ACUTE NORMALITY MALFUNCTION

 

Surrealism claimed to be more than at art movement and, via Dada, assimilated the nihilist anti-art principle into a new dispensation, a new ontology, or even histology, of the real.

One of the most ‘revolutionary’ Surrealist innovations was the Surrealist Object considered as ‘a precipitate of our desire’. The most spectacular of these, such as Salvador Dali’s ‘Lobster Telephone’ (1936) and the ‘Object (Breakfast in Fur)’ (1936) by Meret Oppenheim, are almost ‘object sculptures’, close to the assemblages pioneered by Dadaists such as Hausmann, or the Merz constructions of Schwitters. (Duchamp’s original readymade, the Bicycle Wheel, was mounted on a kitchen stool and therefore a kind of assemblage). However, for the Exposition Surrealiste d’Objets at the Charles Ratton Gallery, Paris (1936), Dali and Andre Breton devised an extensive taxonomy of these displaced entities. Their list and exhibits included mathematical objects, natural objects, primitive objects, irrational objects, interpreted objects, incorporated objects, mobile objects, god-objects, scatological objects, ‘problematic and intriguing objects’, dream objects, perturbed objects, objects functioning symbolically, and other fetishes of psychic compulsion.

Breton was later to make other examples such as the poem-object, the song object and the phantom object. No doubt this latter species was related to Alberto Giacommeti’s sculpture ‘The Invisible Object’ (1935) which, together with his ‘Suspended Ball or the Hour of Traces’ (1930), performed a catalytic role in this Surrealist experiment. These psycho-physical entities shared a new kind of space with assemblages and installations, sculptural works, subversive furniture, ritual costumes and even shop window displays – a favourite Surrealist object was the mannequin, a humanoid figure related to automata and dolls. For Breton these crucial works exemplified the principle, first proposed by Eluard, of a ‘physics of poetry’, furthermore they occupied a cultural space that overlapped with modern science. Again, some objects, for instance Bellmer’s Poupees (Dolls), are generic ciphers capable – like Hoffmann’s Olympia, or the madcap ‘musical sarcasm’ of Os Mutantes, or Haraway’s Cyborg thesis – of provoking moral meltdown in the mind of the spectator. They exert a compulsive fascination, a form of enchantment that seems to hold the key to certain libidinous obsessions intimating a profound fear of sexuality, especially of female sexuality.

 In ‘Der Sandmann’, the student Nathaiel says of Professor Spalanzani’s mechanical daughter, his artificial bride-to-be, “Only in Olympia’s love do I find myself.”  But his shocked friend speaks for others repulsed by the effect of this strange attraction, when he says: “We have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny; we would like to have nothing to do with her…”

These uncanny automata, and other surreal objects, reside in a fantastic sphere where science, magic and art converge. As Hal Foster explains, they expose ‘the desires and fears of the surrealist subject bound up with the uncanny and the death drive’. As in the case of Hoffmann’s Olympia, these objects are heralds of a new imaginative post-moral order, a new politics of desire: for only in Objects do we find ourselves.  

Much Surrealist political thinking from the pre-war era can be confined to the realm of nostalgia and cultural history. Yet, beneath the period impedimenta, the essential principles of the movement remain potent. With its demand for total freedom of expression, even the manifesto Towards A Free Revolutionary Art (1938), produced in the twilight years of the old avant-garde at the height of the Nazi and Stalinist anti-modernist purges, remains relevant to the situation today. For at the core of Surrealism is this one simple principle – freedom – or, to quote the First Manifesto: ‘Le seul mot de liberte est tout ce qui m’exalte encore’  (‘The mere word freedom is the only one that still excites me.’). Against traditional repressive institutions (family, country, religion) the Surrealist project deployed the imagination, its most powerful weapon, to dissolve or fracture the boundary between the imaginary and normative symbolism.

In order to transform the world Surrealists developed a number of ‘cardinal virtues’ such as convulsive beauty, black humour, mad love, dreams and the marvellous. In ‘Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism’ (1937) Andre Breton identified five significant factors of the surrealist project at that time: Materialism, the Convergence of Paths, the Two Poles (of objective humour and objective chance), Automatism and the ‘fantastic’. These principles, or factors, were derived in part from Hegel, Marx and Freud, but their synthesis in the ontological innovation of ‘open realism’ provides us with a compelling vision for a continuing strategy, a way of pro-active engagement with the meta-culture. ‘Convergence of Paths’ refers to a merger of hitherto discontinuous paths or ‘highways of great mental adventure’, including the latest scientific developments that, by fusion with Surrealist ‘open realism’ leads to a singularity, an acute normality malfunction, involving the ruin of the Cartesian-Kantian edifice. This is an outcome that ‘seriously disturbs the sensibility’ for as Raymond Durgnat said, ‘the pang of beauty’ cannot be confused with ‘an idiot adoration of what’s seen’ rather, it is the ‘shock of tearing the veil.’

