Some Rants and Notes about Automatic Poetic Practices in the 21st century

Table of contents:

1) The Bias against Automatic Writing

2) The Contemporary Antagonism between Poetry and Science: the creation and intuition of reality versus its quantitative, reductionist measurement

3) The Dialectic of Digital-Fetishism and Digital-Phobia

4) More Than a Party in New Orleans: the Big Sleazy made manifest

Notes

 

 

1) The Bias against Automatic Writing

 

An internet search for “automatism” yields a plethora of hits regarding its psychological and metaphysical (psychic, spiritual, religious, etc.) meanings and usages. However, when the word automatism is used in the surrealist sense, it has a very different meaning. The original definition of pure psychic automatism, as suggested by Breton in the first manifesto of surrealism, is that by which it is intended to express, verbally, in writing or by other means, the real functioning of thought. The dictation of thought, in the absence of all control exercised by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations. (1)

With automatism, or automatic writing, in particular, the goal is not “therapy” or any kind of mysticism (religious or otherwise), but a liberation of thought, as it is written down word by word as quickly as possible. The advantage of scribbling so rapidly, ‘on the fly’, is that the writer does not have enough time to rationally or morally interpret (censor) the words as they move from brain to hand. For this reason, automatic writing (and other forms of automatism, such as the visual kind) is highly prized by surrealists as a technique of liberating the human psyche when it is temporarily visible in its nakedness, without the interference from moral or rationalistic filters. As Benjamin Peret described it:

You no longer want to know what is logical and what is not, you do not want to know anything except what you are about to be told. Write as fast as possible so that you lose none of the secrets about to be told. Write as fast as possible so that you lose none of the secrets about yourself being confided in you; above all do not reread anything. Soon you will notice that, little by little, as you write, the sentences come more quickly, more audibly, more vividly. (2)

In a way, automatic writing is a “photography of thought,” and these moral and rationalist “filters” are metaphors for the social conditioning that individuals within our oppressive, greedy, consumerist-driven society must endure. Therefore, automatic techniques can be used to develop an understanding of the innermost needs and desires of the psyche, without the interference of repression. Such techniques also provide a glimpse of an unalienated life not driven by economics by instead by desire, new possibilities, providing a means for brave individuals to dream, and ultimately, to effect a new and improved world that does not require people to exploit each other. A simple enough idea to comprehend, but apparently not for many academics and influential literary-art-priests who view surrealism as nothing but a distant, historical memory from the 20 th century.

According to André Breton,

The surrealism in a work is in direct proportion of the efforts the artist has made to embrace the whole psycho-physical field, of which consciousness is only a small fraction. In these unfathomable depths there prevails, according to Freud, a total absence of contradiction, a release from the emotional fetters caused by repression, a lack of temporality and the substitution of external reality by psychic reality obedient to the pleasure principle and no other. Automatism leads us straight to these regions. (3)

Based on Breton’s view, it is suggested here that surrealist automatic techniques have always had a future, and have not been exhausted like the latest (and vacuous) trends and fads offered by popular culture. As long as the human psyche retains its conscious and unconscious dimensions, and as long as civilization keeps these conscious and unconscious parts of the mind in opposition each other, then surrealism is justified in its efforts to transform the human condition. To reiterate, the human condition cannot be changed unless people learn to systematically examine (and thereby liberate) their own minds. Automatism is but one tool that can be used to achieve this end.

However, there has been some disagreement regarding the role of automatism, as evidenced, for example, by Carl-Michael Edenborg’s highly negative and ultimately pessimistic essay entitled “THE IMPURE FLOW- The literary anus blown to pieces: pure psychic automatism” (1996). Edenborg suggests that

Maybe the obvious defects in the surrealist notion of automatism depends on surrealism having made it too easy for itself. Just to sit down and write whatever as fast as possible is hardly a poetical patent-method. (4)

A poetical patent-method? Of course not, but what Edenborg fails to remember is that the usefulness of automatism becomes apparent when the writer differentiates between the interesting versus the worthless, mundane passages of his writing. The interesting parts should be shared with others, not the passages that reflect the mundane, the boring and the miserable. Therefore, the person who writes automatically must be self-discriminatory, but only after the act of writing has taken place. With automatic writing, as with many other activities, there is no “Midas’ touch,” and neither is there “talent.” Instead, there is only receptiveness. Responsibility rests with the author, in what texts he makes available to readers. It follows that the technique itself cannot be faulted, but really the discretion of the writer.

