Notes from the
Neo-Underground
...from all these things I extracted the quintessence. The filth you gave me I have turned to gold. - Baudelaire
Anti-Gravitas
Gravitas
is always the problem, never the
solution. ‘… the principle result of existential psychoanalysis must be to make
us repudiate the spirit of seriousness.’
– Jean-Paul Sartre
I realised that insouciance is the one thing that can provide inspiration for our lives and yet have no argument to offer in its own defence – Francoise Sagan
Automatism
‘An
‘automatic’ scribble of twisting and interlacing lines permits the germ of idea
in the subconscious mind to express, or at least suggest itself to the
consciousness.’ – Spare & Carter. It was this principle that Leonardo
advocated in his use of that semi-legendary ‘old wall covered with dirt’ or the
odd appearance of certain streaked stones, and which Max Ernst later incorporated
into his decalcomania idea of
‘inspiration to order’.
British Values
It is a paradox that Britain has engendered many precursors of
Surrealism, from Cyril Tourneur to Lewis Carroll (by way of Swift, Blake,
Coleridge, The Bronte Sisters, the Gothic novel and the 'mirth and marvels' of the
Ingoldsby Legends) and yet very few
self-defined Surrealists in the contemporary sense. Despite a dimension of
subversive fantasy, a ‘tendency to irrationality’ in English art and literature,
and in popular culture generally (Fred Karno's Army, The Whitehall Follies,
Round The Horne, Carry On films, Union Jack knickers,
farcical sex scandals) it is clearly the case that movements such as Surrealism
remain ‘foreign’, indeed maladjusted, when transposed to the British context. ‘You
know, it's just not cricket', as they say in the 'modern rustic' kitchens of
Middle England.
But Is It Art?
We all know about Style, Content and Genre, the work of Schools, Movements and the historical culture, but what is the purpose of art? The purpose of any work of art is threefold: of course, there are differing degrees of emphasis, but the function of artistic activity is always Therapeutic, and its main purpose is either Propaganda or Entertainment or both. Therapy, Propaganda, Entertainment - look no further.
Convulsion
Please try to forget, if you can, those heretical convulsionnaires,
dismissed by Diderot as ‘a sect of fools’, defined by experts of the day as an
unfortunate by-product of dysfunctional gynecology or of the 'moral
inferiority' of women. A line of argument continued in 1853 by Matthew Arnold when he described Charlotte Bronte's Villette as 'hideous, undelightful, convulsed'. More profitably, consider Baudelaire's view when he said inspiration ‘has something in common with a convulsion’ and noted
further that all sublime thought is ‘accompanied by a more or less violent
nervous shock which has its repercussions at the very core of the brain.’ 'Beauty' said Andre Breton, 'is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave... it consists of jolts and shocks many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are determined to produce one shock which does.' The constitutive
qualities of ‘convulsion’ may be detected in the oneiric aura of Paquita Valdes,
as described by Balzac in La Fille aux
Yeux d’Or (1835). He wrote: ‘there was something sombre, mysterious,
sweet, tender, constrained and expansive, an intermingling of the awful and the
celestial, of paradise and hell…’ Again can there be a more convulsive moment than those lines written in 1845 by the 'titanic' Emily Bronte at the age of 27? 'Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire/ And visions rise and change, that kill me with desire.' Further, consider this landscape from Flaubert's Salammbo: 'An immense mass of shadow lay spread out before them, containing vague crests that looked like the gigantic waves of a petrified black ocean.' A more recent example, ladies and gentlemen, may be the uptempo classy yet anarchic 1960 mambo-cha interpretation of Artie Shaw's popular wartime hit Frenesi by the Edmundo Ros Orchestra with vocals by Caterina Valente; perhaps the ideal soundtrack of convulsive beauty
on account of a predominant sense of ‘apparent gratuitousness’ (Breton). It was Garcia Lorca who reminded us that it is not a matter of theatrical intonation, dynamic vocal flourishes, skill or virtuosity (without question in this case), 'but of a style that's truly alive.' Just like a little girl the poet saw in Puerto de Santa Maria singing and dancing a 'corny Italian song... with such rhythms. silences and intention...' that 'she turned the Neopolitan gewgaw into something new and totally unprecedented...' She has duende! Convulsive Beauty is
paradise deranged.
