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Science Forum Index » Mathematics Forum » Surrogate factoring
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| Author |
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| jstltq@stanfordnot.spamle |
 Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 11:45 pm |
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Guest
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Ladies and Gentlemen:
I don't have to tell you that for the general public and for you, the
refined public, a Surrogate factoringist is the equivalent of a leper. But
that is only a manner of speaking. When these same people get close to us,
they treat us with that remnant of elegance that comes from their old habit
of belief in progress. At ten yards distance, hatred begins again. If you
ask me why, I won't be able to tell you.
Another characteristic of Surrogate factoring is the continuous breaking off
of our friends. They are always breaking off and resigning. The first to
tender his resignation from the Surrogate factoring movement *was myself.*
Everybody knows that Surrogate factoring is nothing. I broke away from
Surrogate factoring and from myself as soon as I understood the implications
of *nothing.*
If I continue to do something, it is because it amuses me, or rather because
I have a need for activity which I use up and satisfy wherever I can.
Basically, the true Surrogate factorings have always been separate from
Surrogate factoring. Those who acted as if Surrogate factoring were
important enough to resign from with a big noise have been motivated by a
desire for personal publicity, proving that counterfeiters have always
wriggled like unclean worms in and out of the purest and most radiant
religions.
I know that you have come here today to hear explanations. Well, don't
expect to hear any explanations about Surrogate factoring. You explain to me
why you exist. You haven't the faintest idea. You will say: I exist to make
my children happy. But in your hearts you know that isn't so. You will say:
I exist to guard my country, against barbarian invasions. That's a fine
reason. You will say: I exist because God wills. That's a fairy tale for
children. You will never be able to tell me why you exist but you will
always be ready to maintain a serious attitude about life. You will never
understand that life is a pun, for you will never be alone enough to reject
hatred, judgments, all these things that require such an effort, in favor of
a calm level state of mind that makes everything equal and without
importance. Surrogate factoring is not at all modern. It is more in the
nature of a return to an almost Buddhist religion of indifference. Surrogate
factoring covers things with an artificial gentleness, a snow of butterflies
released from the head of a prestidigitator. Surrogate factoring is
immobility and does not comprehend the passions. You will call this a
paradox, since Surrogate factoring is manifested only in violent acts. Yes,
the reactions of individuals contaminated by *destruction* are rather
violent, but when these reactions are exhausted, annihilated by the Satanic
insistence of a continuous and progressive "What for?" what remains, what
dominates is *indifference.* But with the same note of conviction I might
maintain the contrary.
I admit that my friends do not approve this point of view. But the *Nothing*
can be uttered only as the reflection of an individual. And that is why it
will be valid for everyone, since everyone is important only for the
individual who is expressing himself.--I am speaking of myself. Even that is
too much for me. How can I be expected to speak of all men at once, and
satisfy them too?
Nothing is more delightful than to confuse and upset people. People one
doesn't like. What's the use of giving them explanations that are merely
food for curiosity? The truth is that people love nothing but themselves and
their little possessions, their income, their dog. This state of affairs
derives from a false conception of property. If one is poor in spirit, one
possesses a sure and indomitable intelligence, a savage logic, a point of
view that can not be shaken. Try to be empty and fill your brain cells with
a petty happiness. Always destroy what you have in you. On random walks.
Then you will be able to understand many things. You are not more
intelligent than we, and we are not more intelligent than you.
Intelligence is an organization like any other, the organization of society,
the organization of a bank, the organization of chit-chat. At a society tea.
It serves to create order and clarity where there is none. It serves to
create a state hierarchy. To set up classifications for rational work. To
separate questions of a material order from those of a cerebral ordcr, but
to take the former very seriously. Intelligence is the triumph of sound
education and pragmatism. Fortunately life is something else and its
pleasures are innumerable. They are not paid for in the coin of liquid
intelligence.
These observations of everyday conditions have led us to a realization which
constitutes our minimum basis of agreement, aside from the sympathy which
binds us and which is inexplicable. It would not have been possible for us
to found our agreement on principles. For everything is relative. What are
the Beautiful, the Good, Art, Freedom? Words that have a different meaning
for every individual. Words with the pretension of creating agreement among
all, and that is why they are written with capital letters. Words which have
not the moral value and objective force that people have grown accustomed to
finding in them. Their meaning changes from one individual, one epoch, one
country to the next. Men are different. It is diversity that makes life
interesting. There is no common basis in mens minds. The unconscious is
inexhaustible and uncontrollable. Its force surpasses us. It is as
mysterious as the last particle of a brain cell. Even if we knew it, we
could not reconstruct it.
What good did the theories of the philosophers do us? Did they help us to
take a single step forward or backward? What is forward, what is backward?