((As a side note, there is the question how much responsibility the poet or anyone else should have when making judgments on the value of the poet’s work. In particular, I refer to the way in which automatic texts have taken on profound significance only after the significant passage of time, as in the famous example of Breton and his Sunflower poem (5). It is fortunate that Breton did not burn his seemingly useless “Sunflower” poem shortly after it was written, just because it didn’t make any sense at the time. To the contrary, it would take a decade for the poem to really acquire its significance, demonstrating that immediate judgments of its value were unwarranted. Likewise, any poet or writer cannot always foresee the future value of his or her writing and works. Therefore judgments can only be made cautiously, at least when there are no obvious flaws, such as literary opportunism or conscious efforts to follow some preconceived idea or moral concept.))

However, Edenborg appears to understand the need for author-discretion by saying that of the poets one should rather demand the highest concentration and core meltdown (6), but through this proposed process of concentration/meltdown, the writer would inadvertently subvert and potentially censor the original flow of thought. Perhaps Edenborg might envision it as a crystallization of thought, but through whittling away at his texts, pasting words and lines here and there, he leaves the word-manipulator open to the danger of judging the work based on whatever conscious value-system he currently subscribes to, thus defeating the purpose of automatism. An alternative approach, as mentioned above, is to simply omit those paragraphs, pages, whatever, which are devoid of psychological lucidity and/or interest, but to do so after a certain significant “holding” or quarantine period (and not just the day after). Better yet, the writer could decide to write at times when he feels himself under the influence of magical, marvelous forces, using the power of intuition to recognize those moments. As Paul Garon said:

…Those texts which are produced by the method of free association are affected strongly by the state of the psychic processes at the time of writing. In the condition of love, for example, that is, mad love, a large number of repressions (as well as other defenses) usually maintained by the ego are found to be superfluous. Without these repressions, unconscious material becomes infinitely more accessible and images of the most marvelous and unscrupulous sort are produced. The love object is the obsessive image which inspires the uncluttered network of broadening and deepening associations, but while the image retains its obsessive quality, it is capable of providing an expanding network of preconscious associations and, through these, access to the unconscious.

Need I say that the situation changes dramatically if the subject is the victim of defeat. Masochistic tendencies which are reinforced threaten to break through to consciousness, and there is an intensification of repression to guard against the emergence of masochism. Not only are preconscious associations (with their links to primary material) severely limited under these conditions, but the effect of the obsessive image is altered appreciably. Not only does it remain obsessive, but it becomes incapable of inspiring images beyond the most trivial, superficial, obsessive limits, often producing no more than an undisguised repetition of the traumatic situation. (7)

Garon further suggests that mass-produced contemporary “literature” is no more than the poetry of defeat. Perhaps Edenborg recognized this quality within a few examples of automatic writing, but for him to condemn the automatic process itself is erroneous. Perhaps it can be hypothesized that automatic writing is capable of releasing the marvelous only during certain charmed and enchanted moments, such as with true love and other strong forces of change.

Edenborg apparently missed the point:

And is it really like Breton seemed to believe: that there is a small wise old man or woman in the dark cave of the unconscious that tell us truths deeper than the ones reason can produce, that let nature itself speak through the language of man?(8)

This thought is merely a vulgarization of Breton’s quest for the inner voice, the “automatic message,” and only reflects Edenborg’s hang-ups regarding automatic writing and the subconscious, (perhaps even his own subconscious). While the automatic voice/message cannot be caricatured into a portable fortune-teller, it also cannot be dismissed either. Perhaps the challenge of releasing the automatic message rests not with how much, but with when, and under what conditions.

It is true that some “poetry,” writings and other works of ‘art’ are nothing but forms of intellectual masturbation, hence requiring caution and awareness on the part of writers and readers, alike. And there is the other situation where someone experiences a work of art, does not understand/appreciate it, and then wrongly concludes that the work’s creator was doing nothing but stroking his own ego while creating it. Both of these scenarios reveal the general misunderstanding and misapprehension that modern society has for the poetic experience. However, to run away from the poetic experience (and automatism, in particular), simply because of the mishaps of some individuals, is the same as “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” amounting to nothing but a reactionary and ineffective response to the problem.

 

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2) The Contemporary Antagonism between Poetry and Science: the creation and intuition of reality versus its quantitative, reductionist measurement

 

How can genuine poetry be distinguished from its caricature? Perhaps a better understanding of the poetic experience can be grasped through a perspective on its relationship with science, and how the two phenomena interact within the 21 st century human psyche.

