An attempt to summarise the Surrealist perspective

The Lovers by Rene Magrette

The need for sincerity in literary expression, felt strongly in France during the first twenty years of the century, is really the belief that the conscious states of mans being are not sufficient to explain him to himself and to others. His subconscious contains a larger and especially a more authentic or accurate part of his being. It was found that our conscious speech and our daily actions are usually in contradiction with our true selves and our deeper desires. The neat patterns of Human behavior, set forth by the realists, and which our lives seem to follow, were found to be patterns formed by social forces rather than by our desires or temperaments or inner psychological selves. This discovery or conviction that we are more sincerely revealed in our dreams and in our purely instinctive actions than in our daily exterior habits of behavior (tea drinking or cocktailing etc) is of course basic to surrealism. It is admirably summarized in a sentence of Andre Gide’s autobiography, Si le grain ne meurt, when he speaks of the difficulty of our knowing the real motivation of any of our actions. ‘le motif secret de nos actes nous echappe’ pg 15 Age of Surrealism Wallace Fowle, Bloomington a London, Indiana University Press, fourth printing 1966

Defining the Art Object as Symbolically Significant, Sensuous, Manifold.

The need to externalize oneself, to achieve recognition from the other, and self recognition through the other, are needs intrinsic to embodied subjectivity, if therefore, it can be shown that certain kinds of artefacts fulfil these needs in a distinctive and positive way, then we would rightly assign to them (whatever ostensible, social or utilitarian functions they may serve) a universal significance in the ecology of human experience. In this study I shall claim this status for Art.; as Symbolically Significant, Sensuous, Manifold.

pg 10 Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-consciousness
Paul Crowther
Publisher: OUP Oxford; New edition edition (5 April 2001)

The Social Construct and Technomysticism

By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, of what we now increasingly think of as ‘the social construction of reality’.
Historically the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualised social narratives of mythology., the ethical inwardness of the ‘religions of the book’, and the increasingly rationalised modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked the their notions and symbols in the world around them, using archetecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual, – and often whatever media they could get their hands on .
For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the religious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the World of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums ‘channel spiritual information‘, the ever shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.
p g 8

TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)