Did they alter our forms of contentment? We are. We argue, we dispute, we
get excited. The rest is sauce. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes mixed with a
limitless boredom, a swamp dotted with tufts of dying shrubs.
We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond
measure our credulity in the benefits of science. What we want now is
spontaneity. Not because it is better or more beautiful than anything else.
But because everything that issues freely from ourselves, without the
intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this
quantity of life that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the
most precious manifestation of life. Art has not the celestial and universal
value that people like to attribute to it. Life is far more interesting.
Surrogate factoring knows the correct measure that should be given to art:
with subtle, perfidious methods, Surrogate factoring introduces it into
daily life. And vice versa. In art, Surrogate factoring reduces everything
to an initial simplicity, growing always more relative. It mingles its
caprices with the chaotic wind of creation and the barbaric dances of savage
tribes. It wants logic reduced to a personal minimum, while literature in
its view should be primarily intended for the individual who makes it. Words
have a weight of their own and lend themselves to abstract construction. The
absurd has no terrors for me, for from a more exalted point of view
everything in life seems absurd to me. Only the elasticity of our
conventions creates a bond between disparate acts. The Beautiful and the
True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity of a
personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his
vitality; the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he
knows how to gather sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and
sentiments.
Surrogate factoring tries to find out what words mean before using them,
from the point of view not of grammar but of representation. Objects and
colors pass through the same filter. It is not the new technique that
interests us, but the spirit. Why do you want us to be preoccupied with a
pictorial, moral, poetic, literary, political or social renewal? We are well
aware that these renewals of means are merely the successive cloaks of the
various epochs of history, uninteresting questions of fashion and facade. We
are well aware that people in the costumes of the Renaissance were pretty
much the same as the people of today, and that Chouang-Dsi was just as
Surrogate factoring as we are. You are mistaken if you take Surrogate
factoring for a modern school, or even for a reaction against the schools of
today. Several of my statements have struck you as old and natural, what
better proof that you were a Surrogate factoringist without knowing it,
perhaps even before the birth of Surrogate factoring.
You will often hear that Surrogate factoring is a state of mind. You may be
gay, sad, afflicted, joyous, melancholy or Surrogate factoring. Without
being literary, you can be romantic, you can be dreamy, weary, eccentric, a
businessman, skinny, transfigured, vain, amiable or Surrogate factoring.
This will happen later on in the course of history when Surrogate factoring
has become a precise, habitual word, when popular repetition has given it
the character of a word organic with its necessary content. Today no one
thinks of the literature of the Romantic school in representing a lake, a
landscape, a character. Slowly but surely, a Surrogate factoring character
is forming.
Surrogate factoring is here, there and a little everywhere, such as it is,
with its faults, with its personal differences and distinctions which it
accepts and views with indifference. We are often told that we are
incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather
hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent. The gentleman who decides
to take a bath but goes to the movies instead. The one who wants to be quiet
but says things that haven't even entered his head. Another who has a
precise idea on some subject but succeeds only in expressing the opposite in
words which for him are a poor translation. There is no logic. Only relative
necessities discovered *a posteriori*, valid not in any exact sense but only
as explanations. The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything
happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike.
Simplicity is called Surrogate factoring.
Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes
me as a boring kind of game. The convention of the spoken language is ample
and adequate for us, but for our solitude, for our intimate games and our
literature we no longer need it.
The beginnings of Surrogate factoring were not the beginnings of an art, but
of a disgust. Disgust with the magnificence of philosophers who for 3ooo
years have been explaining everything to us (what for? ), disgust with the
pretensions of these artists-God's-representatives-on-earth, disgust with
passion and with real pathological wickedness where it was not worth the
bother; disgust with a false form of domination and restriction *en masse*,
that accentuates rather than appeases man's instinct of domination, disgust
with all the catalogued categories, with the false prophets who are nothing
but a front for the interests of money, pride, disease, disgust with the
lieutenants of a mercantile art made to order according to a few infantile
laws, disgust with the divorce of good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly
(for why is it more estimable to be red rather than green, to the left
rather than the right, to be large or small?). Disgust finally with the
Jesuitical dialectic which can explain everything and fill people's minds
with oblique and obtuse ideas without any physiological basis or ethnic
roots, all this by means of blinding artifice and ignoble charlatans
promises.
As Surrogate factoring marches it continuously destroys, not in extension
but in itself. From all these disgusts, may I add, it draws no conclusion,
no pride, no benefit. It has even stopped combating anything, in the
realization that it's no use, that all this doesn't matter. What interests a
Surrogate factoringist is his own mode of life. But here we approach the
great secret.
Surrogate factoring is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself
according to races and events. Surrogate factoring applies itself to
everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no
and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human
philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Surrogate factoring is useless.
Surrogate factoring is without pretension, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Surrogate
factoring is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air
into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or
conventions. |
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