As much as western culture has advanced its scientific knowledge of the modern mind, this knowledge is still alienated, in that it uses as its empirical model the average, “normal,” alienated psyche. Its quality of being “ Normal ” resides in its being alienated. The psychology and sociology of the Normal is derived and deduced, from everyday “capitalist” or economically driven (9) reality (if the reader agrees with the concept of historical materialism – i.e. that cultural reality is directly shaped by economic reality), with its morality system based on convenience and profit. Those individuals and trends that do not fit these “Normal” standards are shunted to the domain of the “Abnormal,” and are treated with antidepressants and set apart by propaganda.

Capitalist-funded science, including the human behavioral sciences, discovers only the things that it wants to discover, usually. In most cases, only the projects that are thought to support the current social reality are funded, whether they are for industry or academic, government or private-sector, corporate business or non-profit. The primary goal of economics-driven science is to fulfill material needs and optimize the efficiency of industrial need-fulfillment, while its secondary goal is to deal with the problems that may result: to clean up the mess caused by industrial pursuits. In this way, environmentalist science has developed not as a wholehearted appreciation of nature and the environment, but really as a response to the science of industry. Meanwhile, and analogously, the social sciences, especially the varieties dealing with ‘pathology’ and the ‘dysfunctional,’ owe their existence to the “science of efficiency”, (an ideology sometimes known as the capitalist work ethic, which includes moral attitudes toward work, reproduction, family). One of the main functions of the social sciences is to clean up the “psychological messes” caused by our progress-oriented civilization. The psycho-pathological effects of capitalism and its derivative economic regimes (such as Chinese and Cuban “communism”, for example) have still not been fully studied, categorized, nor even acknowledged, and instead, we have these mysterious mental illnesses, such as “hysteria”, “depression” and all flavors of “dysfunction”.

 But why even mention economically driven science and psychology controlled by money, in an article about automatism and the poetic experience? Depending on whom you ask, science is the modern gate-keeper of reality and the enforcer of reason in the industrialized world, which replaced mighty religion. At one point, religion filled the niche of gate-keeper, but now science does, with its myth of “progress.” As Herbert Marcuse suggests, “in the household of culture, the functions of science and religion tend to become complementary; through their present usage, they both deny the hopes which they once aroused and teach men to appreciate the facts in a world of alienation.”(10) Furthermore, the social sciences are two-faced, in that their textbooks criticize the myth of the “normal life,” while their practices actually support such a concept, reinforcing Macuse’s notion of the “One-Dimensional Society” (11).

 With regards to poetic needs, a very important side-effect of this “technocracy” is the reinforcement of the old notion that the poetic experience is for a select, “talented” few. Paradoxically, there is also the existence of the newer, opposite idea: that the poetic experience is easily ‘downloaded’ from a reality TV show (as an abstract commodity), or that it is something that can be scheduled in advance, or that it can seem rebellious today but ‘return to the fold’ tomorrow, etc., etc. If the behavioral sciences are the ideological enforcers of capitalist morality, then the poetic experience (known as “phantasy,” in some circles) provides a temporary psychological release from that morality. As Marcuse pointed out:

 As a fundamental, independent process, phantasy has a truth value of its own, which corresponds to an experience of its own – namely, the surmounting of the antagonistic human reality. Imagination envisions the reconciliation of the individual with the whole, of desire with realization, of happiness with reason. While this harmony has been removed into utopia by the established reality principle, phantasy insists that it must and can become real, that behind the illusion lies knowledge. The truths of imagination are first realized when phantasy itself takes form, when it creates a universe of perception and comprehension – a subjective and at the same time objective universe. This occurs in art…….Behind the aesthetic form lies the repressed harmony of sensuousness and reason – the eternal protest against the organization of life by the logic of domination, the critique of the performance principle. (12)

 Economic sponsored “poetry,” or pseudo-poetry, to the contrary, is mass-produced and designed to provide aesthetically stimulating distraction, while still supporting and reinforcing the underlying morality of the state. This is the fundamental difference between true poetry and aesthetically pleasing pseudo-poetry.

Psychology, sociology, etc., all serve to explain, categorize and adjust the human to the human condition by attempting to understand reality via logic and measurements. Poetry, however, is about experiencing, refusing, and transforming the human condition. In modern society, the poetic and scientific approaches are opposed to each other, alienated from each other. The alienation of poetry (whose alienation is maintained, in part, by the social sciences and their unspoken code of Normality, in response to the demands of money) represents an alienation from the human experience, and ultimately an alienation from “life,” as all of us would idealize it.

 It follows that if the “Normal” in this society is really the alienated, then the Normal, everyday pseudo-poetic consumables of capitalist culture found (in the form of TV, popular music, paperback literature, radio, etc.) in every store and on every channel are, in most cases, the poetry of alienation (or the Poetry of Defeat, according to Garon). Alienated poetry, or, the Poetry of the Normal, is only a caricature of real poetry, often masochistic, and a counterfeit of the subjective nourishment that all people crave. Therefore, the goal is to tease unalienated poetic transmission (like, visual, verbal, tactile transmissions, etc.) from the alienated mind, and also to induce unalienated poetic experiences in the industrially alienated anyone and everyone, provoking a “communism of genius.” Therein lies one of the most immediate challenges of the surrealist movement, not to mention the ‘sweeping away of the capitalist world’ (13).

 

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3) The Dialectic of Digital-Fetishism and Digital-Phobia

 

It is important to note that the opening of the 21 st century is marked by a continuing war against human freedom, easily gauged by the degree to which the poetic experience is prostituted, automated and enslaved at the hands of mass production. Not only has the commercialization of consumable art reached its highest level yet, but its ease of distribution and availability have skyrocketed thanks to the internet and other computer-based technologies. In particular, the United States and its followers have developed those stupid “reality shows,” live rockstar talent competitions, blogs and other forms of instant, rehydrated, miserabilist culture. In no way do I deprecate the technology behind these manifestations of “expression,” but merely the uses to which the technologies are put.

There are some who have criticized the use of computers as a means of creating poetry. It can be argued that the current problem is not the use of computers but the expectation that computers can replace the human imagination in matters of poetic expression. The computer is a tool like any other, and there is no reason to expect a tool to provide imaginative, analogical thought, something that only a human brain can accomplish. Attempting to delegate the responsibility of poetic imagination to a machine reveals a certain kind of moral laziness, or to put it another way: only humans can imagine, not machines. So while we dream and daydream, we could never expect a computer to do this for us.

If we wanted to look to the immediate past for an analogous situation, we would find that Paul Nougé commented on the efforts of some musicians like “Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Schoenberg,” to make music that is “mathematical” and “pure” (14). Nougé’s criticism of the concept of “pure, mathematical music” is that “the sense of conquest and discovery has suddenly given way to the despair begotten of sterile play and the intrusion of arbitrary considerations.” For mathematically or artificially constructed music, the conclusion is that, “music left to its own devices loses no time in going sour.” This lesson is easily applied to mathematical or computer generated art.

There is still confusion in distinguishing automatic techniques that humans employ from the ability of computers to randomly or automatically generate images based on algorithmic parameters, for example. Superficially, human automatism is quite similar to computer automatism, in that images, words, etc. are spontaneously generated. Qualitatively, however, the results from human-performed automatic methods are different from machine results in that the former are created through complex psychological associations, values, emotions, logic, and volition, whereas the computer-driven results are only based on logic. As if these profound differences weren’t obvious enough, there are still people who perceive no fundamental distinction between human versus computer expression and who even take delight in imagining the human as more and more machine-like, and oppositely, humanizing the machine (the myth of the cyborg is a great example of this modern reductionist game).

On the flipside, other people avoid the use of technology at all costs, manifesting a certain technophobia, believing that nothing good could ever come from technological advances, avoiding the use of new technologies with an almost superstitious zeal.

For surrealism, there should be a middle ground somewhere, regarding the issue of computers. There must be a way to effectively use them without worshiping them and neither with the user being so technophobic as to limit their use to just email. Computers should be put to surrealist uses, with total confidence, as long as they are regarded as tools, in the way pens, paintbrushes, cameras and other objects and devices have been successfully integrated with culture. By way of example: we do not curse ballpoint pen technology when it is used to sign police search-warrants and capitalist legislation, any more than we praise the ballpoint pen when it is used to write marvelous poetry and love letters. Likewise, we snicker at the idea of a writer fondling his pen before writing, as if this act in itself would ensure the creation of a literary masterpiece (or what about the painter who believes that the future of the surrealist revolution would come solely from her paintbrushes and pastel-box?). Fortunately, most of us understand that change and radical transformation are initiated by the human will and the imagination, not by objects (no matter how sparkly, iridescent, or precise they are sometimes).

Despite the agonizingly slow progression of this era of economic decline, there is still the certainty that a great crisis of consciousness is lurking in the future. If capitalist regimes and their derivative imitators become deadlier with increasing computerization and mechanization, then it could only be expected that this upcoming crisis would involve a massive upheaval of all social morals and values, a revolutionary change in existence. Concurrently, it will be necessary to understand and question the needs and desires of our culture, our minds and our bodies. Automatic techniques, rather than becoming obsolete (like “Art”), should become more and more frequently utilized in this unavoidable re-evaluation of human existence, and it is certain that technology will be involved. In fact, in a world that becomes more and more machine-oriented, automatism will always be regarded a voice of truth that emanates from within each of us.

