Date: 29 Jun 97 18:12:46 EDT
From: "Jennifer  M. de Coste" <76171.535-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: surreality


"A certain immediate ambiguity contained in the word 'surrealism' is capable, in
fact, of leading one to suppose that it designates I know not what
transcendental attitude, when on the contrary it expresses - and always has
expressed for us - a desire to deepen the foundation of the real; to bring about
an ever clearer and at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the
world perceived by the senses."

This is one of my favorite passages of Breton's, for practical purposes.  It
articulates my 'ideal' for completeness, struggling and experiential.

Re: surreality - I do not think it was I who invented this term, but if I did (I
was charged by someone - Pierre, perhaps - of doing so), so be it.  It is
formally a noun, it trips off the tongue, and it serves a similar function in my
thought and articulation as the term 'surrealism.'

Edward, I am not tremendously knowledgeable of Bataille - just bits and pieces.
Yet his criticism, and yours, of Breton, and perhaps some underlying metaphysics
- or signifying metaphysics - in SUR-realism is well-taken.  Perhaps you do not
so much criticize against it as to actually wish surrealist theory would
acknowledge the impulse of this 'ideal.'(?)  I would agree, to an extent.  SUR over, beyond is perhaps one expression of surrealism.  Yet I am with Benjamin,
who describes the constitutive strain of surrealism as anthropological and
materialist.

Along those lines:  I did not anticipate what a stir the phrase 'of the lived
world' would provoke.  Initially, it is to distinguish an articulation of the
world looking (or trying to look) from the outside in versus acknowledging our
descriptions of the 'world' as crucially dependent upon our situatedness -
socially, historically, etc.  We can now criticize many of the 'moderns' -
perhaps excluding Hume - of trying to 'abstract' things too much, wrap things up
neatly in the 'product.'  "Of the lived world" is initially to prefer the
phenomenological over the scientific - in terms of tracing the source of our
experience, our articulation of that experience.  William James said, "So the
(critical) science of religions would depend for its original material on facts
of personal experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience
through all its critical reconstructions.  It could never get away from concrete
life, or work in a conceptual vacuum.  It would forever have to confess, as
every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that
its formulas are but approximations." (his using the term 'science of religion'
is especially juicy given recent discussion!).  Galileo's mathematics and
formulas gave us a wonderful 'language' and tool to solve problems.
Unfortunately, we began to describe experience as though it were inherently 'of
the scientific, mathematical, formulaic.'  Certainly, I do not negate these, as
I do not negate the illusory, the imagination, the dream, the ideal, etc.  The
polemic of Aesthetic Automatism proposes two profundities: we 'do' before we
'are' (and I might substitute, for present purposes, 'live' for 'do'); and what
we 'do' is pursue desire.  James again:  "In every crescendo of sensation, in
every effort to recall, in every progress toward the satisfaction of desire,
this succession of an emptiness and fullness that have reference to each other
and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon."