Well, hmm.
OK, let's see if this gets me anywhere. Everything below should be read with a big, fat "In my belief..." and "From what I remember reading..." in front of it.
The surrealist project (inasmuch as it was a movement with a manifesto and a leader, Andre Breton) was dedicated to the liberation of the irrational (which could be mapped, more or less, onto the Freudian unconscious) from the rational. This was a cultural response to the horrors of World War I, the "civilized" industrial war, blah blah.
A lot of the techniques used by the early surrealists consisted of things drawn from some of the weird not-quite overlapping spheres of 19th century occultism and (pre-)psychology -- automatic writing, stream-of-consciousness, interpretation of dream images. Before Uncle Freud, these kinds of things were more at home in Spiritualist seances and carnival fortunetellers' tents than in any place that'd be dignified with the name "clinic." For the Surrealists, there's a parallel weighting of goofy, illogical stuff and what an Industrial-Age scientist would dismiss as "magical thinking." They used these random, irrational systems as generative machines.
I think a lot of the stuff that erupted around the Chaos Magick thing in the 1980s was a development of this. One step earlier, I think it's possible to draw a line from the Discordians (early 70s/late 60s) back through the Situationists to the Surrealists, basically following the same track as Greil Marcus' _Lipstick Traces_. (Why, yes, I took cultural studies in the early 90s, why do you ask?) (Also, this doesn't mean I don't find the 23 brigade intensely annoying on various online groups, but hey, I was a teenager once, too.) It's the same ideology, only leaning more towards Breton-as-Surrealist-Pope (religious/spiritual work) than Breton-as-manifesto-writer (revolutionary punk rocker).
I also think it's possible to link today's improv comedy to the rites of Dionysus before they evolved into classic Greek theater, but that's more of an article of faith (since I'm neither a Classics student nor any kind of anthropologist). There's something in that experience, though, that's both intensely absurd and intensely transformative, isn't there? When it's done right, I mean. That weedy guy in the turtleneck is suddenly a fearsome sadist holding a venomous snake or a housewife with an electric mixer....
So, that's part of what I meant. Is that a clear enough answer?
----- Original Message ----
From: Caroline Tully <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 02:24:29
Subject: Grant's Intro
Hi Grant, I'd like to hear more about your opinion on transformation through
absurdity and on the Surrealists, as mentioned in your Intro post.
~Caroline.
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