Crawling the ice for a year

Now the original intention with the icecrawler blog was to have a forum for critical discussion about organisational and internal theoretical questions of the surrealist movement, starting out from the hellchoir text. Now some people, it turned out, strongly preferred to see that discussion not publicised, and others, perhaps as usual, didn’t really react at all or didn’t bother to communicate their reactions. So what we have been doing here during the last year is pretty much to throw out some minor updates and some scraps of raw meat for anyone to snap at while still waiting for more comments and suggestions to turn up, along with other departure points to adress similar questions as hellchoir did but perhaps with other means or specific focuses. It is ok for us to display the confusion and hunches of our own ongoing discussions, but we would be very much more interested in seeing others take part in those same discussions, either as commentaries here or through email or any other means. And for those of you who believe in keeping the “public” “at bay” just mark your comments “strictly for internal use” or similar and we will not post, explicitly quote or in detail refer to them in any open forum. We may have quoted from some letters or documents the status of which were not obvious, but then we should also remember that an exaggarated carefulness and politeness is not part of surrealist or any polemics, and the major question remains remembering who your comrades are, and respecting their differences but not their shortcomings, making critical confrontation a constructive challenge and not an aggressive or selfrighteous gesture. We still need to draw a lot more strategical and epistemological conclusions from these 80 years of experimentation, and we still need new suggestions more than anything.