r277986140

your point is well taken, and we've already achieved sufficient subtlety. situatonists would've rejected the idea that they owe debt to an -ism, which is where we started, but debord would've freely acknowledge an influence of specific surrealists.

surrealist groups keep dragging a dead corpse around. there's nothing wrong with that, in same way as improv clubs are a perfectly acceptable leisure activities for the laptop class.

we can definitely agree that both surrealist and situationist tactics are at this point fully integrated. but then traditional protest tactics have been at this point fully integrated: you know si celebrating watts riots, but the covid riots might as well be a perfect case study on the nature of recuperation. i doubt op new york times writer thinks she's being anything but clever, but you know everything about it is a neat little mockery of our collective impotence.

there are lessons that we can derive from si writing AND surrealist works, but i don't think goofy "one simple hack the spectacle hates!" are it.

in retrospect we consider automatism surrealist, but historically and from the consideration of situatonists' relationship with surrealists i think it would be fairer to say that both borrowed from the same origins. les champs magnétiques is 1919, how to write a dadaist poem is 1920, but surrealism manifesto is 1924. but the techniques involved predate both. and situationists themselves would've rejected the debt you're asigning them, on principles, and from the perspective of the historic development of the relevant techniques it would be hard to catch them in a lie.

i'm not missing the political dimension of surrealism, i'm deliberately ignoring it. there's two of us in these comments who are aware of these political dimensions, where's society's perspective on surrealism is duchamp's fountain and dali's persistence of memory. surrealist art is a one trick pony, that is at fault for how easily it was recuperated. situatonists argued that this dimension was built in from the very beginning.

surrealism is a recuperation of the dadaist movement by the capital, guy debord's opinion, but i will further add that surrealism was a recuperation of the revolutionary artistic spirit of the early 20th century in general. futurists, cubists, dadaists all expressing important points about the nature of art and man, the future of art, its relationship to a common man as opposed to aristocrat which was a completely novel thing, and at its core the political and sexual potential of art. all of that, reduced to dali walking an anteater.

dadaist ideas were continued to be picked up by the avant guard over years, and as predictable recuperated with various degrees of success. one can trace a line of ideas from dadaists to punks, for example, and its easier to understand what is the relationship between dadaism and surrealism, by looking at the way punk was very rapidly stripped of its political potential and reduced to representation only.

it has become significantly hard to do, but one should go see kazemir malevich's "black square" at the tretyakov galery of art in moscow. none of the digital copies, that are mere representation, do it justice. the piece oozes power in person, it's a long subdued power, that we also have to see through the prism of gulags and terror that followed, but its a raw power of men, an ability to accomplish things both awesome and terrifying, to wrought matter into form. that power terrifies those who were in power at the time AND those who are in power now. disregard all that peasant, look it's a fish floating through a rain of melting clocks! dahlin, isn't it so maavelous and inventive.