Surrealpolitik: Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

Against all forms of oppression and horror, humor wreaks havoc. When oppression and horror become total, nothing less than total humor can do the trick. In the coming revolution the role of humor will be decisive, and the role of surrealism no less so, for surrealism is the lever of that humor. (page 82-83)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

Clearly the fundamental task of revolutionists today must be to find ways of freeing people, and especially working people, of their repression, so that instead of denying the omnipresent horror they can recognize it and change the social system that perpetuates it. Humor alone can effect this revolution in consciousness on a large scale.

Attempts to achieve the same ends by "serious," rational means invariably prove self-defeating. Rational argument affects only a very small number of people a very small part of the time; if this were not the case, the world revolution would have been made long ago and we would all right now be enjoying life in marvelous anarchy. But to try to convince someone, by rational means, to see something that is in fact unbearable, is doubly thankless: first, because no one wants to see how horrible everything really is, and second, because even if some could be made to see it, to do so would probably serve to paralyze them with fear rather than move them to action. To perceive the horror directly is more than anyone can stand, and can lead only to suicide or madness. Humor, however, not only deflects the horror's full force by means of a powerful shield of poetic intuition, but also provides, in self-defense, weapons of eros-affirmative action. In the world as it is today, humor has become a matter of life and death. (page 83)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

The overwhelming superiority of a humorous, irrational, eros-affirmative approach over sober, moralistic and/or rational argument should be plain from everyday experience. People who consciously respect the police, admire their employer, and revere the church fathers nonetheless will laugh heartily at film comedies, songs and comic strips that sadistically ridicule cops, bosses and preachers. The "comic situation" allows the unconscious truth to erupt in to consciousness in a spontaneously liberating way. To translate this laughter into revolutionary action may not always be easy, but it provides an indispensable point of departure that rational argument does not.

Surrealism intervenes precisely at that point. Our task, to paraphrase Marx, is to create the comic situation that makes all turning back impossible. (page 83)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

Surrealism began historically by appropriating all the advantages of madness -- that is, of the Mind functioning outside the confines of reified Reason -- while avoiding its disadvantages. It was not without humor that the prerogatives of the hysteric, the paranoiac, the schizophrenic became the prerogatives of surrealists. Precisely because they have not been mad, surrealists have been able to use madness creatively, or rather dialectally, in the service of Revolution. Had madness not come to the rescue, moreover, Reason would not have been reborn. (page 83)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor, Rationality, Madness, Paranoia]

[T]he new humor -- humor that tends to be activist, anonymous, collective, often black, illegal and above all objective -- ...need not be "funny," in the usual sense of the word. Poetry can exist and even flourish without poems, and humor can get along very well without chuckles and guffaws. "I do not know how to laugh, said Lautréamont, the new humor's most decisive forerunner. (page 84)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Activism, Humor]

Aggressively undermining the existing order's monopolization of the definition of reality...the new humor opens fire in all directions with the only effective weapons of the next revolution: the free development of rambunctious shenanigans, the ceaseless unfettering of the revolutionary imagination, new ways of saying no to the whole stinking mess of capitalist-christian civilizations. (page 84)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]

In modern mythology, no one is more exemplary of this world-historical becoming of the new humor than the inexorably disorienting dialectician, Bugs Bunny. In the activity of this perennial pilferer of carrots from Fudd's garden, what Hegel called humor's "conscious disintegration" of existing social relations attains a subversive excess that can only be described as absolutely enticing. If there can be said to be a model for the next revolutionaries, it would be difficult to think of a better one than the World's Greatest Rabbit.

As an inscription in a surrealist publication I received from abroad some years ago put it: "Bugs Bunny world? Bugs Bunny life? These two commands are for us but one."

Until further notice, the watchword of the next revolution remains: "What's up, Doc?" (page 84)

[From chapter: Humor: Here Today & Everywhere Tomorrow, Franklin Rosemont]
Tags: [Surrealism, Humor]