Culture
Culture
is tyranny. Enculturation and cultural baggage retard society.
Cultural
Seismology
Beneath the outer ideological layer lies a subsurface region
called the ‘mantle’ or cultural interior: a complex yet unstable force field of
primal values imposed through structural violence. This structural violence is
the immediate cause of surface instability leading to shifts and displacements
of the cultural landscape. Cultural Seismology is the 'attempt to record the shifts and displacements of sensibility that regularly occur in the history of art and literature' - Bradbury & McFarlane.
Cyber-Junk Style (Cyber-trash)
Subtopian Materialism meets classic B-Movie Sci-Fi in cyberspace littered with cosmic debris. Like techno-eschatology. Well, sort of.
Didacticism?
No thanks. It's art-for-art's-sake, innit
Doubt
Doubt
is freedom.
L'esthetique Baudelairienne
The marvelous envelopes and saturates us like the atmosphere; but we fail to see it. - The Salon of 1846.
Beauty always has an element of strangeness... a certain degree of strangeness, of simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness... - The Universal Exhibition of 1855
From all these things I extracted the quintessence. The mud you gave me I have turned to gold. - Draft for an Epilogue for the 2nd Edition of Les Fleus du Mal.
Exi-Noir Underground Style
Black,
always black. Like Niccolo Paganini, the original Man in Black or Les Habits Noirs, via the Velvet Undergound.
Remarquez bien que l'habit noir... - Baudelaire, The Salon of 1846, XVIII On the Heroism of Modern Life
Existence
The horizon of existence is untranscendable.
Fashion
Fashion will be discussed according to the gravitation of white letters on nocturnal flesh. - La Revolution Surrealiste
The trick is not any one outrageous item, but in a combination and juxtaposition which is fashionably perverse.
- Mary Quant.
Fear of the Dark
A Modernist tendency to reject subjectivist forms and movements such as
Confessional Poetry, the workings of the Lyric Ego and Romantic Individualism more generally.
Fear of the Dark is a phobic fear of apparent introversion sometimes disguised as a moral argument, of ascetic origin, against ‘self indulgence’, 'egotism' the 'worship of false gods' or ‘ivory
tower’ aestheticism. Fear of the Dark is a fear of the psychic depths, fear of the uncanny, fear of
the Shadow and the shadow world, fear of the dark-side, Critics who suffer from
Fear of the Dark tend to privilege the Apollonian over the Dionysian, the abstract over the figurative and the
Classic over the Romantic. At the same time they promote high-brow ideas of elevated taste, great traditions and cultural superiority. This fear can be projected onto the products of consumer society, mass entertainment and mass production, often treated with disdain, derided as Kitsch or denigrated as decadence or even idolatry. Radical nonconformists may well feel they are on an iconoclastic mission to cleanse the world of distracting images and the seductive products of the imagination. However, as Jung says, the Shadow 'cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness'. Furthermore, this fear can be transformed into hatred because it reminds us of our 'helplessness and ineffectuality' in the face of the unknown and the indifference of Nature, an existential theme portrayed by Byron in his poem 'Darkness' (1817). Hence the zealotry of puritans, driven by the 'horror of great darkness' that afflicted Abraham, the prototypical 'God Fearing Man', in Genesis 12 - Fear of the Dark inflated by apocalyptic amplification.
Forbidden
Territory
‘…let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of Surrealism
aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which
is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic
illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places,
the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory…’ – Second Manifesto of
Surrealism.
Freedom
'The mere word 'freedom' is the only one that still excites me' - Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924. But what is freedom? Freedom is the absence of tyranny. Simple.
