"Be realistic: demand the impossible." -- Situationist slogan of May 1968

Although we have the ability to apprehend the infinite, we cannot comprehend it. Or if we can comprehend it, we can't embody it. To demand the impossible (from whom?) is to set up the basis of the utopian dystopia in which we are never satisified. The Situationists represent to me the apotheosis of the scream. Placing endless demands on the economy (Marx), when the economy is by its very nature (by Nature) closed and circumspect, creates a Situation in which the animal portion of our existence (somewhere between 51% and 98%) has placed on it a demand by our spiritual aspect (2% to 49%) that cannot be fulfilled.

When an impossible order is placed, it cannot be fulfilled.

How to rewrite the hilariously pithy slogan of the Situationists? "Defy the Impossibilists: Be Realistic!"

The disjunction betweeen what's possible and what's surreal and impossible is part of what makes the incongruity between the two conducive to laughter. But to reverse the equation such that we recognize that our minds are infinite (as Lutheran Kurt Godel emphasizes) but that our bodily nature has placed us into an economy of the finite, is part of the Lutheran two-kingdom's theory that I have wanted to insert into contemporary theory (without success).

I have not yet written this off as a lost cause. Lutheran Surrealism is not yet a lost cause, any more than the Christianity from which it derives is yet a lost cause. Three years ago I would open the computer and get two to three hits on the hit counter. All of them were me checking to see if there were any hits. Today I receive about 40-60 hits per day. While I'm nowhere near the hit count of Broob or Althouse or Silliman, I also like to think that my position is somewhat more difficult to attract discussants for -- as it requires something that IS almost always already lost: an ability to think that the avant-garde realm of art, and the avant-garde of Christ, are not truly opposites, as almost everyone seems to think, but in fact the same thing.

The notion that the infinite economy of heaven can be inserted into the finite economy of earth is explosively laughable. This is part of why we laugh at the Situationist slogan. What's problematic however is that the generation of May 1968 didn't laugh. They took a dour and pious gravity toward what should have remained levity. Lutheran surrealist thought aims to bring laughter back into the polis, by making a clear division of what's possible and impossible.