FLECHES D'AMOUR - UPDATED WHENEVER

SURRATIONALISME

YET ANOTHER 'S' WORD

"I'm higher than the world/ And my head is in a swirl [...] Higher in my mind/ I'm gonna leave these blues behind/ And I'll find what I find/ Today [...] And I'm higher than the world/ I'm living in my mind/ And I've gotta hold on to what I find/ Today, today"(1) -- Van Morrison (1983)

"Where then, lies the duty of surrationalism? It is to take over those formulas, well purged and economically ordered by the logicians, and recharge them psychologically, put them back into motion and into life [...] In teaching a revolution of reason, one would multiply the reasons for spiritual revolutions."(2) --Gaston Bachelard (1936)

Surréalisme and Surrationalisme

Surréalisme (reduced to emblems of an intellectual bad conscience by Manfredo Tafuri) and surrationalisme (poeticized rationalism re-discovered and re-launched by Gaston Bachelard in the 1930s) is not the same thing. That these two terms are often conjoined, then and now, and offered as the left and right hand of one thing in the process of modeling a new, better world (i.e., as mutually determined forms), is not in itself a problem insofar as surrationalism was/is a surplus (synchronic, sublime excess) within the historic Surrealist revolution.

The commonplace usage of the two terms belies their very real distance from one another: surrealism is mostly anti-rationalist, while surrationalism seeks to raise rational thought (and rational discourse) to a place where subjectivity is folded back into so-called scientific, empirical coodinates of thought resulting in a renewed vision of the world intensely folded in upon itself and illuminated by the age-old process of constructing representations -- viz., such that these very representations no longer simply reside in the uncomfortable space between subject and object but collapse that space altogether. Fichtean idealism and transcendental idealism meet in surrationalism, and Goethe's prescient complaints regarding a premature disavowal of rationalism (aimed at the Schlegels) is mooted, as all complaints are more or less mooted when the fractured, savaged world is suddenly seen in its originary ensouled state.

"Our cabaret is a gesture. Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect. What could be respectable and impressive about it? Its cannons? Our big Drum drowns them. Its idealism? That has long been a laughingstock, in its popular and its academic edition. The grandiose slaughters and cannibalistic exploits? Our spontaneous foolishness and our enthusiasm for illusion will destroy them."(3) --Hugo Ball (1927)

The prison-house of representations is, in part, the result of all forms having an implicit gravity (versus gravitas), a cultural phenomenon that leads to the near automatic depletion of content and the banalization of experience; or, everything falls (in time). The institutionalization of this banality is another problem. One has to examine what factors in cultural calculus induce extreme banality and neutralize them. This is what the Surrealists accomplished within the limited range of their mostly private revolution. Tafuri's problem with Surrealism was not so much that it was anti-rational as it represented a private universe for the initiated. Similar in spirit to private utopias, Surrealism stopped short of routing its own inherent autism -- a stopping short that led to the New York version and its conversion into mere titillation and, then, an art-historical commodity. Surrationalism, as a form of intellection, automatically resists the inherent process of banalization simply by being itself. It cannot be absorbed into the machinery of the world since it is -- paradoxically -- pure thought. Heidegger's "thinking about thinking" almost seems a parody of this electrifying potentiality within surrationalism. Surrationalism is totally 'out of bounds' -- it is the same dis-ease that Hugo Ball suffered from when he started the Cabaret Voltaire (in Zurich c.1916), and the same he later carried with him to self-imposed 'internal exile' in rural Switzerland (forever working on a book about Byzantine angelology and supported, in part, by the generosity of Herman Hesse). This same proto-anarchic spirit is to be found tucked away in the un-indexed ledgers of art-historical accounting houses everywhere. A search for such secret ledgers moves within Walter Benjamin's heroic work, for sure, as it does in Bachelard's post-epistemological writing, but also within all of recorded time (or since poets turned into historians and vice versa).

Close Encounters With 'S'

And so, winged-thought: The 'insane' Holderlin holed up in his tower, walls plastered with maps; Bruno wandering England and Europe, and, then, burned at the stake by the Church Triumphant; Byron swimming through the canals of Venice at night, torch in hand; Zarathustra's (Nietzsche's?) 'discovery' of the devastating Eternal Return of the Same; the Asian image of Ourobouros biting off its own tail; Yeats in his tower, writing up a storm; troubadours rounded up with Cathari; Francis of Assisi (erstwhile troubadour) receiving the stigmata high atop a ragged mountain; Unamuno's wild vision of vertiginous black (nothingness?) by way of Velazquez's "Christ"; and on and on ...

And: Scarpa, and his 11-centimeter obsession, wound into his work -- e.g., at Brion -- a telltale sign of an intimate (intense) knowledge of the secret mathesis of the universe (a remnant of a brush with Kabalistic 'science'?), a quivering some-thing else hiding out within his auto-didactic architecture, in the tectonic jouissance (unlicensed thrill) of building worlds within worlds; Cornell (not the University) shuttered in his Queen's (New York City) home (on Utopia Parkway), assembling things from other things (bits of things ripped out of one context, expropriated, and thrust into another), dreaming of Emily Dickinson, collaging seemingly 'useless' stuff into seemingly 'useless' assemblages; Schwitters, in Ambleside, constructing the Merzbarn, slowly wasting away, letters unanswered by Barr and Gropius ('Help!'), packet of MoMA money keeping him afloat as his boat sinks; and etcetera, etcetera ...

Plus: Museums collecting all of this; books written; legends circulated; periphrastic peripatetics canonized; heretics resurrected; heroes worshipped and discarded; things bought and sold; non-things turned into things; 'thinking the complex' re-sold as neurosis; the open circle closed (again); the curse of dead letters launched like missiles in all directions; and -- out of necessity -- the surrational sublime disappearing (again and again) only to pop up somewhere else, unannounced (uninvited), again 'out of time' (falling into time and things, furtively), furiously, without finality, fetchingly (and far-fetchingly) quite literally setting everything on fire.

"Babe/ It seems so long/ Since you went away/ And I just got to say/ That it grows darker with the day"(4) --Nick Cave (2001)

[...]

Dr. Prof. Ing. I. M. Avenarius (June 2003)

ENDNOTES

1 - Van Morrison, "Higher than the World", Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (Essential Music, 1983)
2 - Gaston Bachelard, "Surrationalism", Inquisitions 1 (Paris: Organe du Groupe d’Études pour la Phénoménologie Humaine, 1936); trans. Julien Lévy, reprinted in Arsenal / Surrealist Subversion 4 (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989)
3 - Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time, trans. Ann Raimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
4 - Nick Cave, "Darker with the Day", No More Shall We Part (Mute Song, 2001)

MISCELLANEOUS OUTTAKES

"In truth, our leaders and propagandists know very well that liberal capitalism is an inegalitarian regime, unjust, and unacceptable for the vast majority of humanity. And they know too that our 'democracy' is an illusion: Where is the power of the people? Where is the political power for third world peasants, the European working class, the poor everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian -- where all existence is evaluated in tterms of money alone -- is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot bbecome potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non-Being. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness' [Potentialities 1999]. Truth to untruth, we could add, originality and uniqueness to non-originality and translation. This understanding and articulation of 'potentiality' has enabled Agamben to enter a sustained reappraisal of knowledge, selfhood, language, and narrative in books such as Potentialities (1999), The End of the Poem (1999), and The Coming Community (1993)." --Paolo Bartoloni on Giorgio Agamben (CLCWeb)

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