilism within the West that Nietzsche spoke of throughout his philosophical peregrinations was and is the process of this slow and tortuous destruction of the West’s Christian heritage and the reemergence of the repressed, and denial of its Pagan Worldview. Under the facade of Rousseauistic Enlightenment was a vision of the last gasp of the humanistic ideal of goodness, purity, and Christian ascetic Ideals.

Camille Paglia has been maligned by the latest trend in progressive culture, but her early work stands as a capstone in that great tradition from Sade to Bataille who would critique the Rousseauistic strain in Western culture and ideology. As she’d state in her searing critique:

Sade’s work is a comprehensive satiric critique of Rousseau, written in the decade after the first failed Rousseauist experiment, the French Revolution, which ended not in political paradise but in the hell of the Reign of Terror. Sade follows Hobbes rather than Locke. Aggression comes from nature; it is what Nietzsche is to call the will-to-power. For Sade, getting back to nature (the Romantic imperative that still permeates our culture from sex counseling to cereal commercials) would be to give free rein to violence and lust. I agree. Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning. Feminists, seeking to drive power relations out of sex, have set themselves against nature. Sex is power. Identity is power. In western culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter. As Freud, Nietzsche’s heir, asserts, identity is conflict. Each generation drives its plow over the bones of the dead.

Camille Paglia
                Sexual Personae

One need only turn to Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel published in June 2023, which portrays cannibalism in a medieval village overcome by plague and drought. Agustina Bazterrica’s book Tender Is the Flesh, released in English in 2020 and in Spanish in 2017, imagines a future society that farms humans like cattle. Also out in 2017, Raw, a film by the director and screenwriter Julia Ducournau, tells the story of a vegetarian veterinary student whose taste for meat escalates after consuming raw offal. Each of these delves into the collapse of those very Christian illusions and delusions which have guided the value systems of self-denial and perversity of asceticism and religious ideology in the West for two-thousand years.

Kristi Demeester’s Such a Pretty Smile offers us adolescent girls on the cusp of womanhood that are being found slaughtered and mutilated by a presence that feels too malevolent to be human and is drawn to those whose fierce independence makes them a target for enforcing the status quo. As Paula Ashe (We Are Here to Hurt Each Other) another horror author puts it in an interview “For me, horror is honest. It gives me a space to process and explore some very uncomfortable and unsettling truths about the human experience.”

David Roden’s Snuff Memories introduces us to the posthuman annihilation of Western culture and humanistic piety, offering us a vision in which an ancient time-war ripples through a demon-haunted cosmos as its characters systematically expunge their humanity. Their ‘posthuman becoming’ pre-empts any possible ethics or sane politics. Instead, desire is weaponized from a bleak, inhuman future. Bodies replicate and unzip across the novella’s pornographic vignettes, remade in erotic rituals of mutation, death, and pain. On Roden’s blog Enemy Industry he tells us in a brief philosophical introduction to this work:

This book is a montage of texts, genres and perspectives – alternating between the subtractive eroticism of death-driven biomorphic bodies and the disindividuating mesh of all the alienating ‘moral powers’ haunting its ancient, demon-haunted Cosmos (technological, alien, theological).

Konior summarizes Snuff Memories better than I can in her cover blurb:

Unveiling like a tableau of ancient gods and deathly orgies, where “the universe is composed out of windowless monads each locked away and screaming,”this evocative novel is better called a theoretical installation. Each fragment documenting an erotic way to lose one’s humanity, this is a collection of nightmarish yet utopian miniature visions of sex, death, transformation, and pain, where human bodies are stretched beyond their capacity into mythical realms.

It is just a given that death and pain are what its characters ultimately crave, just as xenophilia is the libidinal presupposition of any posthumanism. Neither they nor the author give explanation or apology for this. Its narrator, a hermaphroditic Wellsian Time Pilot, addresses its prime political operator, the Cabalist saying “Like you, would die but cannot. Not in a way that might satisfy you.”

This brings us to Kenji Siratori whose project cannot be defined, cannot be reduced to any Western mode of apprehension and is in fact a complete annihilation of all modes of Western identity and representation.

In his work we come to the end of the human and humanist project. To describe his work would be to scar it and ourselves. One cannot describe it one must enter it, experience it viscerally, and induce it to enter us in its immiseration, a shocking annihilation of all we have ever thought we are or shall become. To become inhuman, one must obliterate the surface textures of our history, our flesh, our thought. Under the dark contours of this flesh resides the inhuman truth of our future if we would allow it to blossom from the Abyss.

As Andrew C. Wenaus sumarises:

Siratori’s work resonates at a fever pitch, blaring at the limitless informational realm of our minds as it bursts the parameters of the skull. As a kind of accelerationist aesthetic, Siratori critiques technology by pushing it beyond its sensible potentiality; he cultivates alien cognitions where alternatives thrive, where semantic derangement is revolt, where epistemology uncoils.

Andrew C. Wenaus
Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature

Interviewer: Take me through the thought process of your writing; how is the hyperreal insanity of HUMANEXIT created?
Kenji Siratori: “All of my writing is inspired by my nervous system. The HUMANEXIT story is the schizophrenic nerve map of this abolition world. I am a body… I install the murder game of a hybrid corpse mechanism. Eternal GAME OVER…”

I would say that Siratori doesn’t so much critique technology as he does its formation and dominion under the Western war machine that Deleuze and Guattari so adeptly critiqued decades ago. Instead, for Siratori the technojunkie’s body is merging with the machine, and we are becoming inhuman because under the facade of Western conceptions we’ve for far too long been encased in a prison house of identity which covered over the machinic truth of our own death. What is returning is the dead truth of our own inexistence as humans and the flowering of the thousand petals of machinic life we are becoming.

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HYPER-ANNOTATION
2023年2月27日 02:58

Body Horror Erotics