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Many times people discover new ideas at the same time. All but one is remembered.
Laurent Loty and I discovered idea and named it alterrealism at the same time; only we are planning to work on it together,
and hope to bring more people in. We talked on the phone the other day, from Paris to Berkeley.
I love my life.
“…..continue the struggle against the enemies of utopia who accuse all utopias of
unrealism, I have invented a word: “alterrealism”. Utopia must be neither
realist nor unrealistic, but alterrealist
Dialogue is or should be the predominant form for the genre which
connects fiction and reality, belief and demystification. It is this form that
allows an escape from the authoritarian monologue of a perfect world. Dialogue
allows a distanced kind of belief.”
F(or)EVER]
We are here to receive the invisible worlds. Not just the freight of our histories, our stories, all of the visible nowhere that is with us everywhere. Nor only love, repulsion, and desperate belief, even if these have long signaled the army to the field of death, or propelled the mother into the dark surf after her child. Not time, of which we can only say “it traps us.” Of which we can only say, “it does not exist.” There are other worlds.
by Quentin Hardy
and more writing…. by Quentin Hardy.
Modern man has remade the physical world beyond recognition to any previous age. In consequence mankind is also remaking – in ways more urgent than ever – its age-old relationship with the invisible. These are the worlds of emotion, the subconscious, historical forces, Heaven and Hell, the self and the soul, plus the nameless dimly perceived and the still unseen worlds that guide, mark, vex and delight us.
Altrealism is a response to this paradox of the triumph of the physical and the reassertion of the invisible. As a means of tapping unconscious realms of experience to bring forth glimpses of that experience, Alrealism aims to unite personal inner worlds and larger social patterns, seeking commonality of expression – the terms of experience. Altrealism describes worlds we have both within ourselves and beyond our limited physical senses, bringing them to our shared physical space to renew it.
Altrealism has precursors in the so-called (still!) “modern” age of a century ago. As its name suggests, surrealism was one forebear, and the most influential. Surrealism was grounded in the same hopes for human transformation, however, that stoked philosophies of destruction from Russia to Germany to Cambodia. “Making man new” meant killing as a cost, and it exhausted our civilization for decades. Surrealism’s goal to “ruin once and for all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them” now seems like more deluded totalitarianism.
Man is never made new, Altrealism knows. But man must recognize anew of what he is really made. Altrealism is the artistic, playful journalism of our explosive invisible worlds – the stuff of which we are really made.
First, we must appreciate our achievement over the physical world. We have inherited and exploited a triumph of the scientific method, made real through engineering, with results that surpass previous dreams. Our forebears moved rivers or [and] leveled mountains [erase end of phrase up to the semicolon] as the final victory of their civilization; we fuse atoms, adjust molecules, and tinker with proteins inside DNA [as commerce] as commercial activity. We ease our loneliness among the billions of stars as we consider terraforming new planets. We wrap this world in fiber optic cables, construct cities for a billion or more people, and melt the glaciers of millennia. We are masters of the largest and smallest, for better or worse.
Greater still though are our different invisible worlds. Many of these are in service to the physical, but may rebel from control. Few of us care what an atom looks like, though we hear that it is largely empty space, dominated by the incessant motion of particles. We know, however, that it is we. This discovery and exploitation is, like all others, the product of a culture of desire, spurred by insubstantial dreams of consumption. We define ourselves by credit scores, potential to act or achieve, and loyalty points. They do not exist, in any meaningful sense, except their domination of our thoughts.
Our sense of human history was long dominated by theories of impersonal economic forces at work; these have lately fallen to an equally discredited impersonal “magic” of the marketplace. The recent eruption of global terrorism is in itself more a shout of negation, a “no!” to an accepted flow of history by dominant forces, than the terrible bombings that are its manifestation. People flock to its invisible rage, blind to the absence of any way forward.
Our durable cultural legacy includes for many ideas of Heaven and angels, somewhat less so Hell, and for others the equally immaterial subconscious and its urges. Even as we dominated the physical, we cling to vague awareness of ever more invisible forces and worlds. At times, death alone seems the one unchanged invisible world, though we shun its complex and terrifyingly simple presence.
