Dadaists

Surrealism: The Emergence of a Radical Experiential Reality

Surrealism: The Emergence of a Radical Experiential Reality

From The Commoner by Luke Francis Beirne

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists in Paris saw that restrictive, arbitrary frameworks had been imposed upon society by structures of power. They recognized that these frameworks ran so deeply that they penetrated the mind and shaped the very way that it perceived reality. They also saw that things could be otherwise and took it upon themselves to develop a practice which could radically re-enchant the world and produce an alternative reality – a superior reality: surreality.

Who do the passionate communards work for?

une pétroleuse

via Anarquía, translation by Anarchist News

"I will then become a worker: such is the idea that stops me, when the mad rages push me towards the battle of Paris - where, however, so many workers continue to die while I write to you! Work now, never again." 1 Rimbaud

Since 1871 - the year in which the "accursed poet" wrote this letter - it was not necessary to be a "seer" to see the obvious: the masses of workers who fought on the barricades in Paris continued to work. That "wildcat strike" in front of the Versailles authority was, in turn, a new job that produced new obligations and condemned them to perpetuate work in saecula saeculorum. Such deep reflection, in the midst of a necromancing trance, probably prompted Rimbaud to question: who were the passionate communards working for? prophesying a system of domination based on direct democracy as the axis of political-social management, which ensured the permanence of authority and continuity of work.

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