 

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4) More Than a Party in New Orleans: the Big Sleazy made manifest

The Party-town of Cultural Contradictions

The city of New Orleans is a seeming contradiction. On the one hand, people from the Big Easy prefer to view their city as a “party town”, of which the Mardi Gras festival is its zenith, with excesses of everything: food, drink, sex, music and dance. Such debauchery is not confined to the carnival season, however; people in New Orleans generally look for excuses to “party” all year round, and they prefer to see themselves as “cool”, “easygoing”, “laid back”, etc. In apparent contradiction to the party image, the culture of this region has an opposing current within it of profound, but typical American conservatism. Plagued by racism, this easygoing party city is really not so easygoing, upon examination. A closer look at this cultural cesspool is warranted, especially in light of the hurricane-floods of 2005.

According to Marx, "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness"(15). This definition of historical materialism implies matter over mind, rather than mind over matter. When New Orleans is regarded from such a materialist perspective, then its flamboyant excesses, both chemical and ideological, don’t seem so contradictory. In particular, its stagnant economy, based on an oversized portion of tourism, makes its citizens highly vulnerable to economic recession, and obviously, unemployment. Within the city, service industry jobs are the most prevalent kind available, for skilled and unskilled workers, alike. It is hard to convince businesses to invest in the city. With such a weak industry presence, New Orleans has no choice but to appeal to tourists, prostituting its history and culture to generate income.

Through having such a “seasonal” (or weak and unreliable) source of income, the city has generally had fewer funds available for education, housing and other living amenities that get taken for granted in more prosperous cities.

Physically, the city is below sea-level, and built upon soft mud, necessitating periodic “support therapy” for houses and other large structures that sink into the ground at uneven rates. For this reason, there will never be any skyscrapers in New Orleans. Through having such a weak physical foundation on which the city is built, and through being in a permanent state of economic depression, New Orleans was destined to be demolished by a hurricane some day. Despite all of the damage and loss of life, the city is still supremely lucky to have avoided a direct hit from such a dangerous hurricane like Katrina.

The White Problem in New Orleans

New Orleans in no way deviates from the hypothesis that a culture of misery directly results from an economy of misery. In a town where jobs and resources are scarce, people are at each others’ throats. In particular, socio-economic class and racial antagonism are highly pronounced. In other parts of the United States of North America, racism often appears in more subtle shades, but in New Orleans, the racial antagonism is highly visible. One shocking, fairly recent example is the wide show of political support given to David Duke, an ex-KKK member and outspoken white supremacist, who has served as a Louisiana state representative and who also ran unsuccessfully for the Louisiana senate and governor (16).

The passage of hurricane Katrina through New Orleans quickly and unexpectedly exposed the racism of the Deep South, as well as that of the rest of the country. Most of the harm to human life occurred not directly from the hurricane or floods themselves, but through the failure of government at all levels, local and federal, to intervene in a timely fashion. When the world learned that the majority of people stranded in the city were African-Americans, it was then that the racism became visible. If anything, it shows how well the United States government usually does a great job at concealing its ugly, racist tendencies during times of status quo normalignancy. The true colors of American society shine through during these unexpected moments of paralysis, such as after a natural disaster.

The media contributed to this whirlwind exposé of racism through their coverage of the events as they unfolded: disproportionately reporting the property damage (private property, no less) of businesses and casinos over the loss of human life, and the differential treatment of stranded residents: the black “looters” of grocery stores versus the whites who “found” items of survival. In many of the photos that accompanied the news-stories, the skin color of the victim was the primary determinant in describing whether the individual was “looting” versus “finding” items from abandoned businesses and stores. It took the media several days to make the captions in their photo-essays “politically correct”.

The media (ultimately in the service of the government) also distorted events as they were reported: many of the rumors of gunfights, looting, raping, murders, assaults, etc. have been widely unsubstantiated so far, perhaps serving as ways to justify the government’s own brutalities, which will go unreported until long after the fact. These manufactured, overblown, and thoroughly “edited” reports of urban chaos also might be interpreted as unconscious expressions of the white society’s fears of black insurrection and of African-American power. A common tactic used by white power to justify its use of violence has been to invent and/or inflate the purported misdeeds of non-whites, by way of the media. Either way, the media’s display of racism during the coverage of events after the storm was an eyesore, and a totally obvious one.