The great lodestar of today, the Internet, is the greatest exemplar of this physical/invisible paradox. We know it consists of fiber and computers existing somewhere, made meaningful by billions of lines of computer code. Software, however, is a most insubstantial thing – it may rest on disks or inside silicon, but its essence is a series of statements of how the world might be arranged. Turn it on, and it is so. The essence of the Internet is our collective experience of it, however, a largely imaginary activity of connection, observation, recognition and change. With the personalization allowed as the system matures, each of us will possess a configuration of the messages, images, and connections perfect for us: In effect, not one Internet, but billions of individual Internets, in continual change. Or, as they used to say of God, our center will be everywhere and our circumference nowhere. The delight may in fact be palpable.
We have discovered new and invisible attributes of ourselves, such as the “hive mind” of our intersubjective intelligence. It is constituted in common with others, based on interactions with others, a shared perspective that is interdependent and fluid, depending on changes happening in others and in ourselves, and socially constructed. We are, it seems, in some invisible way capable of discerning lost objects and unknown prices through aggregation of our small, ungoverned contributions to addressing a problem.
The intersubjective, still being explored, throws our sense of the individual into doubt, even as we seek newer software to measure our ever-shifting collective behavior as a basis for action. Follow the behavior of the group, it goes, and we build the best possible product for the individual.
On top of these non-physical outcomes of the physical world of computers and the market, there is the undeniable world of emotional response. It has become increasingly hard to place, as the invisible is harnessed to better serve the physical. Friendship was once a coequal recognition, a lifelong bond. Now it is a choice on Facebook. Love is managed in prenuptual contracts, to be consumed without unforeseen consequence. Rage and anger are unhelpful, and must be managed. Joy, real joy, is frightening and disruptive. To feel something is merely that. Feelings no matter how deep are discouraged as a guide to action, and are thereby denied. Or else, they are terrifying forces of truth, justifying invasions. Either way, we do not know where to put them in this world.
Small wonder, then, that easy and foolish sarcasm dominates so much of our discourse and entertainment. It is the ideal secular religion for a consumer culture that has abandoned any physical-seeming teleological end, one in love with the method and a process. Sarcasm allows us to be in on the joke, to admire the process and its insubstantiality even as we consume. We are left somewhat hollow for knowing it was a joke, however, and must therefore consume again.
We have known that our dilemma must end in crisis. We feel it every day – even the casual nihilism of process is abandoned. In time, we have gained the courage to stop.
The solution we seek is Altrealism. Alrealism acknowledges the longstanding frustration with the domination of the method, adding to it an observation of our dilemmas in the invisible worlds created by the visible. The artist has always known this, but became caught up in the domination of the physical, often with sarcastic commentary posing as comprehension.
By acting as an observer and reporter of the great invisible, Alrealists return to the primacy the invisible as a source of action and creation in the physical world. We are reporters of the felt and the intuited, with scouting reports from the motive regions, the place of creation and suffering. We are the reporters of the felt and the intuited.
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I have some writings on alterrealism….. here is one of them by John McCarthy
“Reality” is a very slippery word, and thus anything that is “alter”-“reality” is going to be equally slippery. In a kind of conventional usage we tend to use the term “reality” in two ways: 1) to refer to the everyday, practical, generally shared views of the way things work, that allow us to interact with others without constantly explaining ourselves. In this sense “reality” is what we tend to share with others, what we often assume to be the way we and others look at things. 2) A second sense of “reality” tends to be a more critical one, and it usually occurs when we think that someone is understanding something in a distorted way. It may indicate that the shared sense of a whole society (“reality 1” above) is distorted and that they are not seeing the “reality” of what is going on—e.g. somebody might say “you don’t really understand the impact of capitalism on the world” or “Buddhism lets you see a higher reality.” Because it is a more critical sense of the notion of “reality” it usually calls upon someone to change, to be transformed in some way, so that they can move from what they think is real, to what is the undistorted, actual reality.
