November 22nd, 2008 / 9:28 pm
Author Spotlight & Web Hype

‘Soft Surrealism’

Johannes Gorannson’s blog Exoskeleton remains one of my favorites, a constant outsource of way-in-from-way-out spittle and barb on everything from piggery to Lynch to babble camps to etc. Even if sometimes it hits the head as heady, you can always count on Johannes to say it like no one else, and say it well.

For those of interest, there has just been posted a manifesto by Johannes and Joyelle McSweeney on the matter of ‘soft surrealism,’ which is spoken, if slightly in tongues, in a way that only they can: somehow combining the Project Pat with the Deleuze and all that leak.

Here’s one of the nodes I liked to like:

9. We think Ron’s got it wrong. The global epidemic of Surrealism derives not from its manifestos and pronouncements, the imperialist/ecumenical instincts of Breton, but because it has traveled with émigrés across borders and oceans, in a flux of disheveled genders, nationalities, and media, in the second-rate garments of sleep, dream, and game.

Yes. I am glad to see Breton for once not getting creditized out of the ass for something he barely seemed to stick a tongue on. I’ve had urinal cakes in my meatloaf for like 150000 weeks.

Johannes’s attitude reminds me of how Nation of Ulysses used to come off: “the serious unserious, the reverent irrevent” etc…

Ian Svenonious used to have some shit to say:

Now he just works for Vice magazine. Pleh.

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6 Comments

  1. darby

      Gorannson is fascinating to me. It’s all so heady for me, my edu is in engineering, but it’s interesting to get that window into it all via his blog. I’m glad he does it. I learn new things constantly over there.

  2. darby

      Gorannson is fascinating to me. It’s all so heady for me, my edu is in engineering, but it’s interesting to get that window into it all via his blog. I’m glad he does it. I learn new things constantly over there.

  3. Justin Taylor

      (I think I’ll go cross-post this on that blog)

      This is a fascinating essay. I really enjoyed it.

      >>Such pronouncements cast the American ‘avant-garde’ as an alternative hierarchy rather than an alternative to hierarchy.<>We want to recognize the minor, which never takes power, which never sets up a new regime. <>This non-eschatological, non-linear avant-garde project does not identify with the macho hard-core Messiah who knocks out History and sets up His own shop.<<

      Mostly what interests me about this is that it seems to fail to see how the eschatological project itself, though admittedly linear, is basically designed for perpetual motion. The myth of a Messiah Who Is Coming is valuable *precisely* in that he never gets here. It’s the theology of the asymptote, utopianism by any other name, and just so we’re totally clear, I would cheerfully count myself among the adherents or anyway believers.

      The authors refer constantly back to Kafka, but they don’t quote what I find to be his most powerful words on this–or any other–subject: “The messiah will come on the day when he is no longer necessary. Not on the last day, but on the very last.”

      Question: When will the Messiah ever not be necessary? Answer: never.

      Ergo: the Messiah is *never* going to get here.

      Question: does it therefore follow that he does not exist, or isn’t coming? I say, not necessarily. To me, the eternal process of his getting-here and never-arriving, sounds very much to me like the open-ended and un-ending process of “becoming” which the authors call for.

  4. Justin Taylor

      (I think I’ll go cross-post this on that blog)

      This is a fascinating essay. I really enjoyed it.

      >>Such pronouncements cast the American ‘avant-garde’ as an alternative hierarchy rather than an alternative to hierarchy.<>We want to recognize the minor, which never takes power, which never sets up a new regime. <>This non-eschatological, non-linear avant-garde project does not identify with the macho hard-core Messiah who knocks out History and sets up His own shop.<<

      Mostly what interests me about this is that it seems to fail to see how the eschatological project itself, though admittedly linear, is basically designed for perpetual motion. The myth of a Messiah Who Is Coming is valuable *precisely* in that he never gets here. It’s the theology of the asymptote, utopianism by any other name, and just so we’re totally clear, I would cheerfully count myself among the adherents or anyway believers.

      The authors refer constantly back to Kafka, but they don’t quote what I find to be his most powerful words on this–or any other–subject: “The messiah will come on the day when he is no longer necessary. Not on the last day, but on the very last.”

      Question: When will the Messiah ever not be necessary? Answer: never.

      Ergo: the Messiah is *never* going to get here.

      Question: does it therefore follow that he does not exist, or isn’t coming? I say, not necessarily. To me, the eternal process of his getting-here and never-arriving, sounds very much to me like the open-ended and un-ending process of “becoming” which the authors call for.

  5. Matt K

      R.I.D.N.O.U.

  6. Matt K

      R.I.D.N.O.U.