‘Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it.’
Surrealism is the faith that language might permit the great overcoming of the antimonies and contradictions which prevent us from realizing our total existence. All difficulties will be resolved; this new language we speak will attain what language always struggled to be (the places of struggle? Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Earth …). And what does it want? To attain itself as thinking itself and not a means of thinking, to attain the truth of immediacy, of immediate life and not its mediation. Language will no longer be an instrument through which the human being might realize its freedom: automatic poetry is freedom, not freedom incarnated, but freedom absolute – freedom acting and manifesting itself. My freedom does pass through words, it is realized in them; I discover, through writing, a relation to myself without intermediary. Whence the surrealist attack on the hackneyed notion of individual talent, on the artwork as hallowed cultural object, on the great museums and galleries of our culture. For it is an equality that is issue; we are equal with respect to the gift of automatism.
Surrealist poetry is a poetry of freedom, of spontaneity, of automatism. How then to understand the Surrealists’ avowal of Marxism, of communism? How to understand the poetry that would give itself in service of the revolution? Because to write freely is also to take responsibility for what freedom is not; it is to brace oneself against the conditions of society, to flash against the darkness of our present condition – to flash, and, in this flashing, to expose the cracks and interstices, the great contradictions in the present state of society.
The Surrealist knows that the problems that we take to be important are only a function of the contradictions implicit in our society; it is only after the revolution that one can begin to understand what freedom might mean. Freedom will be grasped negatively until it is grasped no longer freedom from oppression, from exploitation. And on the day after the revolution? Ah, but that is the day from which automatic poetry is written. It calls us on the pages we read and write. It is bound to the affirmation of a freedom to come; it is already there, ahead of us. Inspired, automatic writing is also critical; if it appears uncommitted this is only because it is belongs to another order of commitment, because it burns like a star which has consumed everything but itself; it is total, absolute.
Human possibility, human capacity – are these words appropriate for a poetry which reaches us from the future and calls us towards an unimaginable equality? Perhaps it is better to write of what is humanly impossible, or what at least reaches us from the day which arrives on the other side of time.
Lars Iyer's Blog 