File spoon-archives/surrealist.archive/surrealist_1996/96-06-11.135, message 179


Date: Sat, 8 Jun 1996 01:18:03 +0200 (MET DST)
From: p_petiot-AT-euronet.nl (PETIOT_Pierre)
Subject: Re: electronic exhibition


Michael,

>This is why the areas of convergence with each
>other and with current theory must be a central point of this exhibition.
>Otherwise it could seem like a revival or retrospective hence dismissable...
>Art history has generally written Surrealism off as an activity of the past
>(an art movement) rather than as something living in the present. Showing
>not only that the past perspectives are being adopted by the scientific
>world but also that the art is still connected to the present is necessary
>if we are to avoid this pitfall.
>
>[Sorry to disagree about this with you, Pierre, but it's too important (from
>my perspective) to not be insistant about.]

Michael, there are limits to intellectual freedom, and as far I as can see 
you made here a step beyond. You cannot logically disagree with me all 
alone, in such a unilateral way. Disagreeing is a matter where 2 persons 
agree upon a minimum common basis... i.e. the fact that they disagree. 
Disagreement is hence ultimately based on a consensus. Just like war is 
based on the underlying agreement that both sides accept to fight, otherwise 
it is not called war but just slaughter. 
For the moment, you cannot disagree with me in the above sentence - although 
you are trying your best, I know - this because I agree with you.

What I am trying to show here - beyond logics-based humor which is the main 
aspect of my remark - is that disagreeing actually requires a subtle sort of 
true cooperation, and the game I am playing is to refuse to cooperate with 
you on establishing a disagreement. 
This is enough to show that WE can disagree TOGETHER, but I cannot disagree 
with you and you cannot disagree with me as long as this WE which actually 
builds the disagreement, is not present.

If you apply the above to a more serious and considerable subject, like for 
instanace this stupid story between William and his Canadian collegue, you 
see that the Canadian's basic problem lies in his attempt to disagree 
unilaterally. So that, what is not acceptable in this adventure is that 
total absence of the normal and deeply human logic of disagreement, which 
the canadian abruptly inserted. 
>From there you immediately see the worst: the Canadian went to the point of 
breaking the human logic of disagreement because he deeply he does not 
consider a pedophile as a human being. And here, you can see that we are not 
too far from something like the roots of nazism. I am not interested into 
the possibly surrealist or anti-surrealist attitude at all anymore. I only 
focus on the fact that a pedophile and even a murderer are full, entire, 
human beings and who ever questions this fact, takes advantage of something 
who is considered as bad, to drop the normal (and basically democratic) 
human rules. Even the State about the inhumanity of which Sade has always 
been complaining does not break these basic rules. Justice is at its 
minimum, the establishment of a disagreement too, and until the very last 
moment any condemned person keeps intact its right to speak. To a certain 
extent, I think that breaking this very low level human consensus I am 
speaking about is worse than killing, because you do not even notice.

Just as is shown by this trick invented by Christiane Rochefort, who once 
proposed as a first level joke and for a feminist demonstration the 
following slogan: "down with the arabs, the negroes the jews and the 
hair-dressers" ; and got her feminist friends quite astonished as they heard 
their own voices raising - after half a second of perplexity - this 
marvellous question :"But WHY the hair-dressers ?"  

Heraclite is right when he say that men should fight for their laws more 
than for the walls of their cities. And that's where the deep wisdom of Sade 
also appears, much more than in all the fuss he makes about sexuality and 
murder. Killing a man is nothing compared to witch hunting in all its 
subreptice and hidden forms, because witch hunting is not a crime against a 
man, it is a crime against humanity. And this has of course no meaning to me 
in terms of justice, but it does have a meaning in terms of awareness. 

Now getting back to a more pleasant subject: us, the only possible point of 
disagreement - and see how I am trying to be nice and helpful - might be the 
following expression "the past perspectives are being adopted by the 
scientific world", which I think is both true and not true.

I do have written that science was getting surrealist, but I did not mean 
that science is adopting past perspectives of surrealism. Science has its 
own logics, threads, paths and methods and it  must be so (yet), or there is 
no science left. What is of some importance is that following its own 
logics, threads, paths and methods, science _confirms_ (to a certain extent) 
 "the past perspectives". And what is more important is that science also 
leads these "past perspectives" much further and to our shame, further 
WITHOUT US. In other terms, I think that in some directions, science is 
currently leading surrealism further than surrealists have ever been capable 
of doing (yet)

But, yes, I also mentioned that (real) artists are quite often 
_at_intuition_level_ 50 years ahead of scientists (which someone translated 
(maybe Rimbaud) in French as "La Science baffouillle"). You can now see why 
I agree with you Michael. Because I know that art may also lead further than 
science... And that is why I refuse to drop one or the other, why I refuse 
to reduce the scope, I WANT BOTH !
A surrealist once wrote - and I think it was a woman: "Je serai toujours 
perverse polymorphe".

