Decadence, Decolonization, and the Critique of Modernity: An Introduction by the Guest Editor

What would it mean to decolonize decadence? To ask the question is to consider the relationship between disparate but intertwined critiques of modernity. For writers in late nineteenth-century France such as Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Joris-Karl Huysmans, for example, ‘decadence’ captures a particular critique of urban modernity. These were writers who exhibited a ‘profound scepticism about modernity and progress’, and were ‘disgusted by overcrowding, poverty, and rampant commercialism, what Huysmans described as ‘the caliphate of the counter’. Decolonizing critiques, however, developed out of the anti-colonial movements that lead to political decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of newly independent postcolonial national cultures, as well as continuing efforts at cultural decolonization, including the development of postcolonial theory, and theorizations of coloniality and decoloniality. These are all critiques of modernity differentiated by their origins and ends, but which nevertheless cast doubt, each in their own ways, on the project of Western civilization, its myths of progress, imperial expansionism, imposed temporalities, and enthralment to commodity capital. But to consider what it would mean to decolonize decadence is also to imagine modernity from starkly different viewpoints, from a stance of alienation within the West, from standpoints that experience Western hegemony as alien, and from innumerable perspectives that otherwise navigate colonial rule, imperialism and its aftermath, settler colonial myths, or the development of national cultures outside, but in relation to the West

Imperial Shame, Magnificent Decay: Decadent Poetics and the Colonial West Indies

In the introduction to The Poet of Guiana, a selection of works by Walter MacArthur Lawrence published posthumously in 1948, the editor, Patrick H. Daly, identifies Lawrence as ‘the leader of the Aesthetic movement in Guiana because of the high regard he had for literary purity as such’. Daly praises Lawrence, who was born in British Guiana 1896 and died in 1942, as ‘the most intellectual and urbane Guianese poet of his generation’, known for his ‘chaste, strenuous, athletically supple and pure verse’. And though Lawrence was ‘prone to excess emotional fervour and long, complex sentences […] his poetry generally has euphony’. Daly describes Lawrence’s talent as being ‘like a delicately strung instrument: the higher it is the deeper is its possessor’s sensitivity’. While Daly stipulates that ‘hypersensitivity’ in an artist is abnormal, he echoes Walter Pater by defending Lawrence on the grounds of ‘temperament’. Lawrence’s ‘sensitivity claimed as its ancestry merely the artist’s temperament […]. He would have been less than an artist – and more than an artist – had his art not been agonised by profound sensitivity’.[i] In describing Lawrence as an artist agonized by sensitivity but not hypersensitive, graceful yet prone to emotional excess, Daly locates Lawrence’s poetry on the line between aestheticism and decadence, between refinement and an abnormal over-refinement. This is a distinction Daly affirms by identifying Lawrence with the virtuosity of Algernon Charles Swinburne while disavowing Swinburne’s more scandalous traits: We consider Lawrence to have been the first of the moderns in this country, but his contact with the final, spiritual moments of Victorianism, and the influence of his masters, Swinburne (that is Swinburne’s desirably effective orchestration without Swinburne’s irreligion) and Wordsworth, gave him strength and uniformity.[ii]   [i] P. H. Daly, [Biography], in Walter MacArthur Lawrence,The Poet of Guiana, Walter MacArthur Lawrence: Selected Works, ed. by P. H. Daly (Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1948), pp. 5-17 (p. 8). [ii] Ibid., p. 9

What can we learn from a peer review?

The quality assurance of research articles is based on a widespread reliance on peer review, which has gradually become black boxed, as the way to do it. By opening the black box, it turns out that this form of quality assurance varies a great deal. This article looks at the comments offered by peer reviewers and treats them as an important but overlooked element of the methodological circle and science production. Based on an auto-ethnographical study of one manuscript that undergoes peer reviewing in three different journals the article examines how the review comments affect the author and hence promote/inhibit the becoming of a research article. The article offers a transmethodological look at peer review by employing concepts from actor-network theory. This allows for a theoretical move from notions of single authorship to notions of writing as a performance of relations between heterogeneous actors. The analysis aims to identify the connections that are established between the manuscript and other actors such as scientific standards for good research, journals’ aim and scope, universities’ requirements for staff publication, peer reviewer’s personal academic interests etc. which all become part of a peer review network. In conclusion, the article suggests acknowledging the relational and co-productive aspect of peer reviewing as an important part of quality assurance of scientific knowledge

En styringsteknologi bliver til

Hos  Michel  Foucault  og  Nikolas  Rose  er  magt  ikke  noget,  man  besid-­‐der, men noget der skal udføres og derfor betinget af handlinger og intentioner  hos  de,  som  søges  styret.  Alligevel  fremstilles  styringstek-­‐nologier i governmentality litteraturen ofte som mere eller mindre direkte afledt af beskrivelser i policy-­‐papirer. De interesserer sig først og  fremmest  for  at  studere,  hvordan  færdige  styringsteknologier  gri-­‐ber ind i menneskers liv og medvirker til, at subjekter bliver til på be-­‐stemte måder. En styringsteknologi har en tilblivelseshistorie, der er værd at beskrive. Denne artikel viser gennem en Latourinspireret ana-­‐lyse af en implementeringsproces, hvordan en lov udfoldes som trans-­‐lationer i et netværk. Analysen følger implementeringen af loven om pædagogiske  læreplaner  i  dagtilbud  med  henblik  på  at  identificere  koblinger mellem viden, magt og subjektivitet og andre aktanter, der danner  grundlag  for,  at  loven  kan  fungere  som  en  styringsteknologi  for arbejdet i dagtilbud. Analysen bidrager til en nuancering af vores forståelse  af  policy  som  flydende  og  med  et  element  af  uforudsigelig-­‐hed, som ikke indfanges af governmentalitystudier, der studerer lov-­‐givningsprocesser ud fra et styringseffektperspektiv