The Brooklyn Rail

The Surrealists were my first avant-garde. I got my hands on Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism (1965) at an impressionable age. I was familiar with the painters already, but it was from Nadeau that I learned that it was a movement of artists in all media whose aim was to change life, as Rimbaud said.

What can be the connection between art and life? That, to me, is the enduring question with which the Surrealists left us. Not just for an individual artist, but as a collective problem. That whatever the aesthetic is, or could be, that it is neither a private nor separate concern, nor reducible to making artworks.

The convergence of art and life would require a revolution—but which one? The Surrealists also leave us with the problem of the aesthetic in relation to forms of collective action. I won’t say the political as that seems too narrow. Politics isn’t the whole of life. But to change life, does the aesthetic need first to subordinate itself to politics?

To conceive of Surrealism in terms of a relation between politics and art narrows the problem. It’s more about the relation between the aesthetic and everyday life. The latter is a concept the Surrealists could rightly claim to have discovered. The everyday is what is interstitial to the great categories of the political, the social, the religious, the cultural, the historical, and so on.

Everyday life for the Surrealists was an urban experience. It’s the felt texture of a great city. It’s the way the totality of the world-historical situation concatenates into the gesture of buying a pack of cigarettes. The everyday has an ambivalent relation to labor. It’s not the work of the farm or factory, but it might include the work it takes to produce oneself, as a worker, or as an artist, or both. The experience of everyday life is the real material of any avant-garde worthy of the name.

We tend to think of avant-gardes as collections of writers and artists, occasionally filmmakers and musicians, gathered together under the aegis of a manifesto. To me the real medium of an avant-garde is not this or that art, it is media (in various senses of the word). Avant-gardes are avant-gardes of media. Avant-gardes pose this question: how is everyday life to be mediated?

By mediation, I mean a few different things. Firstly, an avant-garde has a relation to the popular media technics of its era. From the Futurists onwards, the most common tactic was one of shock, provocation, publicity, via the newspapers. The Surrealists deployed these tactics too. The poems and paintings exist in a media milieu sustained by manifestos and manifestations—disrupting banquets or opening nights.

Mediation means something far beyond that. Mediation extends to the entirety of the social-technical relations that produce and reproduce life itself. Could the totality of social-technical mediation have an aesthetic form? Meaning: what if we thought of the problem of life from the point of view of how everything appears? What if the path to liberation included a reform—or more likely a revolution—in how everything is mediated?

That is the substantive meaning of the slogan that the Surrealists took up from Lautréamont: a poetry made by all. Not just that everyone can be a poet, but rather that the totality of social-technical mediation becomes a poesis: an open-ended play of appearances via which the materiality of life is made and made over in the direction of liberation.

The Surrealists came up with some brilliant experimental tactics to this end, but tended to get bogged down in petty artworld squabbles or in trying to mesh with existing forms of political organization. The painters wanted to sell to collectors. The poets wanted book deals. And there were patrons to amuse—usually aristocrats more than happy to claim aesthetic superiority over the bourgeois who held the real power. Like all avant-gardes, it had its time.

From A Hacker Manifesto (2004) to Raving (2023), my own work has tried to pick up the problem of how everyday life could be mediated such that the social-technical totality opens towards poesis, toward liberation, for all. I was still optimistic about the potentials for an avant-garde twenty years ago. Now I think that rather than an avant-garde, we might become deserters. Look for ways to desert the military-entertainment complex that has seized the means of production and seduction.

The art, or rather the media tactics, might be different for deserters from those of an avant-garde. Our tactics are those of discretion. We do not announce our program to a world mediated by universal surveillance and extraction. When you decide to desert yourself, you’ll find us. We left some clues.

When you desert, you start to find out that parallel to the historic avant-gardes consecrated in the museums, there is a discreet history also of deserters. A deserter history known only to deserters. Some of whom hide in plain sight. Some of whom are known only to those who need to know. We still want to change life. We still want a poetry made by all. Our tactics have changed with the times.