7 the dead awoke and followed for a time

I am not well versed in the various productions of Breton and his band of knights. Of all the documents that I have examined, the one that seemed to convey the deepest appreciation of the movement as a whole is a work by Vaneigem, who inherited its legacy and whose own perspective was largely honed as a reaction to its apparent failings. The breadth of his analysis and sharpness of his criticism is very impressive. Although I'm not at all familiar with French, I would say from the translations that the writing in "cavalier" is more accomplished than in "everyday life," his signature work...

The destruction waged by Dada was primarily a rejection of "aestheticism," defined as follows:
...................."Aestheticism acquired ideological force as the contrary of commercial value, as the thing which could make the world worth living in, and which thus held the key to a particular style of life, a particular way of investing being with value that was diametrically opposed to the capitalist's reduction of being to having."

The vantage point here really seems quite acute. For my own part, it articulates an intuition. a reservation that has always undermined my enthusiasm in the face of the "artistic." On one level we have reality, in which things and people are owned and controlled by others. On another level we have imagination, within reality but only a very small part thereof, a consolation and a distraction for those who are owned and oppressed. At some point, the people who fabricate imaginations, or are particularly devoted to them...at some point these people have been affiliated with possessing some sort of more desirable...a loftier...a "holier" existence than those who own and those who are owned. This affiliation with a more desirable way of life is at first portrayed as a challenge or an opposition to the powerlessness of the average individual. Some years later, others, for example, the gymnasts of provocation who proclaimed: "dada," came to believe that the idealization of particular individuals as uniquely being "creative" was a mindset that reinforced powerlessness.

I urge anyone reading this to abandon it and take up the Vaneigem essay. The depth of that work far exceeds this collection of paltry remarks- the impoverished intelligence that they reflect. I return to the essay often, and I am challenged time and time again by personal weaknesses which force out of focus my attempts to confront what it affirms and denies. The situationalists departed from the history of their time to conduct some extremely trenchant operations whose objective was to lay bare the inadequacy of symbolic expression. I would prefer to relate to these efforts directly, but I am still trying to fathom both a sufficient technique/technology and a sufficient context.