Texts in English

They are found everywhere, in every street and on top of every house: a multitude of forms that constitutes a type of architecture based on limit or frontier, heteroclite pieces of buildings patinated by the weather. It is as if these corniches and abandoned roofs, these dilapidated walls of bricks and old chimneys all belonged to another dimension, as if they were celestial with their elevated, open aesthetics and impaired by their own physicality.

The maturity that these thresholds halfway to the sky have acquired through the years exhibits a slower, different kind of time in which there would be another kind of time. And the weather, bathing in this time, turns much more present through the clouds that gives the day its plasticity.

Foreign to human presence for years or even decades, they belong to the domain of the wind, of the rain and of the pigeons. They are so close to the street, and yet there is a whole universe of inaccessibility within the hidden and unknown concealed (...) Leer más

The immediate purpose of this game is to provide evidence drawn from living experiences for the existence of a ‘surrealist poetic time.’ There is here a necessary prior consideration: to discover to what extent there is in each of us, and how intense the experience, an experience of time that overlaps with ‘forced time’ in all its possible manifestations. Testimony, modest but decisive, of an experience of ‘emancipated time.’ Naturally, what comes out of the answers will be a mystery that can transform the obviousness of the game into something new. Although this remains to be seen.

1) A clock face is found from which the hands are removed.

2) Each player designates a time associated with an event from his/her life that upholds the principle of the marvellous: revelation, passion, liberation, emancipation, encounter.

3) Each player selects a sentence that acts as an emblem of this lived experience and, upon the clock face chosen for the game, writes it against the corresponding time.

A selection of the replies:

Three o'clock in the afternoon, always and everywhere. It is the timeless moment, or perhaps better, when (...) Leer más

I

Poetry by other means: poetry should not only be made by all – any means to experience it can also be valid. And the importance lies precisely in this: in the experience of poetry, not its expression (verbal or visual), which in this case would limit its value as bearing witness to a specific event1. The ability of the poet writer would have lost its insolent superiority. Speaking of poetry as an experience, means to speak of poetry in everyday life, to release it from the neat shell in which it lives like a sleepwalker. Poetry is a luxury available to everyone. And here analog or symbolic thought comes into play, which, like a sieve of thought makes it possible for us to move through the daily flow, sifting the miserable and miserabilist aspect of everyday life to illuminate the subversive mirrors of a vision returned to its insatiable appetite to see / to which its insatiable appetite to see has been restored.
(...) Leer más

Every project that calls itself revolutionary needs to undertake, in the field of creative imagination, the task of confronting unreservedly a radical opposition to the imaginary of domination. At the same time, it requires the assertion of an own imaginary, not only in order to reply to it but also as utopian, i. e. emancipatory promise.

To give in for the blackmail of the spectacular image is to insult the legacy of history in the form of images of freedom; it is to consent to a kind of sociologistic fatalism, of undialectical historistic determinism that would lead to a suffocating situation; it is to concede a victorious present rising over an unredeemed passed to the language of the masters. It is moreover to adopt the tactics of the ostrich in front of a threatening reality that bothers one to address as it breaks the ideological laziness that  took for closed the debate on creation because of the supposedly indisputable expedient of the death of art and its historic realization in everyday life. And still, what is certain is that the economy continues to produce images that penetrate us through all the pores, taking control of our desires, depriving (...) Leer más

A fundamental fact stands out in the media-culture of the image: that Power has been able to use it as avant-garde evidence of its discourse, turning the image into the foundation of its goals: the instrumentalisation of the imaginary. In this way, Power has found in the image an unexpectedly effective and aestheticising tool that establishes the objective order of appearance and illusion, and at the same time makes its transparent violence acceptable.

