Genesis P. Orridge

« To demolish the harmonies. Essais et entretiens autour de Decoder », livret mis en ligne pour accompagner la diffusion du film Decoder (Klaus Maeck, Muscha, Volker Schäfer et Trini Trimpop) (1984) lors du FAME – Festival international des films sur la musique du 18 au 25 février 2021 à la Gaieté Lyrique en partenariat avec MK2 Curiosity (avec Clémentine Hougue).

Il Novecento è per molti aspetti il secolo più corporeo. Se già della metà dell'Ottocento poeti come Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine e Mallarmè, e più in generale l'intero simbolismo/decadentismo, avevano riscattato il corpo dal silenzio in cui era stato confinato da circa due millenni di cultura cristiana, tuttavia è con il Novecento che esso assume piena dignità letteraria. Le radici di un attenzione agli elementi corporei e alla sintomatologia organica di determinati sentimenti è sicuramente di matrice classica: noti a tutti sono i devastanti effetti corporei dell'amore in Saffo. Tuttavia il Ventesimo secolo spoglia il corpo dei residui elementi nobilitanti delle epoche precedenti: esso emerge in tutta la sua fisicità o meglio metafisicità, sebbene privo di ogni riferimento alla religione o alla morale. Tale processo non investe soltanto la letteratura ma più in generale un immaginario visivo, onirico e " fotografico " a cui la cronaca storica ci ha abituato. La pubblicazione alla metà degli anni quaranta degli scatti fotografici ritraenti i corpi morti e nudi ammassati ad

The Twentieth Century is, on several counts, the century which focuses more upon human body. If, since the mid­nineteenth century, poets of the caliber of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmè, and, in wider terms, the entire Symbolism and Decadentism, had released body from the silence to which it had been confined in two thousand years of Christian culture, the Twentieth Century, on balance, gives really the body the literary dignity that it deserves. The roots of the attention to body and to the organic symptoms of certain feelings date back to Classical period: the ravaging effects of love on Saffo's body are well­known to everyone. Nonetheless, the twentieth century strips the body of the residual ennobling factors hailing from the earlier epochs, so much so its physicality, or better still its metaphysicalness, bursts out, even though with no reference to religion or ethics. This process does not involve only literature, but more broadly the dreamlike optical unconsciousness of photography, to which the chronicles have accustomed us. The publication in the mid­40's of the photos of the naked dead bodies in Auschwitz has accustomed the twentieth­century man to a depersonalizing conception of body. The two World Wars have constituted a corporeal and bloody orgy into which two generations have fallen and against which they have fought; the war reports delivered the photos of the daily bloodbath at the battle's front to the entire world. The growing habit at seeing the body portrayed in its concreteness is what, most of all, had modified the conception of body: no more Junoesque Renaissance Venuses, no more idealized icons, relics of the classical period, no more the quest for the perfect proportions and the harmony between the parts, but the body, the skin and the organs in their unarmed nudity, in their thinness and in their defenseless exposure to external and existential factors. Therefore, the interaction between mental representation and somatic relapse is more and more frequent, according to the ideas which, starting from the Viennese Freudian and Jungian School, spread all over Europe, involving even laymen and barkers in an amateurish passion. The nearly obsessive research into the potential psychological or psychiatric causes of every physical disorder has seen that the body has been considered as the mirror of the mind. The latter takes soul's place and is almost integrated to an organic conception of individual. As a matter of fact, in the early 1900's lots of scholars made studies with the specific purpose to find the anatomical location of

This paper presents an original methodology whereby traditional literary surrealism may be integrated with epidemiological frameworks in order to create a psychological basis for public-health profiles, in which non-traditional gender-competition relationships are dissected and shown to be both supportive of and in conflict with Marxist notions of class-struggle, feminist self-realisation paradigms and academic referencing selection criteria, or lack thereof. The piece takes the work of one Tea Drinker of the Queen Fighting Bandits of the Psychedelic Bolsheviks as its starting point. It may be useful to conceptualise Tea Drinker as a person of the traditionally female gender-persuasion, perhaps in what Anita Sarkeensian refers to as the 'Damsel in Distress' mode, while both Out To Lunch and Bob Jeff Rhys take on the traditional gender-male role of protector/aggressor. Care has been taken to present this dialogue 'as-is' in regards to format and general presentation, though some alterations were necessary for readability. The original new-media frameworks have been retained where possible.