Surrealism and exteriority
Introduction from 'The Exteriority Crisis'
In its corners, streets, gates, bars, squares, boulevards, gardens, parks and cafés, the city, as is known, maintains some of the focal points of "its" unconscious. These are found and explored everyday by surrealists who obtain the essential experience of surreality in metropolitan life. The concrete experience of exteriority (which in the following collective essay we concentrate only on the city limits and beyond them) requires from us a disposition closely akin not only to the sensible renewal of people (since the greatest promise resides herein), but also to existence and its poetic reserves, and to the revitalization of the interior life that is suffering a process of sterilization because of the convulsive technologization of interiority and the progressive forgetting of life outside.
The experience of exteriority begins with a leap past the point where it had been alienated by the metropolitan (culturized) interiorization of the experience, where it became merely delegated and improper. This metropolitan interiorization works as a screen that separates exteriority from its outskirts, which tends to homogenize it, making it uniform, diluting its non-duality and its indeterminate nature. To have this metropolitan outskirt restored is thus to overcome an urbanized interiority (cellular, virtual, without community) predetermined by knowledge that is mimetic, clonal, delayed and consequently devitalized, since it doesn't reveal itself (not announcing its place, breaking with its prearranged location) but instead withdraws into a feeble interior, in an advanced stage of sterilility.
In a period when the human spirit (of the individual and of the collective) suffers from great convulsions, pronounced declines and experiences symptoms like the ones that we just described (only a few, although sufficiently alarming), the power with which exteriority canpenetrate the human spirit might have the unsuspected value of effecting a renewal on it.This abandonment to exteriority is not an escape (nor an Edenic return), but the impulse of life towards the reconquest of itself (1), and in the intellectual sphere is one of the most urgent objectives at the beginning of this century.
This abandonment is not comparable to the sublimation of the romantic absolute (neither is it a question of comparing it within the frame of this reflection). Perhaps the abandonment to exteriority engenders a somewhat more modest disposition (at least in its first formulation) , despite the great depth, as if it were the restoration of the relationship with exteriority through what we could call a lesson from childhood: the discovery within the concrete of the animacy of everything, of that which palpitates and which we could associate with an exteriorial unconscious. By this we think of exteriority as an indeterminate sphere that could contain its own unconscious, or rather, its own animate life, pulsating within concrete objects, spaces and places; and we encounter these items at a limit which this collective essay defines as the one distinguished by the outskirts (and what comes thereafter). This is the reason why exteriority can't be confused with nature, or otherwise we would be obliged to include within our interventions for example a reflection on the ecological phenomena in its broadest sense, which is not the case here.
Through confining our thought to the outskirts – to those urban spaces on the fringe – we conclude our interventions in a certain way by trying to focus on these specific objects, spaces and places, while deliberately setting aside surrealism's historic interests such as the ones relative to the encounter, objective chance, wandering, unconditional waiting, etc. And by situating this thought beyond the outskirts, we dare to cross the bridge where the ghosts come to meet us (2), to find ourselves before everything that lives not according to the predeterminations of history, but which flows with the generative force of original ambiguity.The following texts and images retrace the development of this growing concern that has emerged in certain parts of the international surrealist movement since the early 1990's, and which represent the concretization of specific investigations.
It is our hope that this book – and especially the reflections and points of view expressed in the most recent writings (3) – not only contributes to the enrichment and actualization of the surrealist experience, but above all will inspire the reader to deepen them in concrete life.
In its corners, streets, gates, bars, squares, boulevards, gardens, parks and cafés, the city, as is known, maintains some of the focal points of "its" unconscious. These are found and explored everyday by surrealists who obtain the essential experience of surreality in metropolitan life. The concrete experience of exteriority (which in the following collective essay we concentrate only on the city limits and beyond them) requires from us a disposition closely akin not only to the sensible renewal of people (since the greatest promise resides herein), but also to existence and its poetic reserves, and to the revitalization of the interior life that is suffering a process of sterilization because of the convulsive technologization of interiority and the progressive forgetting of life outside.
The experience of exteriority begins with a leap past the point where it had been alienated by the metropolitan (culturized) interiorization of the experience, where it became merely delegated and improper. This metropolitan interiorization works as a screen that separates exteriority from its outskirts, which tends to homogenize it, making it uniform, diluting its non-duality and its indeterminate nature. To have this metropolitan outskirt restored is thus to overcome an urbanized interiority (cellular, virtual, without community) predetermined by knowledge that is mimetic, clonal, delayed and consequently devitalized, since it doesn't reveal itself (not announcing its place, breaking with its prearranged location) but instead withdraws into a feeble interior, in an advanced stage of sterilility.
In a period when the human spirit (of the individual and of the collective) suffers from great convulsions, pronounced declines and experiences symptoms like the ones that we just described (only a few, although sufficiently alarming), the power with which exteriority canpenetrate the human spirit might have the unsuspected value of effecting a renewal on it.This abandonment to exteriority is not an escape (nor an Edenic return), but the impulse of life towards the reconquest of itself (1), and in the intellectual sphere is one of the most urgent objectives at the beginning of this century.
This abandonment is not comparable to the sublimation of the romantic absolute (neither is it a question of comparing it within the frame of this reflection). Perhaps the abandonment to exteriority engenders a somewhat more modest disposition (at least in its first formulation) , despite the great depth, as if it were the restoration of the relationship with exteriority through what we could call a lesson from childhood: the discovery within the concrete of the animacy of everything, of that which palpitates and which we could associate with an exteriorial unconscious. By this we think of exteriority as an indeterminate sphere that could contain its own unconscious, or rather, its own animate life, pulsating within concrete objects, spaces and places; and we encounter these items at a limit which this collective essay defines as the one distinguished by the outskirts (and what comes thereafter). This is the reason why exteriority can't be confused with nature, or otherwise we would be obliged to include within our interventions for example a reflection on the ecological phenomena in its broadest sense, which is not the case here.
Through confining our thought to the outskirts – to those urban spaces on the fringe – we conclude our interventions in a certain way by trying to focus on these specific objects, spaces and places, while deliberately setting aside surrealism's historic interests such as the ones relative to the encounter, objective chance, wandering, unconditional waiting, etc. And by situating this thought beyond the outskirts, we dare to cross the bridge where the ghosts come to meet us (2), to find ourselves before everything that lives not according to the predeterminations of history, but which flows with the generative force of original ambiguity.The following texts and images retrace the development of this growing concern that has emerged in certain parts of the international surrealist movement since the early 1990's, and which represent the concretization of specific investigations.
It is our hope that this book – and especially the reflections and points of view expressed in the most recent writings (3) – not only contributes to the enrichment and actualization of the surrealist experience, but above all will inspire the reader to deepen them in concrete life.
posted by G.d'A-L. or HARL or Ori Sapel at 12:49 PM
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