#realism

Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all ↗

— Nikolai Gogol

#surreal

I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone. ↗

— Salvador Dalí

#surrealism #surreal

Nothing that surrounds us is object, all is subject. ↗

— André Breton

#reality #subject #surrealism #surreal

I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky. A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss. ↗

— Joë Bousquet

#sky #surrealism #surreal

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism. ↗

— Mark Fisher

#capitalist-realism #individualism #mental-health #mental-illness #mental-health

When James Cameron brought me the script, which I developed with both Cameron and Jay Cocks, I wanted to make it a thriller, an action film, but with a conscience, and I found that it had elements of social realism. ↗

— Kathryn Bigelow

#action film #both #brought #cameron #conscience

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#been #book #both #cliches #done

Painting is the representation of visible forms. The essence of realism is its negation of the ideal. ↗

— Gustave Courbet

#forms #ideal #negation #painting #realism

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism. ↗

— Marguerite Young

#passages #philosophy #poetic #realism #revert

Somewhere there are gardens where peacocks sing like nightingales, somewhere there are caravans of separated lovers traveling to meet each other; there are ruby fires on distant mountains, and blue comets that come in spring like sapphires in the black sky. If this is not so, meet me in the shameful yard, and we will plant a gallows tree, and swing like sad pendulums, never once touching. ↗

— K.J. Bishop

#weird #surreal