To arrive at such a state of affairs, it was necessary to implant so-called freedom of expression into the liberal dynamics of “sensure” (censure of sense, a term coined by the French poet Bernard Nöel) to make it reappear, after a barely perceptible displacement, under a new name: freedom of representation, a concept undoubtedly closer to that of the free market with which it is associated. As a result of this distortion, which takes the form of a cataclysm, representation occupies an increasingly preferential position in respect to imagination, to the point that we can state that imagination, now ruled by the laws of representation, is losing all connotations of interiority. This is, of course, a disaster that promises to wipe out the primordial ‘sin (...) Leer más

for Jonás, so that he continues believing in magic

When comparing concepts like Magic and Technology we immediately perceive a kind of conflict or violent polarization. In most cases, after recognizing a common atmosphere of application in our operative ability regarding all phenomena, we put both of them at irreconcilable extremes of the same continuous line. When we lack a satisfactory explanation regarding a particular phenomenon, either because our level of knowledge still doesn’t embrace its dynamics or because it openly contradicts our perception of the world, we banish it to the domain of magical thought, with the hope that, with the expansion and accumulation of knowledge, it will end up finding its place some day in the constantly expanding domain of scientific knowledge. If doubt persists, if the phenomenon in question resists obeying all known laws that would allow us to domesticate it, then it is simply pushed outside of the paradigm, it is discredited and vilified by those who defend mysticism or obscurantism. In the same way, those who refuse to surrender to triumphant technological power — reinforcing the radical nature of mystery, the impossibility of fundamentals, the inaccessibility of the ‘noumenon,’ or simple and (...) Leer más

”Reality is a word without opposite”, said Pierre Mabille1. If a phenomenon exists, if it manifests itself, it cannot be unreal unless it was made before a more or less arbitrary effort in order to catalogue the phenomena through a series of assumptions that can not be but biased in some of its parts. Everything that is is being stated in its existence. And by existing, it automatically enters in dialectical relationship with the whole and its parts, as this and nothing else is the way in which this assertion is developing. The dream could not be less. By manifest itself in reality it cannot but affect directly and regardless to the whole. The dream intervenes, struggles with the existing, first on the individual level explicitly, then on the social level in more subtle but equally significant ways. Today this existence is being hidden by the forces of day and confined, at best, to a non-complete existence, to a shadowy existence in which its powers have come to be quarantined. In this hidden dialectic our desires have been resolved.

From (...) Leer más

I

The unconscious is truly the most extensive region of our minds, and for precisely that reason the unconscious is like the interior of Africa, whose unknown frontiers could be very distant indeed.
Jean Paul, 1804

The exploitation of man by man that alternately employs economic, moral or passional weapons, or all of them at once, is born of man’s biological and physiological diversity. Until now, these weapons left some space for possible revolts, but at this point a new element enters upon the scene: the doctor who is transformed into a biologist and begins the transformation of man. With the analysis of unconscious conflicts, synthetic hormones, vitamins, genetic orientation, he already controls the decisive levers of the living machine. At the request of his master, since all technology is subordinate, he will light the fire or put it out, to act on the desire, that is, to reach the very origin of the problem of freedom. From now on, man is included in livestock breeding.
  Pierre Mabille, Minor Considerations on Freedom, 1947

Among the many pathologies which made the end of the 19th century an especially turbulent and pathetic (...) Leer más

There is no party without any surprise guest, although the former is a pantomime and the second one that an undesirable that nobody is waiting for because everyone is afraid. The Spanish transition would not be an exception, and so it was as the post-Franco intrigue was impaired by a new cycle of proletarian struggles known as working class autonomy, organized in assemblies with recallable delegates and concrete demands responding to real problems, and which in themselves, often escaped from the factory and the economy to spread to the neighborhood and disturb life. These features, and the spontaneity with which they manifest themselves explain the almost revolutionary power of the worker's autonomy in the context of that “second assault of the proletariat” which showed it cards in Paris, Portugal and Italy, as it did in Vitoria or in the port of Barcelona. That such an assault was given in a second even larger existential context, the so-called counter culture that explored new ways of life through drugs, sexuality, music or travel, justified without doubt that many of their players spoke of “living utopia”, even if it may seem today that that lifestyle was more a preview of the current social (...) Leer más