That's where people of my sort may be unpleasant to everyone, including 
themselves. Just like a man who is in love with both a black magic woman and 
a pale white fairy... He would certainly be happy to share a castle with 
them. But the two others disagree about the color of the wall paper and he 
is left alone.

My feeling is that surrealism as a perspective is "bigger" than art, 
science, politics and religion (which makes it a quite big "thing" indeed). 
"Bigger" means here "incorporates the best (the active/creative) parts of 
these threads of thinking and practice". However each of the above "art, 
science, politics and religion" has its own sphere of autonomy and its own 
set of methodologies and evolving practices. This until we have restored the 
human practice as a unified field. 
Surrealism is "just" a meta-meta awareness/practice level which, provides 
the underlying basis for, integrates, and goes beyond all these pleasurable 
specialities... 

As regards the religion side of the world, that we are a bit confronted with 
nowadays, please have a look to Ken Knabb's booklet "The Realization and 
Suppression of Religion" in the SI bibliography provided by Shawn.
I think this booklet is an important keystone in the wonderful wave of 
awareness that the SI was, and unfortunately still is. At least, that 
explains a lot as regards what Vaneigem has been working on in the recent 
past years. (see  Raoul Vaneigem, "The Movement of the Free Spirit". New 
York: Zone Books, 1994, in Shawn's list again). 

>>>I think it should be made plain that we see a vital importance in a
>>>_reunification_ of kin, and _expanding collective action_ in the face of the
>>>often subtle but nevertheless extreme threats we all face to our creative
>>>liberty from the ubiquitous "marketplace" model. 
>>> We should also highlight
>>>the endangered revolutionary promise of the "new technology" 
>
>Not just new technology, but new materials as well. In general, I've noted a
>lack of enthusiasm for new techniques or novel uses for existing materials,
>especially when those uses conflict with 'how things are done'. We (at least
>in the US) live in very conservative times. Part of our goal should be to
>provoke thought along new lines.

Agreed (of course).

>>Yes. Showing surrealism as a living movement which would not take into 
>>account the surrealist "opportunities" opened in the recent scientific 
>>developments would also not be credible.
>
>True.
>
>>Besides, we would then be the FIRST "revolutionary" movement to seriously 
>>attempt to create that sort of gateway and to attempt incorporating the 
>>recent results into non-scientific intellectual developments.

 (The SI failed there apart from Asger Jorn for a while maybe). 

>>Once again, this certainly does not need to be a prominent aspect of the 
>>exhibition, but we should make visible our presence on this field (for the 
>>moment, some dark corner of the exhibition would fit) 
>
>As above, so here: I disagree. It must be absolutely clear what we're saying
>about surrealism and it's livelyness. Otherwise we won't be credible as a
>Current Surrealism. Because it's an "old" position, it's easy to dismiss
>what it says as old too. 

Ah! Maybe a less dark corner would fit better, then...

I am trying to extract a set of short quotations out of Prigogine's last 
book making some convergences quite clear. My main problem is that I would 
tend to put the entire book on line if I was following my nose... After that 
I would like to do the same with Francisco Varela, Henri Atlan and some others.

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Post Scriptum 1: 

Michael,

I will try to prepare these little .wav files I told you about during next 
week and send them to you. 
This week-end I can't, because all my kids (Mervin and Morgane) have their 
birthdays and we go in the Hague try to see the Vermeer exhibition.

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Post Scriptum 2: 

All, 
speaking of sponsors (and not mentioning the fact that I do not like this 
idea too much), why not link with people who actually created something, 
like Xeros or even Sun Microsystems, rather than with Bill Gates who did not 
ever invent hot water (French expression for you William: "Il n'a pas 
invente l'eau chaude" for describing a stupid person).

Xerox engineers (and among them Alan Kay) made the Ethernet, the Windows 
based Graphical User Interfaces and object oriented languages like smalltalk. 
Sun made the NFS and Java. 

Where would we be without them ?

If sponsoring is required, why not sing songs to the glory of Xerox and Sun 
rather than to the glory of Microsoft who has more enough ?
(And, yes, I know, the ARPA should also be thanked for their help, but well...) 
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*

Pierre PETIOT
See also...
http://www.euronet.nl/users/p_petiot/poiein/poiein.html
http://www.euronet.nl/users/p_petiot/index.html



   

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