repost... Re: neaby the Bridge of Bellaja
PK
> > > The list of the massacred people neaby the Bridge of Bellaja
> [PK wrote stuff]
> i must say i'm surprised to see you posted this from Leeds.
>
> there is a surrealist group based there and one would have
> hoped this might lead to greater awareness of surrealist
> perspectives among the inhabitants of that area than your
> post indicates.
>
> military oppression is not a surrealist concern?
It's also of concern to physicists, cow enthusiasts and
railway buffs, but that doesn't make politics and lists of
murdered Kosovars on-topic for sci.physics.research,
alt.cows.moo.moo.moo, or uk.railways. Perhaps if the list
was of murdered artists then it would have been relevant.
> i quote from comments i made in a 1996 post to a surrealist
> mailing list addressing this kind of complacency:
> [...]
Many physicists write about God, that doesn't make religion a
topic for sci.physics.research. Many also join and form political
groups, and advocate this or that policy, and write manifestoes.
If a person of type X has political pretensions or interests,
that does not necessarily make those political pretentions an
integral part of X-ness.
For example, I have an interest in physics, and I could write a
manifesto if I wanted to. Would it then be surrealist to post my
paper "Inter-subband electron-electron scattering in asymmetric
quantum wells designed for far infrared emission" here?
#Paul
barrett john erickson
PK <nob...@bloch.leeds.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:3701E816...@bloch.leeds.ac.uk...
> barrett john erickson wrote:
>[,,,]
> > military oppression is not a surrealist concern?
>
> It's also of concern to physicists, cow enthusiasts and
> railway buffs, but that doesn't make politics and lists of
> murdered Kosovars on-topic for sci.physics.research,
> alt.cows.moo.moo.moo, or uk.railways. Perhaps if the list
> was of murdered artists then it would have been relevant.
surely you're not saying that artists are more worthy of our attention?
"surrealism" isn't about art -- it's about liberating the imagination and
integrating it into daily living.
it is also an error to think of "surrealism" as an interest or a field of
study or a specialization or ? (like physics, or cognitive science, or
thermodynamics) rather than understanding it as life project.
for a surrealist, all things relevant to living are relevant to
"surrealism".
this doesn't mean all perspectives on all things are valid in a surrealist
context. certainly, it's acceptable to challenge someone's understanding of
that relevance, to draw a person into a defense of his/her post so as to
explore a new direction or perhaps expose a misunderstanding.
but i know (from previous posts) there is no misunderstanding hidden behind
Scottyes' list, and there is nothing more central to what "surrealism" is
about than the oppression it implies with subtle power.
> Many physicists write about God, that doesn't make religion a
> topic for sci.physics.research. Many also join and form political
> groups, and advocate this or that policy, and write manifestoes.
> If a person of type X has political pretensions or interests,
> that does not necessarily make those political pretentions an
> integral part of X-ness.
the mistake in this passage is considering "surrealism" as an attribute or
classification of people ("a person of type X").
> For example, I have an interest in physics, and I could write a
> manifesto if I wanted to. Would it then be surrealist to post my
> paper "Inter-subband electron-electron scattering in asymmetric
> quantum wells designed for far infrared emission" here?
you should, if you can transcend the banalities of the traditional
scientific posture, explore its poetic dimensions and relate this subject to
the struggle for the liberation of the imagination.
it _can_ be done. can _you_ do it? i for one would welcome this if you
can.
i have collaborated [EAR de Jour] with a surrealist physicist and a
surrealist mathematician (neither of whom consider themselves artists). as
surrealists, they have no problem seeing the poetic dimensions of any topic.
we think it is very important at this time to pursue the integration of
science into an expanded surrealist perspective.
if a dissertation on physics, or cognitive science, or chaos, or dissipative
systems fails to draw the interest of surrealists, it's not because these
topics are not relevant to "surrealism", it's because the presenter has
failed to avoid the falsifications of a scientific perspective which
considers it a virtue to extract, abstract, isolate and sterilize the
phenomena it seeks to study so as to remove all traces of human
contamination.
-- barrett
bar...@MagneticFields.org
http://www.MagneticFields.org/
"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of
the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and
future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be
perceived as contradictions."
...André Breton
Brandon J. Freels
PK wrote
>It's also of concern to physicists, cow enthusiasts and
>railway buffs, but that doesn't make politics and lists of
>murdered Kosovars on-topic for sci.physics.research,
>alt.cows.moo.moo.moo, or uk.railways. Perhaps if the list
>was of murdered artists then it would have been relevant.
Brandon:
FUCK YOU! Surrealism is not an art movement.
PK
> the mistake in this passage is considering "surrealism" as an
> attribute or classification of people ("a person of type X").
s/surrealism/surrealist/
In any case, no doubt we could argue forever, and probably would
if I wasn't away from my computer for the next week.
#Paul, off to catch a train.
