Paranoiac-Critical Method

Definition

Salvador Dalí's method, defined in the wiki's source as "the generation of knowledge." The chapter sets the method against Breton's definition of surrealism itself as "a method by which one revealed the true nature of thought": where Breton's method reveals, Dalí's paranoiac-critical method — "the paranoiac-critical method that Dalí used in designing these objects" — produces a knowledge that is "a dissimulated presentation that conceals the objects' nature." Its products (the edible table, the egg-built Venus, the Lobster Telephone) "do not reveal themselves and what is hidden by appearance, but reproduce nature's concealment": they "arouse hunger and affirm themselves as desirable objects, but they cannot satisfy the desires they provoke." The knowledge the method generates is therefore knowledge of concealment itself — nature's hiding mastered as design procedure rather than dispelled as illusion.

Key Thinkers

• Salvador Dalí (not yet paged — see log) — the method's author; deployed from the 1927 essays ("an elevated concept of irony [that] is the equivalent of naked reality… that may be seen at present in my works") through the surrealist objects of the early 1930s to the interiors of Port Lligat.
• Simon Weir — the interpretation that ties the method to Heraclitus's concealment: the method generates knowledge by reproducing, not dispelling, nature's hiding — its knowledge "a dissimulated presentation."

Related Concepts

• Surrealism — the movement whose Bretonian self-definition ("a method by which one revealed the true nature of thought") the method complicates: a method of revelation that conceals.
• Concealment — the method's Heraclitean premise and its product: knowledge of nature's hiding, reproduced rather than revealed.
• Knowledge — the method's declared output — knowledge generated by procedure, here in its dissimulated mode.
• The Double — the paranoiac's doubling as such; Dalí's better-known double images lie outside this source, but the mechanism of one thing seen as another is the same family of operation.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment (Weir 2018) — "the paranoiac-critical method that Dalí used in designing these objects was defined as the generation of knowledge"; "the knowledge is a dissimulated presentation that conceals the objects' nature"; the objects that reproduce nature's concealment.

Open Questions

• Can a method that conceals its objects be "critical" — or is the paranoiac-critical method Savinio's irony perfected: the morality of distortion institutionalized as procedure?
• The method generated knowledge of concealment in objects, then a room (the Oval Room): is there a paranoiac-critical architecture — and would its knowledge also be dissimulated, its designs reproducing what they study?
• If the method is "the generation of knowledge," how does its knowledge differ from the hermeneutic kind the wiki tracks elsewhere (interpretation, hermeneutics) — is dissimulation a form of evidence?