Blog

Surrealism is examined through its history and phenomenology. The frame of reference is shifted from the history of art to the history of religions; the premises of modern art historiography examined; and Surrealism placed within an interdisciplinary context. The conjunction between the Surreal and the sacred is developed through the phenomenological clues of the uncanny, the weird, and the irrational--popular perceptions of the Surreal. The Surreal is seen as the transition between the ordinary and the extra-ordinary: as the threshold of the sacred. The origins of the Surrealist impulse to "transform life" are traced to occultism, alchemy, and hermetic philosophy, that attempt to create "the union of opposites". Historically, Surrealism stems from this heterodox tradition of archaic, occult, and daemonic elements in European cultures, yet it radically opposes them to the accepted religion and conventional mentality. In so doing, Surrealism creates a new orientation based upon the power of contradiction and ambivalence.

Ellul examines this process in modern art from the beginning of the 20th century where the sense of art - its meaning and embodiments - is reduced to non-sense. Ellul's study is in the tradition of Guy Debord's The Society of Spectacle and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory but moves significantly beyond their Marxist perspectives that were, from Ellul's view, co-opted by technique.

Where is the shore that was previously here?

All has shifted, and all is no more.

The lines that are drawn have blurred and disappeared,

grasping at air, in despair, wind torn and forlorn.

Historians of the Age

Look to the musty and vacant spaces of learning.

The physical will always hold truth. The virtual is a lie.

The past half-century has seen a steady erosion of trust in authority of all sorts, ranging from a healthy scepticism to conspiracy theories, which say that governments and their agencies or associates are capable of anything, even murder. To put it in a more scholarly fashion, conspiracy theories are “attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an event…as a secret plot by a covert alliance of powerful individuals or organizations”. The phrase conspiracy theories is often seen as pejorative and belief in them as irrational, but researchers from the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK, are asking for more research into “why people overtly reject conspiracy theories but privately accept them as true”. For that is what we do, apparently.

"Once a contraption allowing the separation of technological capacity from moral imagination is put in place, it becomes self propelling, self reinforcing...the human capacity to adjust, habituate, become accustomed...will see to that. Atrocities in other words do not self condemn or self destruct. They self reproduce: what was once a shock degenerates into routine reflex."

-Zygmunt Bauman

"The most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism"

-T J Jackson Lear

"You must be a light to yourself! In a world that is rapidly growing dark."

-J Krisnamurti

"Television and the personal computer, even as they are now converging on a single machinic functioning ... are methods for the management of attention ... rendering bodies controllable and useful simultaneously, even as they simulate the illusion of choices and ‘interactivity’...the management of attention ... through the television set or computer monitor (at least in their overwhelmingly pervasive forms), has little to do with the visual contents of these screens and far more with a larger strategy of the individual ... with the construction of conditions that individuate, immobilize, and separate subjects, even within a world in which mobility and circulation are ubiquitous..."

-Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Mit Press, 2001.



"The illusion of user control corresponds to the idea of contemporary identity as a continual performative task of self-construction. Culture today is made up of roles that must be continually reinvented – ‘chosen’ – rather than fixed identities...We are permeated with narcissism, not as self-love but in terms of the exclusive reference to ourselves, which asks: What does this event mean to me? The narcissistic subject searches for and expects ‘real’ and intense experiences only within the framework of their own needs and expectations...in which social relationships are treated as pretexts for the expression of personality..."

-Daniel Palmer, "The paradox of user control." Design Philosophy Papers 1.3 (2003): 127-135.



"The neo-Panoptic environment is a space where the destrucuration of trust isn't exercised by intimidation and refutation but by circulation and provocation, i.e., by the fact that deeply trusting relationships are never given the means, time or anonymous social space to thrive and develop. In control societies social-being mirrors the soft and immaterial forms of production that permeate a radically de-socialized/hypersocialized world of exchange - where 'interactivity' and 'inter-subjective relations' largely consist of the multiplication of light interactions, tertiary acquaintanships, and virtual transactions. Even sexual relations have be commuted into 'booty calls', FWB's, simulated pleasures and every other possible form of denatured touching."

-Grant Vetter, The architecture of control: a contribution to the critique of the science of apparatuses. John Hunt Publishing, 2012.