Dale Houstman
> In any case, no doubt we could argue forever, and probably would
> if I wasn't away from my computer for the next week.
>
>
You could argue forever, but you would still be wrong. You would
only be wrong at length.
Surrealism has always been more interested in the many varieties
of liberation (and its opposites in oppression, repression, banality,
duty, church) than it it is in "pure art" or the "merely aesthetic."
Surrealists in fact are only interested in art that (in its various
ways)
defeats one or more of the agents of death. Politics and the armies
it engenders is not only of interest to surrealism it is central. And
(thankfully!) it is an andidote to the endless silliness that drifts
in and out of this ng, a silliness that is, in itself, as form of
oppression,
in that it oppresses sense rather than opening it up to new options.
Not to make sense (and to confuse that descent into random spew)
is easy; the most primitive computer is more than capable of that
act. Man's relationship to his language is much more subtle, as is
his connection to all forms of anti-life. If genocide (and America's
usually tainted and selective and brutal response to it) is not
central to surrealism, then surrealism is not central to anything.
DMH
PK
> You could argue forever, but you would still be wrong. You would
> only be wrong at length.
>
> Surrealism has always been more interested in the many varieties
> of liberation (and its opposites in oppression, repression, banality,
> duty, church) than it it is in "pure art" or the "merely aesthetic."
> Surrealists in fact are only interested in art that (in its various
Well, then I'll bow down before your greater knowledge of the
doctrines of Surrealism. But it still seems to me that "of interest to"
and "part of" are not the same thing; and that surrealists interested
in the events in Kosovo can easily read newspapers or political
newsgroups if they so desire -- and unless I missed something,
there was nothing surreal about the list of the dead that was posted
here. It seemed more like crude propaganda LOOK HOW EVIL THEY ARE,
SEE HOW OPPRESSED WE ARE, and I can read crossposts in soc.culture
groups if I like that sort of thing. Still, perhaps it was subverting
that particular genre, and I just missed the point.
Perhaps I also did miss a different point, and rather than shouting
"off-topic", I should have tried to treat it as new material, and
used it as a springboard to create something "surreal". But I'm not
sure butchery puts me in that particular mood.
#Paul
barrett john erickson
> Perhaps I also did miss a different point, and rather than shouting
> "off-topic", I should have tried to treat it as new material, and
> used it as a springboard to create something "surreal". But I'm not
> sure butchery puts me in that particular mood.
the fundamental point you're missing is that "surrealism" isn't about
"creat[ing] something 'surreal'", it is about achieving "(sur)reality" -- a
quest for a reality (of daily living) which is continuously enhanced by a
liberated and integrated imagination.
that quest is fluid and spontaneous and personal, but (and this is the
critical point so often overlooked) it is also actively social. it is
always deeply involved in the struggle to liberate _all_ imaginations from
anything ("internal" or "external") which limits their integration into the
_actions_ of daily living. each of us must recognize that _our_ creative
potential is inextricably linked to the creative potential of human life in
general and therefore restricted by all efforts to constrain that life
wherever they occur.
the mystification of the situation in Kosova offers a classic example of
this struggle. the imagination has been subdued and put into the service of
the existing order. we are submerged in the debates of "great men"
agonizing over the inevitable conflicts of ethnicities, religions,
nation-states, "good" leaders vs. "evil" leaders, etc.. in this process, we
are encouraged to feel ignorant and helpless -- observers removed from any
opportunity to intervene in a centuries-old ritual of hatred performed by
mysteriously irrational people on the other side of the world.
the larger context of our living is portrayed as something remote and beyond
our influence -- precisely the kind of thinking "surrealism" struggles
against.
the injection of a very simple list of dead people with their ages into this
context can have the effect of refocusing attention on the human project,
the surrealist project.
PK
> the fundamental point you're missing is that "surrealism" isn't about
> "creat[ing] something 'surreal'", it is about achieving "(sur)reality" -- a
> quest for a reality (of daily living) which is continuously enhanced by a
> liberated and integrated imagination.
That's all very well, but unless people go from imagining something
"surreal", or "achieving surreality"; to _creating_ something from that,
this'd be an awfully empty newsgroup. The Kosova post might have
inspired
any amount of surrealissitude, but it didn't work for me and I see no
evidence it worked for anyone else. If it had worked for me, I'd have
said
so or created something to communicate the surreality it did evoke.
> the injection of a very simple list of dead people with their ages into
> this context can have the effect of refocusing attention on the
[pk: surely you mean "a"]
> human project, the surrealist project.
And did it?
#Paul
Brandon J. Freels
What is happening in Kosovo is against freedom, and therefor
anti-Surrealism.
Surrealism is concerned with any actions that are anti-Freedom for they are
also anti-Surrealism.
End of discussion.
PK
Hmm. For a while there I thought I was losing this argument.
#Paul.