Both of these senses of reality still maintain some sense of “mimesis” (imitation)—that there is something out there that should be “imitated” or “pictured” correctly—that our thoughts are “correct” when they imitate or picture “reality”, or that art ought to imitate reality in some way. When this sense of mimesis is tied with the above two senses of reality, then the mimetic impulse is to either represent in some way what the usual social conventions are (reality 1) or what is critically real (reality 2). My sense is that Surrealism is trying to do the latter—by incorporating something like psychoanalysis into the picturing of reality it highlights images and symbols and dreams and repressed thoughts as what is “really” going on, and what need to brought forth in art. It is a kind of “alter-realism” that is critical of “reality 1”. And thus it is “alter-real” in a very specific sense.
It seems that the kind of “alter-realism” that Loty is getting at is a utopian one, pitched against modernism, and achieved through a broad sense of dialogue. It is still a kind of “reality 2” to my mind—that you can critically correct the distortions of modernity by making a utopia that better reflects “reality.”
I am struck in some ways by what is going on in contemporary French phenomenology. Phenomenology calls into question the whole mimetic framework—that we picture a reality outside of us, or inside of us, with thoughts, or images or the like. Rather than calling for an alter-reality, it calls more for what I would term an “alter-mimesis”, a questioning that there is a reality that is either out there or inside of us that ought to be imitated. Rather it holds in tension two kinds of motions—that which is given, and that which recognizes. It is not concerned with “reality” which can never be gotten at anyway; it is concerned with phenomena, that which occurs at the intersection of what gives itself to be noticed and what we recognize. This is constantly in oscillation, and thus it resists the designation “reality” as either what is shared and stable, or what is “really” behind our distortions. One of the French writers who focuses on some of this, Jean Luc Marion, makes the distinction between “idols” and “icons”. He has a very interesting approach to the visual descriptions of these two terms, one which gets at some of the aesthetics of this. “Idols”, he suggests, are what halts our vision; they stop our seeing in an object. It is what we identify as the thing that we are seeing, but it is our sight and it is ultimately our vision that is going out and coming back to us as an object. We see something. The “icon” on the other hand is there to be transparent in its being seen—you are to see through it; if it stops your gaze, then it becomes just one more idol. In that sense the “icon” is what gives sight, rather than what is seen. It is what Marion calls a “saturated phenomenon.” It is so effusive that it is not a correction of distortions; it is a gift to sight.
It is only on the other side of this correction of the desire to imitate reality either by picturing it or by correcting a picture with another picture, that you can get beyond a mimetic theory of the aesthetic. There is something that seems alter-mimetic (alter-mimesis), rather than alter-realistic (alter-realism) that occurs when you stay inside this oscillation between “givenness” and “recognition” rather than move to the try to capture one side or the other in an image that stops the oscillation—something like an “idol”. This does not mean, to my mind, the end of picturing or art, but rather the replacement of emphasis from some form of reality-mimesis (whether it be graphics, or impressionism, or abstraction, or surrealism, or hyperrealism, or utopianism) to some form alter-mimesis that is always playing with the oscillation of givenness and recognition. Marion turns to the form of the “icon” to get at some of this. Maybe—I am not sure that this is the best form for this, but I think what he is getting at, what I would call some form of alter-mimesis, is seeking a form.
Anyway, this is what I am thinking. It is surely not a manifesto. And this sense of alter-mimesis may be better named alter-reality—I am not sure. I do think that the danger of invoking “reality” at all, is that it leads to some form of imitation or mimesis that inevitably misses the interchange between givenness and reception. So I think more in terms of something like the notion of a Japanese koan—it is meant to stop thinking rather than to be a riddle to be solved. The famous example is “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” If you read this as a riddle you are left assuming that there is an answer. But if understood as the means to stop “reality” as if it is out there or inside you, or can be pictured, then something else happens.
So I think I will stop here. This is what I have been thinking about since we last talked. I had originally worked it out in terms of memories and lost chances, but I don’t think that avenue is the way to go. I think this sense of givenness—reception—oscillation better captures the motion and alter-vision that I understand you to be disclosing.
Let me know what you think; and again I apologize for being so slow on this. I have been thinking about a good deal, but Ph.D. exams, dissertation, classes, and endless meetings—along with all the regular things of life often set up other deadlines.
John McCarthy
