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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

a touch of surrealism « Previous | |Next »
November 3, 2004

In 1924, Miró met André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon and other participants of the Surrealistic group, in the year the first Surrealist Manifesto is published. This movement explores the confusion at the border of the states of dreaming and reality, and it places mundane objects in an unusual circumstance in order to shock the observer.

The surrealist concern is with the fusion of the two states, dream and reality and it appeals to Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. This was interpreted as the idea that imagination lead to the truth of repressed unconscious thoughts. So the Surrealist were searching for a truth of one's internal desires and passions through their practice of automatic writing that expresses their unconscious desires.

Miró executed several paintings in the surrealistic vein, including Harlequin's Carnival:

MiroHarlequin2.jpg
Joan Miro, Harlequin's Carnival, 1924-25.

This created a world of boneless, flowing, amorphous creatures, which freely change their shapes and position in the space and universe. Figures and objects, a fish, an insect, a ladder, flames, stars, cones, circles and spheres, all have real objects, but on the canvas they are swinging colored shadows celebrating a holiday.

Could this not be a radical impulse for philosophy outside the academy given this academic closure and the moral conservatism in our public culture? A philosophy that would connect to, and address, the philosophical heritage of surrealism whilst avoiding the irrationalism constructed by the rationalist world-view inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment?

What would that heritage be? A romantic sense of a fascination with enchantment and the marvellous, as well as with the spellbound aspects of modern consumer cultures and societies? Liberty as desire unbounded? Hegel's unhappy consciousness? The experience of a self divided against itself?

Should we accept the way Habermas constructs surrealism. As an "aesthetic phenomenon," wherein "the concentrated dealings with itself of a decentered subjectivity set free from the everyday conventions of perceiving and acting; onwe which promises us some kind of release from the tyranny of the instrumental rationality which has strangled the spirit, crushed desire and fragmented modern life.

"Modern art alone can communicate with the archaic sources of social integration that have been sealed off within modernity." Does this lead to a materialist psychoanalysis based on the concept of the autoproductive unconscious, which is a desiring-machine in a universe of desiring machines; an autoproductive desiring-machine that is a contentless, non-moral force, like the Freudian id?

Is this not the world of Deleuze, the Breton of the First Manifesto, surrealism in general and Klossowski?; a world that posits the unconscious as the primary reality which must be allowed to express itself. The freeing of the unconscious has the same goal for both surrealism and Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus: an expression-production freed from preconceived cultural ideas, or more particularly from capitalist-bourgeois culture.

The problem that I see with a free flowing unconscious is that Miro is disleading. Not everything woudl be play. What would also flow is a destructive negativity that will be expressed in violence to others because many of us have lived damaged lives since childhood. A capitalist socail formation has engraved its own way of way of being on our bodies.

That destructive negativity can be overwhelming to live with since its constant destruction disintegrates the normal ego. That can make sharing a life very difficult and surrealism can led to a romantic celebration of the life of the mentally ill or disturbed for their "insights."

Is the end to be achieved the dissolution of ego and a free flowing unconscious?

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:52 PM | | Comments (0)
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