Hyper-Culture
After
the ‘modern breakthrough’ of the period between 1850 and 1870 the idea of
Modernity denoted a permanent transfiguration of the human condition. Yet, in retrospect it seems that this ‘modern’ culture was but a short
transition phase between the speedy evaporation of traditional culture and the
emergence of another globalised cultural formation. The looming ontological
hyper-real collapse of the distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ has
given rise to a new trans-national culture – hyper-culture. By the end of the
last century the US had been defined as a hyper-power with full spectrum
dominance, while the features of mass hyper-culture (emerging in the 1960s and 1970s)
were becoming increasingly apparent: on the street the difference between
fashionable and unfashionable was becoming more and more difficult to
distinguish; ‘authenticity’ was becoming an obsolete concept; gender
differences were getting hazy; so-called post-modernism became an obsessive academic
fad with multiple meanings both progressive and reactionary at the same time;
Dada opposition to the ‘official’ avant garde became an all-pervasive trend;
the elements of technoculture (post-biological-cyborg-biotech-virtuality-cyberdelia-fractal
transmutationism) started to mutate with increasing speed of pace in a post-Future Shock landscape where Communist graphics fused with Space Invaders and gave birth to
a new divinity: a super secular, Art Deco-gone-Pop-Flapper-Girl-Dolly-Bird waving
a Sistine Chapel umbrella.
The Infinite
The objective of Surrealism, said Anna Balakian, was 'the infinite expansion of reality'. But what is the infinite? The infinite, she wrote, is 'the realm at whose borders our faculties fail.'
Inner Space
We
might note various use of the term ‘inner space’, ranging from the theology of
the soul (Augustine) to the assertion (by Rorty) that the mind as ‘inner space’
is a misleading invention of Descartes. Novalis famously said in his Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia that
‘Time is inner space – Space is external time’, while Hegel claimed that ‘inner
space and inner time’ comprise the psychic environment of poetry. It has been
observed that the protagonists in the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe inhabit
a godless anti-world which is an internalisation of the physical space of the
entire American Continent, a space where the borderline between sanity and
madness is a new frontier. In 1914, in a letter to Lou Andreas Salome, the poet
Rilke claimed that the flight of a bird ‘turns the whole world into inner
space’, an experience transmuted into a poem known as the Weltinnenraum Poem. Heidegger said that inner space is ‘the
interior of uncustomary consciousness…beyond the arithmetic of calculation…’.
In popular culture the term was first introduced at Worldcon 6 in July 1948 by
Robert Bloch who said that in Science Fiction the ‘exploration of outer space
must eventually give way to an exploration of inner space’, a challenge
reiterated by J B Priestly in 1953 and J G Ballard in 1962. Talking about the
future of the novel William Burroughs defined himself as a ‘cosmonaut of inner
space’, attributing the phrase to Alexander Trocchi. Finally one might recall that Maurice Nadeau described the 'surrealist state of mind' as eternal, and should be understood as a tendency 'not to transcend but to penetrate reality...'
The Jet Age
An
uncanny era when Comets mysteriously fell from the sky and the Jet Set flew Pan Am between NYC and Paris to a bossa nova soundtrack. The age of Populuxe Jet Age Moderne architecture, retro-futurism, supersonic research and Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier flying the Bel X-1 named Glamorous Glennis.
The Kaleidoscope
Principle
‘One
instant leads me numbly to the next and the athematic theme unfurls without a
plan but geometric like the successive shapes in a kaleidoscope.’ – Clarice
Lispector
Neo-Underground
The
Fourth Wave is sometimes termed the ‘Neo-underground’ – Where it’s at.
Non-conformism
For
Surrealists non-conformism is total. Most ‘radicals’, however, are non-conformists in
a very parochial sense: they are immersed in the protest culture and feel engaged in a high-minded struggle against ‘the establishment’. Our English dissenters like to think they are ‘more radical than the radicals’ even
though in actuality they are merely acting-out a pre-determined role; a
particularly entrenched mode of the spirit of seriousness, tolerated as a
‘safety valve’ by the very establishment they claim to oppose. The anti-establishmentarian Malcontent stance is usually an affectation of privileged, if disaffected, middle class youth: 'poor little rich kids' with low self-esteem, offspring of The Golden Age of Capitalism. These are the Radical Chic conformist non-conformists, the illiberal liberals, the belligerent pacifists, the authoritarian libertarians, the full time oppositionists, the anti-racist racists, the anti-elitist elitists, the Banbury Saints, the neo-phobic New Age counter-culturalists, the dystopian-utopian anarchists, the unfunny alternative comedians, the repressive multi-culturalists, the anti-feminine feminists (pro-natalist, anti-sexist puritans), the conspiratorial conspiracy theorists, Angry Young Men, refuseniks, iconoclasts (campaigners against 'graven images' and idolatry), dissenters, Levellers, Ranters, Diggers, subversives, hyper-active activists, right-thinking bien pensants and dissidents of all tribes, classes and types - they all aspire to sainthood in conformance with traditional, reactionary, ascetic ideals of goodness and 'virtue' or the received wisdom of heretics. As a character in Look Back in Anger said of that prototype political post-war era antihero Jimmy Porter: 'He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going. He'll never do anything, and he'll never amount to anything.' Sometimes the nonconformist can 'make a difference', but, more often than not, the 'difference' is an outcome of the law of unintended consequences.