Certainly, the heyday of Surrealism in the Roaring Twenties coincided with the emergence of new scientific concepts that have indeed shattered comfortable, traditional interpretations of the human condition. In the Uncertainty Principle (1927) is to be found the ultimate manifestation of ‘open realism’ for, whereas in the past, the basic building blocks of reality as described by natural philosophy fitted neatly together, now, the indeterminate nature of the actual relations between such qualities discloses a disturbing disconnection. Or, to describe the phenomenon more precisely, we have discovered, and/or observed, a ‘lack of commutativity between canonically conjugate qualities.’

When dealing with fundamental particles, this ‘lack of commutativity’ (Kragh), or lack of reciprocal interchange, characterises, not only the relationship between position and momentum, but also between energy and time. So, in the quantum state it appears that normality malfunction is the ‘default mode’ of physical existence and this normality malfunction incarnates the surreality of now, the uncanny, or anarchic, discontinuity between familiar objects and our perceptions.

 This is the ‘strange dislocation’ G. S. Kirk has identified as a chief factor in the ‘special kind of imagination’ defined as ‘fantasy’. It is the ‘phantasmagoric redefinition’ or ‘kingdom of the instantaneous’ generated by symbolic images as described by Angela Carter in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972). Normality malfunction, the breakdown of ‘commutativity’, is the catalyst of spontaneous autogenesis and the workings of objective chance; fundamental indeterminacy negates the logic of intentional cosmic creation and triggers moral panic. This apparent ‘malfunction’, or absolute divergence, has always characterised the Surrealist enterprise. By extension it also defines the main characteristics of the emerging Hyper-Culture. A condition, or state, in which it has never been more problematic to be human: a tangential condition of divergence from the norms of historical tradition. The ‘apotheosis of the interpenetration of human lives and the media’ (Sirius), a ‘happening’ on The Planet of the Mutants staged in Rio by Os Mutantes (‘surrealism mixed with lysergic poetry madness’), an ‘organised mania for connecting everything to everything else’ (Adorno), an erroneous zone (or Interzone) state of augmented reality (AR), where ‘illusion is a revolutionary weapon’ (Burroughs) and where traditional values evaporate in moral meltdown to a background of canned laughter.

The Convergence of Paths in the epoch of the post-medium aesthetic and of post-modem communications may culminate in the evolutionary synthesis of the human and the non-human, of the animate and in inanimate, of person and machine – a scary, uncanny, mutation with replaceable body parts. This era of the human memory chip, of ‘eye-borg’ prosthetics, of hip-wriggling hot bots, of predatory insectoid micro-drones, of CG Synthespians and Neurocinematics, of techno-savvy toddlers, of ‘Frankenfoods’, of Taser-firing robot helicopters, of the silicon download, of Internet Crusaders, of driverless cars, of digital reality fused with fractal geometry – will witness a metamorphosis from meta-culture into Hyper-Culture. Hypermedia technology evolution has continued to accelerate, from the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon of 1905, to the twenty-five screen Brussels Kinepolis megaplex of 1988, to the 2009 Lakeside Shopping Centre multi-artist ‘goggle-free’ 3D hologram event featuring Pixie Lott (b.1991). Consequently, the Hyper-Culture, the matrix of an ‘infernal desire machine’ indistinguishable from the ultra-diorama of virtual reality, may precipitate a transformation of the human condition. This transformation will be create a state of cyber-visionary transmutation in a physical sense – a triumph of Technosurrealism, of custom car hyper-style and hybridisation over repressive identity politics – a singular union of opposites.

 As Breton wrote in Crise de l’Objet (‘Crisis of the Object’): ‘Poets and artists meet with scholars at the heart of those ‘fields of force’ created in the imagination by the reconciliation of two different images.’  For, as mental capacities are augmented by bio-computing technologies, so the human body and its environment will also mutate into an entity that is part organic and part machine – the Cyborg Singularity prefigured by Hoyle and Elliot’s A for Andromeda (1961). Here, at this supreme point of all possible speculations, at the event horizon of the Hyper-Culture, cosmetic surgery, technosexuality and ‘body modification’ merge with neural computing, self-replicating nanotechnology and artificial intelligence to neutralise the threat from militarised combat robots, wall-climbing automata and other autonomous machines. Outrageously, ‘designer fashion’ will create the post-biological future, liberating a new techno-politics of desire, finally signalling the end of ‘modernity’ as the term in currently understood, eliminating the bogus binary opposition between technology and ‘nature’. The editorial of the first issue of La Revolution Surealiste (1924) announced ‘Fashion will be discussed according to the gravitation of white letters on nocturnal flesh…’ reaffirming the age old link between fashion and fantasy, between couture and anarchy, between fetishism and the flesh of night.

 

 

A C Evans


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