On the Theological and Symbolic Value of Money within Capitalism

1. Three Peak Moments of Capitalism as a Religion

(1) The Gay Science: Liquidation of Christianity. In 1886, four years after the first edition of his book The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), Friedrich Nietzsche added a fifth book to the four that already constituted the work. During these years, capitalism began creating the first gigantic, transnational fortunes by means of various industrial and financial monopolies and cartels and, supported through English imperialism, became established and began to show its most triumphant face. We could say that capitalism is experiencing one of its highest moments. The first text of the fifth book is the extremely well known and oft-quoted aphorism 343 that states the following: “The most important event in recent times, that ‘God has died’, that the belief in the christian god has lost all credibility, begins to throw its first shadows on Europe.”[I will try to find the English translation of this]  As is known, this is the first confirmation of the start of the purging of the concept of God in western, capitalist society. God is viewed as a dead, unusable product from which (...) Leer más

1. to go to Togo

2. menstrual cash flow

3. eczema, ecce homo

4.  i like your lichen

5. What is your favourite drink?  Madonna on the rocks, of course.

6. oil tongue: Langue d¨Oïl

7. silicone lexicon

8. twelve–inch single seeks long–playing blonde

9. with fur in my tongue, with tar in my fungi

10. a fussy fuzzy pussy

11. back in the microgroove

12. very nice, Berenice

13. sepia homo sapiens

14. The Rite of Spring Roll

15. Veni, bidet, vinci

16. China vagina

17. mermaid marmalade

18. foot with footnote

19. pizzicato pizza

20. onanist out of self–compassion

21. blasphemy in blue

22. my dear old fellatio

23. post scriptum, post scrotum

24. prosciutto of prostitute

25. storming of the pastille (la prise de La Pastille)

26. in God we trust, engulf the twist

27. example of tautological apologetic: apologia of the apology

(...) Leer más

Introduction

Sometimes we tend to use the expression ”from the outside of language”. Through it we intend to mean something like what will follow. There is a commonly accepted standard of verbal communication in everyday life that is supposedly determined by a logical discourse. In the ”logic” goes, unequivocally it seems, a use of language spoken pragmatically, usefully, identifiably. Presumably, if the spoken language does not have these characteristics, that is, if it doesn't retain certain established linguistic rules, we would be illegible, we would not understand each others. It is a fact that this amounts to maintain, inevitably, rigid forms of communication that are held on the basis that they have to mean something, that they have to make sense, that they have to be comprehensible, that is, we need to have a rational communicative behavior, or else we would turn illogical, we would fall into nonsense, we would become absurd and irrational. And it is precisely what it is about: for who could continue preventing us from losing ourselves orally, from initiating talks through which (this is language, a means, rather than a tool) humanity could restitute to itself relationships sponsored by the satisfaction of its (...) Leer más

A group of about 40 people joined the gathering in Madrid against the G-20 summit in Washington on Saturday, the 15 of November, with the intention of telling capitalism to fuck off, criticizing through action the cornerstone of its filthy artifice: money, that bloody trash which won’t survive the fall of the system and of which it is its totem and taboo. Therefore we burn it in advance of future bonfires that will sooner or later purify the old world, and we distribute the following leaflet in order to contribute as best we can to starting that fire.

Burn the money and dance!

Now they tell us that there is a crisis and they lie to us, just like when they announced prosperity from mutant cows fattened with transgenics, chemicals and plastic. Because economic recession and expansion are a farce, these two movements of growth and contraction of the same wave of servility, exploitation and fear (which knocks you over and strangles you, me, us, wage-slaves, who live a crisis that is eternal, as to live means to pay for every realized act and for every nurtured dream, and from this we must dare to desire and (...) Leer más

When I hear the word “culture” I see ploughed fields, oxes,
a lark and a beautiful peasant woman.
— Louis Scutenaire

The surrealist movement’s relationship with the cultural sphere has been ambiguous from the beginning for the simple reason that it prioritised certain interventions in areas that also are central ones in the dominating cultural domain. It has therefore been possible, both within and outside surrealism, to perceive it as an more or less radical opposition or alternative to established culture rather than to the broader foundations of bourgeois society, which constitutes its real raison d'être.

It is of course not culture in its general, let us say more popular and positive meaning we have in mind, rather its formal expression as institution, as means of consumption, in other words as a pretext. It is by the way characteristic that this ambiguity between culture in general and its formalised expression with all its economic and ideologic interests, its elites, bureaucracy and norms is willingly being maintained precisely from these quarters with the confusion that follows. It is namely a matter of sucking up what can be profitable in one way or another and ignoring everything that cannot (...) Leer más