Objective Chance
‘…in
which natural necessity makes its way through the unconscious to coincide with
the human necessity of desire’ – Gerard Legrand (in Ades et al). Objective
chance is an occupational hazard.
The Ocean Chart
The Bellman, leader of the Snark Hunt, bought out a large map representing the sea 'without the least vestige of land'. The microcosmic crew were of course delighted 'when they found it to be/ A map they could all understand.'
Open Realism
Open Realism (realisme ouvert – Andre Breton) draws a line in the
sand and, as they say these days, it ‘moves on’. From Kitchen Sink and Swinging Bonkbusters to Hammer Horror… nothing is sacred.
The Outland
Country
‘He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had
strayed into outland and occult territory.’ – Arthur Machen. The Hill of
Dreams, 1907
Paraxis
‘The paraxial area could be taken to represent the spectral region
of the fantastic, whose imaginary world is neither entirely ‘real’…nor entirely
‘unreal’…but is located somewhere indeterminately between the two.’ – Rosemary
Jackson.
Postsurrealism
The
idea of a 'typical post-Surrealist viewpoint' is mentioned by Lucy R Lippard in
her discussion of the art of Valerio Adami, a body of work, focused on the
principle of metamorphosis, that also draws upon the world of advertising. To
quote Adami himself: advertising is 'a language that assails you wherever you
go'. He said his aim was to realise a condition where 'time and space spread
out into a new psychic action'. Writing about the later films
of Luis Bunuel a filmmaker whose aesthetic was rooted in the classic or ‘heroic’
interwar era of Surrealist provocation, Michael Wood observes a certain
character pertaining to Bunuel’s work of his later period (1967-1977) or to the
social context depicted therein. He notes that this mode of modernity appears
‘thoroughly pleased with itself’ and capable of the ‘firmest suppression’ of
any indications of trouble. Crucially, he says ‘This is a world beyond satire,
and the old disruptions of Surrealism are not going to make any mark on it,
because ordinary life, in this place, is already as arbitrary and erratic as
anything a Surrealist could dream up.’ Are there fundamental problems with Surrealism? Taking into account Sartre's critique of a 'curious enterprise of achieving nothingness through an excess of being' one might also add that there are significant issues with Marxism and Hegelianism, political idealism, music, homophobia, infantile regression, anti-consumerism, Westophobia, Postcolonialism, primitivism and the Orientalist Turn To The East which might situate political Surrealism as a precursor to what is now known as the chic pseudo-radical Reactionary Left although the Surrealist Anti-Stalinist emphasis on Liberty (artistic freedom, personal freedom) remains both fundamental and unique. The Surrealists eventually broke with the communists because they refused to accept Socialist Realism as an article of faith. From our present vantage point we should be able to formulate a 'post-surreal' perspective, countering, or, neutralizing such vexatious and problematic questions.
The Post-War
Waves
The
First Wave was The Angries, the Second Wave was The Satire Boom, and the Third
Wave was The Underground. And after the Underground? The Fourth Wave.
