“ Scientific progress is a fraction, the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization which we have been undergoing for thousands of years and which nowadays is usually judged in such an extremely negative way. Let us first clarify what this intellectual rationalization, created by science and by scientifically oriented technology, means practically.
Does it mean that we, today, for instance, everyone sitting in this hall, have a greater knowledge of the conditions of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the street car has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may ‘count’ on the behavior of the streetcar, and he orients his conduct according to this expectation; but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. When we spend money today I bet that even if there are colleagues of political economy herein the hall, almost every one of them will hold a different answer in readiness to the question: How does it happen that one can buy something for money—sometimes more and sometimes less ?The savage knows what he does in order to get his daily food and which institutions serve him in this pursuit. The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not, therefore,indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives.
It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence,it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.
— Max Weber, “Science as Vocation,” Lecture at Munich University, 1919.
“…we have never been able to distinguish between value and the end pursued. The dissociation requires the strange, passionate and reflective approach, lucid but evading its own lucidity, which distinguishes André Breton, who has always treated the future [or rather the projected future] with surprising contempt. “I never make plans,” he writes. […] The morality to which André Breton is drawn is rather poorly defined, but it is—if such a thing is possible—a morality of the instant. What is essential about it is the demand imposed on whosoever expresses a will to choose between the instant…and a concern for results which immediately abolish the value and even, in a sense, the existence of the instant. The accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed.” (Bataille, 1945 review of Arcane 17, 1994: 65-6, qtd Cunningham)
David Cunningham opposes the “time of the avant-garde” to the “time of surrealism”:
“As famously cited by Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Breton states: “The work of art is valuable only insofar as it is vibrated by the reflexes of the future” (qtd. in Benjamin, 242). This strikes me as exemplary, in its abstract temporal [End Page 49] form, of what might be reasonably termed an avant-garde conception of artistic “value,” emerging from the mid-nineteenth-century intensification of modernity as a form of historical consciousness, with the “re-orientation to the future” that this entails (Berman, 135). Considering such a conception in its most fundamental and expansive sense then depends upon the way in which one understands the relation of the present—where the art work comes forth for judgement—to the future, whose reflexes must, for Breton, vibrate therein if the work is to be judged valuable. Nonetheless, if the avant-garde is to be thought in these terms, then far from presenting us with a univocal “category” or “project”—amenable to a fixed empirical or typological determination—this embraces a whole range of equivocal and contested understandings of how such an affirmation of the future is itself to be conceived and manifested in specific cultural forms and practices. Thus it is in terms of the resulting politics of conflicting temporalities that surrealism’s (and Breton and Bataille’s) particular place in the history of modernism and the avant-garde might be reconsidered, in such a way as to modify and enrich our conception of this history.”
…
Nadja insists that Breton must write an account of their time together because “‘everything fades, everything vanishes. Something must remain of us…’”
“”the ‘Now’ of recognizability in which things put on their true—surrealist—face…” (“Last Snapshot,” 1929)
What Benjamin considered revolutionary time, the time of disjunction and immanent possibility of rupture, the time of the alarm clock that rings for sixty seconds in every minute — isn’t this the ahistorical and exitless continual present of the spectacle? Ditto the swapping of Erlebnis for Erfahrung, as the phenomenological mode appropriate to the spectacle.
He says as much himself when he talks about fashion; novelty and fads produce surface interruptions in a temporality characterized by repetition. (What does he mean by that? That the structure of property relations doesn’t change, and that other change is merely superficial? Or that the newness generated by fashion is itself repetitive and relies on forgetful or distracted subjects?)
The suspension of time in the dream. The search for an object/psycho-physiological state/pathological condition on which to center a counter-phenomenology to the machine-time and means-ends rationality of industrialized modernity.
“As nineteenth-century optical science grew in sophistication, it brought greater attention to human perceptual capacity. Extending the efficiency and endurance of the human eye was of critical interest to applications within the scientific management of labour, aiming to produce ever stronger and longer lasting factory workers. Artists began to conceptualise the human body as a machine, notably in Marcel Duchamp’s and Francis Picabia’s so-called mechanomorphs. Duchamp’s To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close To, for Almost an Hour (1918) introduced standardised duration (one hour) into its own viewing conditions. The piece’s title humorously mimics the regimentation of perception, as seen similarly in nineteenth-century chronophotography, where the carefully studied movements of the body were subjected to precise measurements, stopping time incrementally.
Dada and Surrealism suspended time to parody industrialised experience with absurd and zany manmachine hybrids and to escape the tyranny of consciousness by redirecting film into the shocking and surprising, re-creating the supposed temporal conditions of dreams. For Freud, unofficial mentor to Surrealism’s leader André Breton, the unconscious was marked by condensations and displacements that mixed past, present and future. The montage-jumbled temporalities of Surrealist films, as well as the collaged photographs of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí, similarly imply the blurring of time between consciousness and unconsciousness. Luis Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) alternates inexplicably between actual and slowed tempos to suggest a perceptual window into life pulled into dreaming.”
T. J. Demos, “A Matter of Time”
