There's a cottage industry of people who like to bandy about words like "anarchy," or "rebellion," or "resistance," thus rallying troupes of hip young followers. You don't need to use these words in a particularly insightful way to acquire the followers; in fact, at least one person in your audience is sure to supply his own ideas, in a longwinded preamble to what he calls a question, although you won't be able to pick out anything like curiosity in this dreadlocked, baseball-capped young man's voice. He likes to grandstand; he likes to wear the mantle of a rebel: a devoted one, an incisive one.

This grandstanding is in the name of "dialogue," of letting the audience speak and refusing to let any one voice hold the podium for too long—all good things. But an hour later after each person has spoken, how often do we notice if no dialogue has actually occurred, no response has been given to anyone's remarks? Liberal politics, resistance politics, rebellious politics, that politics associated with the people (with individual persons, it is assumed, or else with the people as a collective): these tend almost always into a cacophony of distinct voices, without the requisite synthesis that is supposed to be produced. It tends all too often not to ask itself (we tend not to ask ourselves—each other—) a difficult question that would teach us something about our subject, that would help us make crucial distinctions, that would allow our action tomorrow to be different from our action today. It repeats, it repeats, it repeats. What it doesn't do is affirm, dismiss, compare, or demand.

The speaker speaks on the concept of surrealism as a radical political device. A fellow in the audience pipes up with his example of a "surreal event": "One day I was walking through this maze, lost, trying to get out, and I looked up and I saw some graffiti that said, "Rescue Me."