The Psychonauts
Research
paradigm derived from the concept of the Psychoanauts (Psychonauten) first discussed by Ernst Junger in his collection of
essays Annaherungen: Drogen und Rausch
(1970). The term has subsequently been popularised in the occult world by Peter
J Carroll in his book Liber Null and
Psychonaut : An Introduction to Chaos Magic (1982). Immersive exploration
of of the psycho-geography of inner space and/or ‘altered states’ is, obviously, the foundational
aesthetic experience; to quote Burroughs, ‘altered consciousness, of course, is
a writer’s stock in trade. If my consciousness was just completely
conventional, no one would be interested enough to read it, right?’ All Surrealists are psychonauts as the principle is clearly implied in the First Surrealist Manifesto which explains that the discoveries of Psychoanalysis provide for the 'human explorer' (l'explorateur humain) to carry his investigations much further than would otherwise be the case, 'authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities'. As the Manifesto states, 'It was a question of going back to the sources of poetic imagination and what is more, of remaining there.' This requires a 'great deal of fortitude' especially if the explorer intends to set up his abode 'in these distant regions where everything seems at first so awkward and difficult.' However, to attain this goal it is ultimately a matter of 'the travelers' 'ability to endure'.
Radar
Poetry
is radar.
Religion
Social evolution is secular, All religion is political: all theology is propaganda. All sacred books are fake news, Faith is an addiction, Morality is The Devil's work. Religiosity is mania but Faithwash, like Greenwash, is nevertheless socially expedient. Fideism is the worst kind of faithwash.
Second Highway
Term used by Huysmans with reference to his new artistic formula (Baldick) ; an extension of realistic Naturalism (the 'highway' marked out by Zola) in pursuit of which the novelist should trace a 'parallel road in the air, a second highway reaching out to regions beyond and hereafter...'. Not only was it required to maintain the accurate documentation and precision of detail demanded by the Realists, but it was also necessary to 'sink well-shafts into the soul' and develop 'a spiritual naturalism'. To extract core samples from the depths of the Soul.
Subtopia
To the critical observer it was an anonymous tract of anomic space
lacking in distinctive character or ‘spirit of place'; an interstitial ‘middle
state neither town nor country’. In hindsight it seems that this ‘Subtopia’
('inferior place') was an incitement for the imagination; although it might
also have been that the bizarre strangeness was not a subjective projection but
a discovery – Subtopia is bizarre in itself.
Subtopian
Materialism
A debased form of anti-didactic English Pop associated with the ‘cultural desert’
of the urban fringe. A by-product of the post-war economic boom (The Golden Age of Capitalism) Subtopian Materialism finds inspiration in boring or brutalist architecture, electricity substations, deserted allotments, mass
consumerism, retro-futurism, all forms of popular entertainment, and the indeterminate, sub-surreal no-place
of featureless suburbia - a locale or terrain vague where ‘nothing really happens’. Like The Room described by Cocteau in Les Enfants Terribles, works of Subtopian Materialism
are 'devoid of intellectual content, devoid... of any worldly aim...' reflecting the commercialised, mass-consumerist aestheticism of the mid-twentieth century.
The Subtopian Voyeur (People Watching)
Hang out on the other side of town, navigate the urban phantasmagoria in search of that 'unconscious strangeness' Baudelaire said was the defining element of Beauty. Get immersed in the Freak Show Scene: the fashions, the types, the attitudes: the friendly, the nasty, or the indifferent.
The Space Age
The
atomic space age, the age of The Nuclear Dream and technocratic fantasy dressed
by Courreges and Cardin.
‘Sometimes
I have a feeling I’m an astronaut shot out into space.’ – Federico Fellini.
Tabloid
Impressionism
(1) A Neo-Nonsense, absurdist anti-didactic trash aesthetic; a form of post-surreal Urban Alchemy. The principle of Objective Chance applied
to the mass media, particularly in its most disreputable aspects where the
Spirit of Seriousness is much diminished, or, with luck, completely absent:
downmarket advertising, the tabloid press, junk mail, celebrity culture and
scandals, tacky TV, mass production movies, porn mags, burlesque fashion and so
forth. As Durgnat said, discussing ‘Mute Poetry in the Commercial Cinema’:
‘…academics often ignore or deprecate the popular mythology from which the mass
media so often derive their intimacy of resonance with their audience.’
(2)
A slangy literary style. A form of verbal slumming or nostalgie
de la boue often incorporating found phrases and wacky neologisms from the
mass media.
Teleology?
You must be joking. There is no master-plan.
Veronica Lurk
Bonjour
Maitresse!
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