All along, the journalists and TV talking heads reinforced the unspoken assumption that the looting and lack of capitalist law ‘n order were somehow intensely undesirable outcomes. But given the circumstances, especially in light of the government FEMA “cavalry” that took an insultingly long time to show up, to provide assistance, it is to be expected that stranded New Orleans residents would take food and other such items from abandoned stores. Since the people of New Orleans had been under the thumb of American, capitalist control for all of their lives, it should not be so surprising that poor people would respond by taking clothes and televisions as soon as they saw their city descend into anarchy. The news-reporters were quick to point out the financial losses to business owners whose stores had been robbed, but they failed to address the ways in which minimum-wage workers had been robbed all of their lives by their employers, and by the American capitalist system, in general. These events only illustrate the fact that a capitalist regime values businesses over individual people. Therefore it’s reassuring to know that some people actually did get up the nerve to help themselves to the material luxuries which are usually inaccessible due to their financially restrictive socio-economic status. Despite the fact that African-Americans were usually the ones labeled by the media as “looters”, it’s very safe to say that people of Caucasian backgrounds were not afraid to take part in enjoying the pricey merchandise, too.

Generally, the specter of racism appears in many observable guises, whether one considers the salient ones, such as the abandoned people in the New Orleans Superdome, or the more subtle manifestations, such as the exploitation of black artists or the racist clichés of mass entertainment (17). While anti-racist legislation can be drafted by governments, leading to changes like affirmative action and the desegregation of schools and other institutions, such surface attempts at dealing with the problem lose their effectiveness quickly due to their inability to confront racism at its psychological roots, in particular, to address the psychopathological issue of “whiteness”, something which intellectuals of the establishment haven’t managed to accomplish yet. While many well-meaning sociologists and other academics have made valiant efforts to address racism, their efforts to confront whiteness have only just begun. The surrealists in Chicago expressed these ideas very clearly:

“As surrealists, we are especially interested in how the “white problem” turns up in language, images, myth, symbols, popular culture, science, everyday life, the whole field of human expression. However, our goal at all times is to attack and abolish whiteness and its institutions – to attack and abolish the whole miserabilist social/political/economic/cultural system that has made whiteness the hideous emblem of the worst oppression the world has ever had to endure.”(18)

New Orleans is a true cradle of whiteness, a hive of racist tendencies, and it seems that almost every piece of establishment-sanctioned culture from this part of the world carries the imprint of white malevolence in all of its various degrees of subtlety.

The Thrill of Mardi Gras Transgression versus Poetic Transformation

In addition to the blatant racist phenomena, there is also an underlying political conservatism and corruption that pervade all of life in the Deep South, including New Orleans. It might even be argued that such rottenness goes hand in hand with the racism. Nevertheless, it is surprising that a city so desperate for revitalization would be so resistant to change. But fears abound, and objectives are accomplished at a snail’s pace. Parallel to the political conservatism is their stifling Catholic (and to a lesser extent, Baptist) religion, which might be viewed by some as the pure embodiment of spiritual conservatism and repression of the psyche. Taken together, these religious and political tendencies are really but two different sides of the same coin: that of moral cowardice and conformism.

With such a repressive environment, it should be no wonder that residents of New Orleans would so badly want to transgress and escape, by way of their party culture. A remnant of the European medieval era, Mardi Gras, or “Fat Tuesday” (19), is the pinnacle of decadence within New Orleans, consisting of a few days of Bacchanalian debauchery: excessive amounts food, music, alcohol, nudity, dancing, etc. Although sometimes fun and entertaining, the unhealthy aspects of these excesses relate most significantly to physical health (alcoholism, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.), and the resulting health problems are disproportionately more prevalent than they are in other parts of the world.

Aside from the gluttonous and alcoholic qualities of the party culture, there is the issue of the music, embodied by jazz and blues, and perhaps the most truly revolutionary and surrealist of all New Orleans culture (although the spirits of voodoo and Marie Laveau have been known to mysteriously pervade New Orleans life, at times (20)). Jazz, in particular, is highly esteemed there, and this reverence is fully justified, given that many of its roots are in New Orleans. However, it has been quickly forgotten that the inception of jazz occurred as a spontaneous poetic form, with improvisation as the driving force. The original jazz musicians were not work-a-day song-smiths, creating commodities for sale, but instead were true music-poets.

