Manifestoes from Beyond the Real

Artists from all times have attempted to escape or transcend the constraints they saw in the culturally constructed realities in which they found themselves, often through the penning of manifestoes as statements of purpose for the new realities they wanted to instead create. I have also often struggled with this desperation against the day, in this age against the quotidian, the snarky, the postmodern, the realism that is "just this," when clearly there is so much more to living that can not be contained by pale reiterations of last century's visionaries whose words and worlds no longer apply, at the edge of the future, the crumbling edge of what may be left for us, the necessity of human survival let alone all the possibilities of the imagination, which are vast and untapped except by scattered madmen and genre writers. Despite the beauty of the manifestoes given below though, I have been trying to formulate a new perspective, not against reality or realism, because obviously we do live in the real world, if a limited constructed one, but a sense of reality that contains all that, all the horror and wonder, all the magic, dreams, the future, alternative histories and galactic alignments with the stars spiraling out of all expected orbits, the sense that every day, every moment, is an ultimate moment, reality being pushed to the furthest edges of where we have been, with the realization that we are only now barely learning just how far and fantastic we can go.


"The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded." [from Rudy Rucker's A Transrealist Manifesto]

"Leave it all, new... the entrance is in the area and the entry into adventure: the poem as a journey and the poet as a hero of heroes unveiled. Tenderness as an exercise in speed. Respiration and heat. Experience fired, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions. If the poet is interfered, the reader will have to interfere... The true imagination is one that dynamite elucidated, injected into other microbes esmeraldas imaginations. In poetry and whatever, the entry must be in the area and the entry into adventure. Create tools for the subversion of everyday life. The stations of the subjective human being, with its beautiful trees and huge obscene, as laboratories of experimentation. Fix parallel glimpse situations and so heartbreaking as a large scratch on the chest, in the face. Analogy endless gestures. There are so many that are new or when we notice, although we are doing / watching in front of a mirror. Stormy night. The perception is opened by an ethical-aesthetic brought to the last." [from Roberto Bolaño's "Primer Manifiesto Infrarrealista" (translated by Googlebots)]

"We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds." [from F. T. Marinetti's The Futurist Manifesto]

"The realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity... Taking into consideration only the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the moments of waking, has still today been so grossly neglected. I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams" [from Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism]

"So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence." [from The Situationist Manifesto