La Belle Inutile
Linking Art, Science and Technology
www.surrealists.org
Science, Technology, Fine Arts and Industry, the current representations of which force us to perceive as clearly separated, not to say partitioned or sometimes even opposed activity fields, originally were considered as different facets of a single set of practices that the Middle Ages used to call the Arts.
Matta's painting entitled Point d'Appui designates both the need for human thought to lean on something and, using the same words, the fact that human thought is denied any support anyway.
Similarly, the title Point de Suture expresses both
the idea that gaps and wounds
that have opened between the various fields of culture
are supposed to be "the ransom of progress" and hence may not be reabsorbed
and using the same words, the idea of reunifying culture
by suturing these gaps and these wounds
in order to put an end to the religious myth of Babel.
This text translates in the field of culture Barrett Erickson's surrealist idea
of a seamless consciousness.
Arts and Trades have not always been crumbled arts...
Read More
Sandclock
Genovese-Petiot
L'Or du Temps
Zazie
Everything happens as if we were led by behaviors originating from different, and so to speak sedimentary, deposits of Biological Evolution.
The various repertoires of behaviors bequeathed to us by Biological Evolution (and perhaps should we rather speak here of attractors of behaviors) don't need to be consistent. It is enough them be useful during geological periods, where, depending on adverse circumstances, the implementation of opposite and contradictory solutions can be valuable for the survival of a species.
Considering things well, it would even be quite harmful
for these repertoires of behaviors to be consistent,
because History itself – the vagaries of which they shall help to confront –
is neither logical nor coherent...
Read More
The word Tool is here used in the sense of "any artifact
built or used for a specific purpose".
Which is opposed to most of the objects of the Universe
which are free from any utilitarianism
and have neither meaning nor determined purpose
There are actually two categories of tools.
There are tools that allow us to,
tools that make possible what we often hadn't even thought of before,
tools that create new freedoms, that open up new adventures.
These tools are pure affirmation.
Nothing of what they are existed before them,
and after them, the world is no longer the same.
Their function was not known, it was in no way defined before they appeared,
and of course, it was even less agreed.
In fact, initially, they had no function at all,
and it was only by the sad virtue of a narrow use,
by force of habits, that they finally were assigned a function.
These tools do not replace anything and besides they are irreplaceable...
Read More...
Tower
Zazie
As I often approach books by the end, I happened to first read the last 3 pages of Stiegler's fundamental book, La Technique et le Temps. These pages are part of an afterword added by Stiegler in March 2017, and I was very surprised to find several references to surrealism in them. I was struck by the fact that this man of many fights, came to conclude that, intellectually speaking, the only way out of the ongoing disaster may be Surrealism. A technically armed surrealism, encyclopaedic, open to technology, to its risks and its struggles, a surrealism determined not only to dream, but just as much to make its dreams come true. A surrealism determined, in an alchemical approach to work the world.
Introduction
Dreaming Outside of a Dream
Bogartte
The way the so-called “Far left” has forgotten the most basic intellectual heritage of the labor movement is increasingly astonishing…
Around the 1900s, anarchists practiced "individual recovery". The underlying idea was that what is produced by the workers – that is to say Everything – rightfully belongs to them and hence may be taken back. The revolutionary interest of such practices is doubtless debatable, but their theoretical justification cannot be, unless we recognize that we are now acting and thinking outside the framework of the Labor movement. After all, a communist revolution is nothing but the collective recovery of the products of the producers' labor by the producers themselves.