In contrast, the advertised “Modern Jazz” no longer serves the poetic rebelliousness of the spirit, but rather the needs of the wallet. The rarified jazz for sale in the French Quarter is really the reified sound-bytes of commercialism. The epitome of this tendency of cultural stagnation is the presence of “Preservation Hall”, a place where jazz is remembered and preserved (21), just like any collectible, fossilized specimen. It’s not that jazz shouldn’t be understood and appreciated within in its historical context, but that it should be more actively protected from reification and dilution by these thoroughly benevolent musicians and musicologists. To attempt to “preserve” jazz, is nothing more than the attempt to “ institutionalize art, the very idea of art, plunge it into the domain of experts and specialists, sanctify “greatness” and importance,
recuperate art’s spirit by stamping it officially worthy, old, respectable”(22). Rhetorically, the best way to appreciate jazz would be to experience it inside of a place called “Improvisation Hall”, not “Preservation Hall”. It also shouldn’t be necessary to mention the dangers of artistic opportunism, but apparently the most publicly visible musicians pay more attention to material necessity than moral concerns: the “deliberate will to act upon the world” (23) has degenerated into the will to make a sale.

From the surrealist perspective, original jazz has always been highly regarded because of its inherent and refreshing spontaneity. “Jazz has been one of the best means of purging us, and for recreating in us the sense of the instant and the sense of transition” (24). So wrote the Martiniquan surrealist poet, René Menil. Ever since Breton first mentioned the “mysterious wind of Jazz,” in the first manifesto, surrealists and improvisational musicians have gravitated closer and closer to each other. This special relationship was beautifully described in Michael Vandelaar’s article “Surrealism and Black Music” (25). That some contemporary manifestations of jazz (especially the most visible ones, in the public domain) represent nothing more than capitalist commercialization should be of no surprise. However, it is stressed here that the truest manifestations and improvisations in music come as a result of our knowledge of unfreedom, as well as from our insistent dreaming and demanding of freedom: “While the forces of repression seem ever more pervasive and pernicious each passing year, music has increasingly expressed people’s hunger for freedom and a better world” (26). In particular, jazz is prized for its power to incite bold dreaming, and this is the way it should be remembered, in its twentieth century incarnation.

The danger, of course, is that there is currently a backlash of musicians who only emulate the “tradition” of Jazz, ad nauseam, effectively reducing themselves (and those who listen to them) to being tourists instead of seers. Also, it is especially shameful to see black music transformed into commodities by white marketers of the American culture-machine of tourism. In general, Afro-American culture has always been exploited and lobotomized at the hands of the entertainment industry, often driven by Caucasian Americans who ultimately remove the magical, poetic qualities that made it revolutionary from the beginning.

“Jazz” (if it insists on retaining this name, and as if there aren’t other incarnations of improv music that are equally powerful, concurrently) will have to reinvent itself with new identities, new rhythms, new instruments, new transitions, and new inspirations, and it will have to develop outside of the mainstream, outside of the disgusting and mind-numbing consumerist spotlight. Really, the most potent and penetrating improv music has to be at least one step ahead of the music industry to be considered ground-breaking. As Johannes Bergmark insists, “instead of being ‘socially acceptable’, the music of freedom must be poetically true” (27). Most “modern jazz” in New Orleans is only a caricature of what Jazz used to be. Until the death of Jazz is fully accepted, there will be roaming corpses pursuing their own “styles”, as there are, to the contrary, sonic experimenters and other revolutionary musicians who fearlessly do their own improv without clinging to the jazz label.

The Cultural Poverty after the Party

It must be admitted that, like the music of New Orleans, the city itself is no longer a hotbed of creation, neither of improvisation, nor of free-play. It is not what it once was, even before the hurricanes struck. The stultifying racist, religious, moral, socio-economic conditions of misery correlate with the perpetual need for partying, and are in fact the driving force behind the laid back and jazzy nature of New Orleans. For the people of New Orleans to commercialize their music and culture at the cost of losing the ability to innovate and reinvent their poetic solutions to life, suggests an invisible but far worse kind of poverty than the city’s moral and economic shortcomings: a poverty of creative, poetic thought.

It follows that instead of being called the Big Easy, New Orleans should be called the Big Sleazy. Likewise, it is fair to speculate that in the future, in different parts of the country, white people will search for new places to party (i.e. “party” = “trample”). For this reason, there will always be a demand for new Big Easies, and subsequently, new Big Sleazies to take the place of the original, miserabilist party cities. As long as the American corporate-capitalist system prevails, and as long as people hide from social misery rather than fight to transform it, then these assertions will remain applicable.

The passing of the floods from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita represents a painful but worthy opportunity to closely assess the state of American racist, capitalist culture (as well as the racist cultures of all similar, industrialized places), and not just that of the sad, medieval city of New Orleans. At the worst, there is the abandonment and neglect of lower-class African-Americans at the hands of American politics after a natural disaster. Then there are also the government’s attempts to justify its own neglect and inaction through playing the circular blame-game and through measures of callous self-justification, via the media.

