Today I got myself reading Henri Lefebvre, the Critique of Everyday Life. I read the first chapter.
Lefebvre critiques both the magical realists and the surrealists, for creating nothing fundamentally new after Baudelaire and Rimbaud. They present a confused view of modernity, that cannot resolve the tensions through art.
Much like the two authors, the surrealists merely nominate aspects of modernity without managing to surpass them. Surrealism deposited hopes in the bizarre, in the subconscious, but got little more than an incoherent project that more closely resembled a political party life without politics.
The subconscious gave them very little. They could not provide real answers or outcomes. Their project, filled with the everyday of modernity, had vacuous ends and their ambitions for a society improved by surrealism in the everyday life were frustrated.
I believe this further suggests that the concrete transformation of society, be it through art or not, must be well thought. A successful revolution can't be based on whims only, even if such whims are blessed by the ego and id.
While not fully forgetting the role of the unconscious in human life, a fully human society should be able to elevate the human from every shackle, this ought to include that which comes before the individual and is beyond her or his control or knowledge. The same goes for the project that desires such a transformation.
However, this does not mean such a revolution should not be spontaneous. A successful transformation must be firmed in the old grounds of freedom and reason. It must come from the free, but informed will of humans.
2087
vaporwave
prguitarman
discoholicmusic