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The Paranoiac-Critical Method
Salvador Dali seems by all accounts to have been a bit of a nut. But a brilliant nut, at that. Rotten.com has a decent introduction to some of the more outrageous aspects of his life here, if you’re unfamiliar with the man behind the mania. In any event, I got interested in finding out more about Dali because of something he invented called the “paranoiac-critical method”. Rotten has one of the better explanations of it I’ve found:
The images were produced using what he called the “paranoiac critical” method, which Dali explained as a “spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on critical and systematic objectivation of delirious associations and interpretations.”
The paranoiac-critical method was simple. The artist tricks himself into going insane, while somewhere deep within remembering that the reason for the insanity is to create a great work of art. Dali chose to do it the hard way — by actually going mad, rather than simulating madness through chemical means. “I don’t take drugs. I am drugs,” he once explained.
Not a great explanation of it, but unfortunately the online scholarship in this area seems to be dominated by totally vacuous art-speak. However, Answers.com has an okay addendum to the above, along with a bit more historical information:
When employing the method when creating a work of art, an active process of the mind is used to visualise images in the work and incorporate these into the final product. An example of the resulting work is a double image or multiple image in which an ambiguous image can be interpreted in different ways.
One art history site with a brief overview says of Dali’s method: “As a matter of fact, all of us have practiced the Paranoid Critical Method when gazing at stucco on a wall, or clouds in the sky, and seeing different shapes and visages therein.” It seems actually pretty similar to Jung’s idea of active imagination, or to the use of chaotic patterns in divination.
Another art-speak type website describes the Paranoiac-Critical method “an attempt to systematize irrational thought”, which is kind of cool-sounding. Oh wait, here we go. This seems like a pretty good explanation:
“The invisible Man” is a classic example of Dali’s paranoiac-critical method. Dali believed that paranoid schizophrenics see more than the rest of us do; they have the hallucinatory power to see dual images, to spot the latent in the manifest. So he set out to formulate a method by which he could consciously induce a similar state of delirium. He called it the paranoiac-critical method, which he defined as “a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based upon the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations.” In this typical Dali hallucinatory image, one thing liquidly metamorphosizes into another, from hard into soft forms and from one substance into another, but here an odd figure/ground shift comes into play as well. What emerges is a latent figure: the “Invisible Man.” Dali began to use this method as a system for undermining waking logic and conventional systematic thinking. “I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possile . . . to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.”
If a lot of this seems very similar to occult practices, that’s because the surrealists derived much of their thinking from psychoanalysis. Actually, there’s a book about these correlations that seems pretty interesting: Surrealism and the Occult : Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement. Has anybody read that? I’d be curious to check it out. Also, if anybody knows of other good resources about the paranoiac-critical method, active imagination, or the intersections of art, psychology and the occult, I’d love to check it out.
September 6th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
houston smith said that gnosticism isn`t available to most people. maybe one has to go mad first……………………………..?
September 6th, 2005 at 5:54 pm
Alan Moore did a huge article about the intersection between Dada, the Surrealist movement and the occult in Arthur about a year and a half ago. Google around. If you can find it, it is bloody foogin’ awesome. Illuminating. It’s about three or four Arthur pages long.
September 6th, 2005 at 6:34 pm
Oh I have it (that issue of Arthur). I was living in New York at the time. It’s brilliant. I cherish it. I wish he’d do the book that he threatens to do in it.
September 6th, 2005 at 6:37 pm
yeah that surrealism book is pretty good
I read about the paranoiac critical method as a summer school art student years ago, seem like all Dali really meant was allowing the mind to project associations, eg visual puns and then manifesting them while suspending rational judgement
trying to get into a dreaming mindspace while awake
Robert Williams (the painter) explains how he did this in a lot of his paintings too,
here’s an (admittedly stupid) example i made up myself but never executed
Like tetrahydracannibal THC is the active ingredient of marijuana
tetra means four
a hydra is a many headed mythological beast
famous cannibols [sic] are dahmer, ed gein, idi amin, whomever
so make a collage of a 4 headed hydra with the heads of those gents and a big pot leaf in back
Paranoia involves looking for connections, the symbolic conspiracy behind everything, doesn’t necessarily have to be rational
September 6th, 2005 at 9:54 pm
Thanks for providing me with a scholarly term to describe my approach to painting. I started a piece on Saturday and all sorts of non-related images came to the fore. I just called it “serendipity” even though the definition of that word is not the same as what I was trying to articulate.
September 7th, 2005 at 1:28 am
I did acid once. Once! And had a very bad trip that more or less fucked up my life for years afterwards. I found out of course that I could not smoke pot either as it made me feel as though I was tripping. As many of my friends became stoners throughout the rest of high school, I could not join them and came to “hate” a lot of ‘em cos I couldn’t relate to their zoned out stares anymore. I took it as outward contempt towards me, because I wouldn’t smoke pot with them. Truth of the matter was, was I was being paranoid. They were stoned, duh! What appeared to me as them being arrogant pricks with insolently slitty eyes was just them being stoned.
Ironically, during this same time I was always asked why I would never join in on the marijuana festivities. My reply: My life is already like taking acid and being on a bad permatrip 24/7.
Interestingly enough, this quote:
“As a matter of fact, all of us have practiced the Paranoid Critical Method when gazing at stucco on a wall, or clouds in the sky, and seeing different shapes and visages therein.”
Caused me to recall the ONLY THING I liked about that one time I tripped when I was like 14: It was the symetrical faces everywhere, in and on everything. To this day it is the singlemost astonishing thing I have ever seen. I wasn’t hallucinating them, they were there! Well, whatever.
September 7th, 2005 at 1:50 am
You may want to check out Dali’s - 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship - where he explains and attempts to teach his techniques, as well as other random rantings in Dali’s bizarre and inimitable style. Dali’s Optical Illusions (edited by Dawn Ades) also covers the paranoiac-critical method.
September 7th, 2005 at 4:57 am
I can’t believe Dali was a Hitler sympathizer.
September 7th, 2005 at 6:05 pm
Those 3-D dot pictures from the 80s and 90s– that’s a perfect example of the paranoic-critical method…
September 8th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Why’s that, JK? Fascism is a politics of irrationalism, where extreme emotion and iconic symbolism mean more than any actual coherent platform or agenda (other than the pursuit of power and the high one gets thereby). I can totally see how folks like Dali and Jung could’ve fallen under its spell to an extent. The LeVayan Satanists pin it pretty well. The fascists really new how to play with imagery and that’s fascinating, even if they themselves were unexcusable and loathesome.
September 8th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Did Jung really “fall under it’s spell” though? I’ve never really read any of the evidence for those accusations, but I’d like to.