For culture, American capitalism’s exploitation and castration of the poetic experience in New Orleans is unforgettable. When a true manifestation of poetry (be it music, literature, or art) becomes an established tradition to be preserved, bottled and then sold, it loses its revolutionary, magical character. That the flood would come through and submerge this pit of misery in foul muck is only a metaphor for what has already happened there over the past few decades. Perhaps, by way of objective chance, it’s a signal to rebuild the culture of this decrepit party city, in addition to the physical structures, and to do so with a racially equitable plan. Could it be time to start improvising again?

 

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Notes:

 

1) André Breton. Manifesto of Surrealism.

2) Benjamin Peret. Automatic Writing. 1929. Reprinted in Death to the Pigs and other writings.

3) Breton. Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism in the Plastic Arts, 1942. Reprinted in What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Edited by Franklin Rosemont.

4) Carl-Michael Edenborg. THE IMPURE FLOW -- The literary anus blown to pieces: pure psychic automatism. First printed in Stora Saltet #5. 1996.

5) Breton. Mad Love. 1933.

6) Edenborg. 1996.

7) Paul Garon. Fate of the Obsessive Image. 1972. Printed in Rana Mozelle.

8) Edenborg. 1996.

9) In this essay, I have used “capitalist society” and “economically driven society” interchangeably. This terminology ensures that capitalism and its reactionary imitators, such as “communist regimes” in Eastern Europe and Asia (and Cuba too) are all the same in that their economic practices are used to enslave, rather than uplift, human life. Although there are countries that call themselves “communist”, the word is only a label, and only is a caricature of what was once envisioned by Karl Marx and his followers. True Communism and Socialism will be reinvented some day.

 10) Herbert Marcuse. Eros and Civilization. 1955. Chapter three, “The Origin of Repressive Civilization”.

 11) Marcuse. One-Dimensional Man . 1964.

 12) Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. Chapter seven, “Phantasy and Utopia”.

 13) Breton. Communicating Vessels. 1933

 14) Paul Nougé. Music is Dangerous, Speech from 1928. Translated by Felix Giovanelli, Surrealist R&D Monograph Series, #6, Published by Radical America under the direction of the Chicago Surrealist Group, 1972.

15) Karl Marx, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York : Int’l Publishers. Website: http://www.intpubnyc.com/.

16) Even though David Duke did not win most of the offices for which he ran, it is alarming how many people actually voted for him. Website: http://www.davidduke.com/.

17) Ronnie Burk. “Racist Clichés in the U.S.A.” Race Traitor. Special issue: Surrealism: Revolution Against Whiteness. Issue #9. Summer 1998. pp. 70-2.

18) The Chicago Surrealist Group. From the Introduction. Race Traitor. Issue #9. Summer 1998. p. 4.

19) Mardi Gras, a festival with distinct medieval, European roots, used to exist as a cultural transgression, allowing the poor masses to dress up like nobility or whoever they wanted to be, to spend the day with bountiful food and drink, and to be submerged in faux-riches (i.e. the doubloons and necklaces that are so gratuitously distributed during the carnival season). These traditions, once managed locally, have now become commercialized, and in some cases owned by people and groups who do not even live in the area. Such is the fate of many holidays today.

20) For more information on Marie Laveau and New Orleans voodoo: http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/lave-mar.htm.

21) Preservation Hall website: http://www.preservationhall.com/2.0/.

22) Dust or Art?: The Roles of Museums. Forum discussion among surrealists. Parry Harnden’s comment : “ Art museums, rather like schools and governments, are a promising idea in theory but in practice exist to perpetuate the current social system. They institutionalize art, the very idea of art, plunge it into the domain of experts and specialists, sanctify “greatness” and importance, recuperate art’s spirit by stamping it officially worthy, old, respectable. To the surrealist, the marvelous may be found in either high or low art, so the museum walls which demand the distinction must be seen as an impediment. In searching for marvels in the museum, one must extricate them from the context in which the work is presented. What one finds inspiring in a museum should suggest what museums might be like in a fundamentally different world.” 2003.

23) Paul Nougé. “Music is Dangerous.”

24) René Menil. “Poetry, Jazz and Freedom.” Tropiques. Issue #11. 1944. Translated by Keith Holloman and reprinted in Cultural Correspondence: Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices. 1979.

25) Michael Vandelaar. “Surrealism and Black Music.” Cultural Correspondence: Surrealism and its Popular Accomplices. 1979.

26) Hal Rammel. “Beyond Music.” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion. Issue #4. 1989.

27) Johannes Bergmark. “Toward a Surrealist Revolution in Music.” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion. Issue #4. 1989.

 

 

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