Freedom and Transgression: Sontag on Artaud and Breton

That Artaud found Breton's thinking shallow - that is, optimistic, aesthetic - follows from the fact that Breton did not have a Gnostic style or sensibility. Breton was attracted by the hope of reconciling the demands of individual freedom with the need to expand and balance the personality through generous, corporate emotions; the anarchist view, formulated in this century with the greatest subtlety and authority by Breton and Paul Goodman, is a form of conservative, humanistic thinking - doggedly sensitive to everything repressive and mean while remaining loyal to the limits that protect human growth and pleasure. The mark of Gnostic thinking is that it is enraged by all limits, even those that save. (Susan Sontag, 'Introduction' to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings)

Susan Sontag's sensitive portrait of the difference between Artaud and Breton only slightly exaggerates Breton's often unacknowledged sympathy with ideas of human development often located within the more romantic strands of liberalism (Hegel, von Humboldt, to a lesser extent J S Mill). And the question at issue, of whether the ideal of developing one's creative faculties may be in tension with a profound kind of freedom, must seem crucial in our libertarian age.

One way to doubt whether there really is a tension here may be to ask why it seems so appropriate to describe the Gnostic opposition to limits as a matter of rage. Might not such rage, even while it provides the energies required for a transgression of limits, involve experiential limitations of its own, in particular by closing off the pleasures of growth? And granted that a certain kind of fidelity to growth and pleasure also involves intrinsic limitations (and perhaps it is precisely these that particularly enrage the Gnostic Artaud) is it not precisely the function of such loyalty to open up more choices than it closes off?

Bataille wrote that in Surrealism "the accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed". Although the fact of choosing must remain central to anyone deeply concerned with freedom, the issue between Artaud and Breton may indeed come down to the concrete structure of freedom: not how many limits should be transgressed (for how, in any case, should they be counted) but which limits - and what it is that lies beyond them.

Bataille and Surrealism: Skepticism and Optimism

"Too many fucking idealists". In the age of Auschwitz and the Gulags, where a black pessimism can seem the only rational response to one's historical situation, it is easy to identify with George Bataille's well-known condemnation of the Surrealists' aim of synthesizing dream and reality. Likewise, if the underground stream nourishing modern thought since Descartes is an increasingly thorough skepticism, Bataille's atheistic mysticism of non-knowledge can seem more absolument moderne than the Surrealist preference for mythic imagination over reason.

But what this condemnation fails to recognise is the way the surrealists had already lived through the pessimism and skepticism of modernity in the form of Dada. That the skepticism of Surrealism was at heart more profound than that of Bataille can be judged from their more complete renunciation of logical argumentation. While Bataille cannot rid himself of the need to explain himself (as he ruefully observed with regard to the sociological impetus of The Accursed Share), the surrealist manifestos are free of anxieties of justification, their criticisms of the age ultimately personal, rather than rational.

Surrealism in fact shows how the most profound skepticism triumphs even over pessimism. Far from being the consequence of his skepticism, Bataille's rigorous refusal of hope, both personal and political, can be seen to result instead from a residual addiction to the idea of being constrained by the bleak truth of reality, a reality in which the surrealist Icarus will be cast back to earth by the dark sun of necessity. By contrast, the Surrealists understood that if nothing is true, everything is permitted - even optimism.

Aphorisms

How often, when reading a work by X, we think to ourselves, "if only X had read Y - Y deals with exactly this point but more lucidly, profoundly etc." The art of wide reading lies in being able to diminish such reactions in readers of one's own work.

Video art is to film what poetry is to the novel.

From Heidegger to Hölderlin: Modernity, Homecoming and Adventure

Die Wanderschaft in der Wegrichtung sum Fragwürdigen ist nicht Abenteuer sondern Heimkehr. 
The wandering toward that which is worthy of being questioned, is not adventure but homecoming (Heidegger).

Heidegger emphasises the importance of homecoming over adventure because he sees the impulse to adventure attaining dominance in the modern world - a world in which man feels increasingly homeless. But what if modernity's impulse for adventure were as valid and essential to humanity as the impulse to find one's way home?  What if modernity were in fact constituted by a dialectic of these impulses? What if Hölderlin saw further than Heidegger, when he wrote (in Hyperion), "If the life of the world consists in an alteration between opening and closing, between going forth and returning, why is it not even so with the heart of man?"

Poetry, Strangeness and Ideology

The living core of poetry is the intense strangeness of canonical experience (Bloom) in which a slit is made in the umbrella of civilization (Lawrence). It is this strangeness, this rending of the veil of ideology that makes poetry intrinsically political.

An ideology of canonical strangeness is a contradiction in terms. Individual poetic movements, poetic techniques, poetic forms can be ideological, but poetry as such is intrinsically opposed to ideology.

Communion with nature, experiential profundity, sublime intensity, romantic passion - these elements of romanticism become ideological at the point at which they cease to be strange. Likewise with extreme 'formal' innovation - which always also means, or ought to mean, innovation of experience - e.g. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, objectivism, etc.

The definition of ideology assumed here, like all definitions of ideology, is a partisan one.

Modernism: a Historical Schema

1. German Romanticism = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical anti-modernism

2. Rimbaud, Baudelaire = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical modernism.

3. Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens... = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical ???