icecrawler/heelwalker

january updates

2012-01-06T05:34:00.000-08:00

If 2011 was a hectic year for the Stockholm surrealist group (and for the editor of this blog), with the festival in Istanbul, the international surrealist meeting in Athens, the group exhibition in Stockholm, and the new Swedish edition of the Surrealist Manifestoes along with numbers of smaller events, then 2012 opens with a celebration of international surrealism as the International Surrealist Exhibition in Reading, Pennsylvania opens its gates today (!), and at the same time Corrales's massive compendium of the surrealist movement is distributed. But it's not like richness in events has made us abandon our insistence on the necessity of thorough discussion to sort out implications and discover new alleys of enquiry and involuntary revelations.

A few months have passed since the last update but there is no reason to regard this as an exception to the approximately monthly updates intended. We're commencing the new year with a number of small points about surrealism again. This because a few perhaps more original speculations have been stalled by encountering some additional interesting theoretical problems, as usual... (the continuation and spreading of the discussion of surrealist objects, applied specifically to natural cabinets and surrealist boxes; plus an exploration of the concept of "atmosphere") or by the time it takes to read massive books like Corrales's Caleidoscopio surrealista.

Surrealism and Philosophy

2012-01-06T05:30:00.000-08:00

A year ago I started working on an overview of the historical relationship between surrealism and philosophy. Not having had the time to write this up, I now find that Georges Sebbag (an activist in the French surrealist group in the 60s, who is now busy producing a broad stream of retrospective but not unsympathetical books about surrealism) is publishing a big book on the same subject. I have not read it yet (it's not released yet is it?), so I cannot say whether it will make my findings and emphasises redundant or increasingly relevant. But it may place it as a topic on the agenda, and certain side musings and rants of mine may possibly take their place in a broader discussion, so why I don't I try and go ahead offering them. Here, a reaction on a fairly recent rereading of Ferdinand Alquié's book about The Philosophy of Surrealism from the 50s, a highly controversial book written by a professional philosopher who was a good friend of the French surrealists and who was always defending surrealism in an often strikingly intelligent and insightful way in the intellectual debate.

I remember the book from my youth (read it 25 years ago) as a very sympathetic book, if slightly boring, and with a very strange basic thesis that surrealism is not hegelian but cartesian.

Rereading it for the first time now, I was at first shocked to see how slyly and instrumentally Alquié puts himself in the particular french assimilationist-cultural-syncretic tradition that has always (or at least since Carrouges, Malraux, Crastre and others published their thoughts about Breton) insisted that surrealism, and Breton in person, is in fact only about "good", that surrealism is radical in being the only ones in the 20th century who dared comprehensively defend human creativity and human goodness; romanticism, individualism and humanism. It is in this particular guise that Breton is indeed counted among the big names of 20th century culture in France. Purely assimilated, recuperated, in-defined. We might define this as an enemy strategy, giving surrealism a place among other cultural currents in the history of 20th century literature and art. (Here in Sweden we have most of the respondents of the 1995 Stora Saltet surrealism enquiry to cultural workers as an example.) At the same time, the leading proponents are very often very sympathetic to surrealism, sometimes very sensitive to its contradictions and openings, sometimes very respectful to its claims of autonomy and speaking for itself; it is clearly the ideology most commonly underlying surrealismophilia, and is held in its entirety by many of the best surrealism scholars. Alquié is clearly one of them. What he says is always congenial with at least some currents and potentials within surrealism, and always respectful and admiring (perhaps in a sense always obviously jealous of taking part in a real adventure). Many very good questions are posed, many very astute observations are made. And in the end, half of the standpoints defended are obviously wrong.

Alquié claims surrealism is essentially cartesian and thoroughly non-hegelian and most surrealists have simply misunderstood this objective quality of surrealism. This claim made the surrealists and especially Gérard Legrand furious already at the time the book came out.

Alquié claims surrealism is all about defending humanity as incarnated in the inherent will to do good and the inherent capacity of making the right judgment by the individual. Thus, just like he dismisses surrealism's hegelianism, he also dismisses its profound expectancies on collectivity, on chance, on deep negativity, on fury, on madness, except as polemical or transitional forms that disrobe the false goodness and humanity of conformism, capitalism and christianity, and he claims that for a true surrealist any of these tropes will have to be immediately abandoned once rhetorically used to prove again the faith in sound intuition for the human good.

Revolt can not be surrealist, and only a tool in passing for a surrealist, in Alquié's view, and thus anyone who maintains revolt, or any other of these negative attitudes, is in Alquié's view not a real surrealist but a dadaist stuck in childish negativity. Alquié does in fact seriously explicitly claim that even as incorporated in surrealism, those classic revolters among the forerunners and even advocates of surrealism were not actual surrealists: Sade and Vaché were not surrealists in the sense Breton claimed they were, Artaud and Tzara never understood surrealism because they remained revolters.

Revolution is still a true watchword of surrealism for Alquié, but he introduces a dichotomy between a good revolutionary attitude which is utopian, and a bad revolutionary attitude which is political. The fact that the surrealists were blinded and seduced by the political project, which made them join forces with dialectical materialism, with marxism, with the workers movement, etc, was just a misconception based on them erroneously believing they were hegelians.

And hegelianism, for Alquié, is, not incorrectly, fundamentally antihumanism. If there is such a thing as qualitative leaps, and if there is such a thing as objectivity outside the human mind, then that means that intuition, the good, and individualist humanism are threatened, and then one will jump onto any headless haphazardly-rationalised project such as politics, and abandon the supremacy of spontaneous individual intuition to dangerous speculative reason and to the dangerous collective.

So not only politics, revolt and negativity are not surrealist, but all the efforts towards objectivity and self-abandonment in surrealism: collectivity, chance, method, automatism, ritual as well as any inspiration from, including mock-replication and real pilfering of elements of science, cannot be really surrealist whenever the individual's intuitive judgment is sidestepped (which was one of the main points of such practices).

Surrealism is reduced to profound humanism. Half of the particularity of surrealism is dismissed right away, and the other half would be dismissed by implication. Alquié's view is really interesting as a well-phrased and intelligent systematical expounding of that very misrepresentation which, in far less clear-thought ways, is typically shared by the majority of the surrealismophiles, surrealism fans and surrealismologists within the cultural field, because according to it surrealist activity outside the cultural field is but a vain gesture and the only relevant place for surrealism is a source of warm inspiration for people's little cultural practices.

Well, you just go ahead. We who are active in surrealism place see far more in it; we are expecting far from more it, and we are seeing it deliver far more than that in our experimentation and our general collective experience which you guys will keep misunderstanding the relevance of.

Mattias Forshage

2012-01-06T05:27:00.000-08:00

Excursus about Orthodoxy

2012-01-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

It is a rather funny and shaky undertaking to write an argument against orthodoxy. It is always easy to win the vote of the laughers and the lazy for whom any call to order, commitment and stringency is a personal threat; while any argument attractive enough can be utilised as a doctrine to avoid own thinking... But trying to steer clear of sophistry, the basic point here is that surrealism is perpetually productive; it is a point of departure that can always produce new suggestions and will always need commitment to find its relevant applications, and any notion of orthodoxy is therefore contrary to its dynamics and rather seems inclinded to enclose it in a preconceived and therefore misleading form. If there is such a thing as surrealist orthodoxy, there are two faces of it that we may encounter here and there.

The most common is a proud retrospectivism, typically seen in aging surrealist artists. For them, surrealism is a thing of the past, but one which lies very close at heart to them personally, and through surrealism they made themselves their name and they made some crucial experiences and often had the best time of their lives. Because of that, they tend to regard surrealism as a rather precious secret, and many who are devotedly interested are welcome to the remaining exclusive men's club of its enjoyers. These people often welcome contemporary surrealist activities because they think it is all about young surrealismophiles trying to approach and revive the spirit of long gone days, while they themselves can become centerpoints and authorities, since they know what the real thing is, in contrast to these youngsters charmingly naive groping experimentation. Of course, this is an obvious misunderstanding of what surrealism is about, but it seems quite "natural" for any old person who is not active in a living collective connection (and who doesn't want to learn any more in life), to look for apparently likeminded company, for admirers and listeners, and for occasions to be the one who knows best. These people typically speak about surrealism and the surrealists in the past tense, "the surrealists always said..." "the surrealists despised..." "surrealism was always against..." and typically the surrealist doctrine thus conveyed is a code of behavior, a rigid set of nonconformist living rules forged in the 20s and 30s and not changed since. They clearly don't think that surrealism can have changed, can be applied on phenomena of later decades, can have a particular relevance in any contemporary situation (except as an eternal reminder of all that's good in art and life, which hasn't changed), can be used as a point of departure for openended experimentation, can be used as a source of inspiration for advanced enquiries and new kinds of revolt... This attitude was in fact a lot more common some time ago, and its decline has natural reasons. It's simply the circumstance that people who have met Breton and the original surrealists, and thus have an obvious argument for claiming they know what it's all really about, are dying off. While their often very sympathetic persons and their often very rich experiences are often sorely missed, we say good riddance to their attitudes and teachings. Those selfrighteous arthistorians and recent-generations-hangarounds that will still propagate such attitudes are far more lightweight and will not bother us more than flies. (1)

The other variety, which unfortunately is not subject to any mechanism of natural decline, is defensive sectarianism. In some centers of collective surrealist activity, it is assessed that the times are so dire that surrealism must be safeguarded against novelties and dilution. A commendable task, but alas so often leading to a certain wilful narrowmindedness, static selfrighteousness and a certain paranoia; ghettoism or sectarianism. Since it concerns active surrealism, it allows for surrealism to have had a historical development, and it allows for contemporary surrealist experimentation and experiences to enter into the body of surrealism. It's perhaps mostly about dismissing certain lines of experimentation that seem farfetched, dismissing the need to be vigilant about tendencies in the contemporary world, and of expecting anybody who wants to contribute to ideally first prove themselves as devoted and knowledgable and unlikely to go astray. I apologise for utilising a logical argument again, but doesn't the notion of orthodoxy imply a certain number of factors: 1) a doctrine that is explicit and coherent enough (or vague, charismatic and flexible enough) to be defended at all times and in a way to provide responses to all questions addressed to it, 2) a trust in one's own capability of deciding what is line with this doctrine and not, 3) a trust in one's own capability of deciding who is in accordance with this doctrine and not, 4) an assessment that safeguarding the doctrine is absolutely necessary; the possible reasons I could think of for this are the following: a) so frail that it will crumble if diluted and misapplied, or b) so complicated that it will not have any objective workings in accordance with its aims if not accompanied at all times by the entirety of its corollaries and the whole of its proper form, or c) so immediately dynamic that it must be kept safeguarded in order not to spill out wildly out of control and make us miss some historical opportunities that we are not presently capable of handling? I don't think surrealism fulfills 1 or 4a-c, and I would spontaneously and methodologically avoid and recommend avoiding 2 and 3 as obstacles to vigilance towards the unknown. (2)

(1) This "type" was discussed in the obituary of Ragnar von Holten. A useful book trying to summarise what surrealism was all about in this vein is José Pierres L'Univers surréaliste 1983 (which in spite of its timeless claims is stuck in a mixture of pre-war prejudices (it is fundamental that surrealism is against music, traditional art from the pacific is superior to that of other continents, etc) and specific french 50s detours (dismissing Hegel, dismissing Marx, dismissing the need for contemporary political action, praising the celtic heritage).

(2) Our closest sparring partners in comradely quarrels about orthodoxy are some friends in the Leeds group (who defend it but regularly are far more dynamic than to fully embody it), but there has been declarations of trust in orthodoxy occasionally turning up in several of the more long-lasting historical surrealist groups and a few of the quite recent ones.

A particular variety is presented when faith in orthodoxy is coupled with an urgency to stay vigilant towards the contemporary situation, and thus allow for one's own radical temporary reinterpretations to be integrated into the doctrine (technically we could call this "orthodox revisionism": what was right yesterday may be totally wrong today and vice versa). Of course this was developed into a fine art close to us by Debord (claiming to have learned it from surrealism) and through the situationists has been reintegrated into a surrealist outlook in some camps (such as the Madrid group's famous ban on images). The vigilance part of this often promotes very interesting speculations; the orthodoxy part of it is extremely difficult to apply without an implied power structure where someone has the authority to make such strategical choices for the whole movement, or a formal organisation of decision-making internationally; both of which are not in accordance with the dynamism and present guise of the surrealist movement.

ps about surrealist groups

2012-01-06T05:21:00.000-08:00

To add a perhaps somewhat more pointed tone to the discussion about surrealist groups (Icecrawler october) we could emphasise that there is also a distinction between a group in the widest sense (a pole of communication, collaboration and potential collective dynamics) and a group with a distinct dynamism of irreducible collectivity. Characteristic for the latter is of course that it goes beyond the sum of pooled resources and has a life of its own, a direction, an atmosphere or an explosive power beyond what anyone intended for it ("emergent properties" in the language of modern philosophy and natural science that badly wants to avoid the Hegelian vocabulary of a "dialectical leap").

And therefore, it is important for a surrealist group that it is at all times ready to omit the names of individual contributors – it will sometimes want to list them all for the purpose of the devil's contract, and it will often want to point out individuals as more or less involuntarily responsible for single emissions for the purpose of facilitating communication, interpretation and tracing of personal mythologies, not for achievements; it will always be ready to omit names because it is the invocation of the collective spirit as a creative entity which is the game and the experiment; and as a necessary counterweight to individualist careerism and personality market, individual anonymity is always an attractive option. In fact we could see an important dividing line between those surrealist that still put surrealist activity in the first room and keeps pondering how to implement Nougé's warning that Breton quoted in 1929 ("I would like to see that those among us who are beginning to make a name for themselves erase it") and those who treat surrealism more as a label and a contact network by putting surrealist activity second to their own credentials and individual artistic oeuvre.

And we could add that it is important for a surrealist group that it is at all times ready to abandon representativeness. Even if it the surrealist group from an ontological and historical viewpoint is an instance of surrealism, it will get hampered by this fact if it worries too much about managing the label. The surrealist label gives us access to a wealth of previous experiences and to a vast framework of experimentation and collaboration; but in order to let the ludic collective spirit free in this experimentation it is necessary to sometimes forget the label. Surrealist groups have been known to feel obliged to more or less postpone all actual surrealist activity for the sake of first sweeping the doorstep by trying to correct and attack all misunderstandings and misrepresentations of surrealism first. Considering that this society will keep producing an endless stream of such misrepresentations, such a strategy may potentially keep a surrealist group perpetually in a state of irritating preparations by fighting obstacles that are not necessarily obstacles. Now, in practice, I know of no surrealist group that has actually completely abandoned experimentation, games and creativity for sterile polemics, but there are several which seem to have regarded the latter as the primary collective focus while the former are pursued peripherally, in smaller groups, on spare time or in secrecy. Nothing wrong with secrecy of course, it just becomes self-contradictory to create the misrepresentation of surrealism as being a primarily polemical undertaking specifically in order to rectify misrepresentations.

The Surrealist Group as an Individual and an Organisation, again

2011-10-05T13:43:00.001-07:00

There has been some discussion as to the different particular characters, the role of such a character, and the circumscription-delimitation, of surrealist groups. A surrealist group is typically circumscribed by a combination of its individual character and its partly implicit "area of recruitment" in geographical and linguistic terms (in fact also in broadly cultural terms, but even less explicitly so). Perhaps this is an occasion for merdarius to restate some points that have repeatedly been scattered in different texts about the nature of surrealist collectivity, and to make some new comparisons and observations about it with the background of the history of the surrealist movement.

Participation

Membership, for individuals, is of course a matter of participation in activities (most obviously by showing up for meetings and participating in discussions, games, experiments and walks, but including web-based participations, as well as activities that are very difficult to document such as diffuse development of a collective mythology), and of subjective commitment.

The instance of circumscription of membership: being mostly informal yet rigid, often comes up only when it comes to signing. Declarations, tracts, manifestoes, invitations, open letters, closed letters, etc. Often it is only there that various hangarounds, maybe-members, distance-members and casual participants have to step out of the Schrödinger box and define their membership or not. It is the moment of the devil's contract; selling your soul to the cause of poetry and the imperatives of overindividual dynamics, or retaining your personal conditionals (and career opportunities and the supremacy of civil compromise...).

It will turn out that some who are eager to participate in certain projects (for some especially if they involve a certain public exposure: publications, webpages, exhibitions and performances; for some more a matter of social company) will not have that urge to come out as integral parts of a collective ("fellow travellers" in the negative sense, maybe even "parasites") – sometimes with important contributions to make anyway, but always without the particular mutual trust.

It will turn out that there often is a particular class of surrealists who have an intense and well-established individual creativity and often individual mythology, and who do not have much of a collective discipline but will participate in meetings only occasionally, and will contribute to collective experiments and projects only from a particular characteristic viewpoint; still will continue to manifest a solid solidarity and a commitment to poetry which will make their individual contributions an important part of the collective mythology – the members we will keep putting our trust in regardless of whether they respond to particular demands or requests; which is probably the same category as the pataphysical college called "satraps".

Then there are so-called satellites of different kinds. There we have the unproblematic satellites of exiled members, who moved out but stay in touch. Sometimes these will enroll in locally available groups, facilitating special bilateral collaborations; sometimes they will instigate a new collective activity, which will thus partly appear as a bud-off, yet more or less firmly based in the local conditions. Another kind of fairly unproblematic satellites is participants scattered in smaller towns within the general "area of recruitment" in terms of geography and language, who partake as much as physical circumstances allow them to.

Then, the more problematic and theoretically interesting satellites are those scattered members basing their membership merely on "selective affinities". In their case it becomes critical to what extent the groups have an individuality that is distinct (and visible) enough for a lone individual to actually be able to choose what group to "enrol" in. In some cases it will be a case of merely social preferences, or accident, and typically rely on a certain ignorance of the character of other groups; in others it will be a recognition of the real particularities.

But then, most importantly, the most significant members of a group are not the partaking individual human beings, but the partaking individual modes and mechanisms, and the emergent ambiances and constellations of possibilities. The persons claimed or obsessed by this, or simply contributing to it, typically play a significant but subordinate role. In the end the question of membership is often the question of whether someone is actively or passively becoming available for these intersubjectivities and contributing to them, hopefully in a way which is a dynamic encounter for both parts.

Sympatry

The individual character of each group (or, as some would say, the "authencity", or, why not, the personality of the individual that the group is, or, technically speaking, its methodological/strategical/interest-range/social-characteristics/irreducible-accidentals profile) is what in practice allows distant satellite members, and it is especially important in cases where groups have overlapping recruitment areas. Very often two or more groups simultaneously active in the same geographical/linguistic area is just an expression of a historical split, which is typically a significant one, and one which means a lot to those who were in it, who are able to move more freely, in separate directions, afterwards, but which often make little or no sense to those who arrive afterwards, who didn't experience the conflict but are rather taught it as a mythology, and who can only choose which group to get involved in by chance factors or by savouring the individual character of each group as long as they are openly discernable. And of course there is the tendency for a polemical situation to be swiftly rationalised so that the differences perceived by participants might be quite other ones (though partly self-fulfilling) than the ones at base.

As an obvious example, the two London groups are clearly different, and some of their differences are quite openly manifest, others hidden; probably some mutual recriminations are misguided and some very accurate.

Of course the situation has nowhere been as complex as in Paris, where there were always parasurrealist or subsurrealist satellite nuclei who stayed inofficial partly by the centrifugal pressure exerted by the presence of the one and only unambiguously official surrealist group. Thus in the absence of that group, especially after the dissolution of the group in 1969 and Schuster's subsequent ban on the label "surrealist" (but to a smaller extent also during the second world war), there was a plethora of groupuscules under various more or less fancy names, claiming part of the historical heritage of the official group or not, very often kept apart by personal enmities, employing different strategies and interest-ranges. Amidst infighting, bad feelings and real difficulties, the groupuscule most adamant at keeping up surrealist activity in a traditional-like way, could still not live up to be a group but designated itself less ambitiously a "liaison". Several years later, when reassuming the group label, again with an accumulative and official ambition yet rigidly circumscribed by a number of contingent historical distinctions and personal enmities, it was not as the surrealist group of Paris (that would have been too controversial but also misleading) but more descriptively as that one among the surrealist groupuscules which is a node in the collaborations of the international surrealist movement (Group Parisienne de Mouvement Surréaliste - GPMS) – perhaps not as exclusively as it might have seemed, but giving a clear hint as to its self-image and its individual character.

But even then, membership in this group has been problematical. I'm not talking about the famous split in three groups in 1995 (later more or less remerged), but about the large number of surrealists and surrealist sympathisers who have liked to participate in surrealist activity but has had various reservations against counting themselves as formal members throughout the entire history of this group, leaving on its tracts a bunch (sometimes impressive) of "amis" of the group listed after the group members; sometimes it's like the actual attendants of surrealist meetings constituted a looser collective (actually with a name, "les alchemistes de la rue Pernelle", since the group's meeting café is on rue Pernelle) with an unspecified relationship to a narrower real group (?). This emphatic separation between participation in surrealist activity and membership in the surrealist group, must be partly based on a general postschusterian anxiety over the surrealist label and partly on particular characteristics of the GPMS that I am unable to analyse from afar; it seems to differ from the usual organisation models and hasn't, as far as I know, been explained.

Quite recently, some people have held forth the "liaison" as if it were an alternative to the group as an organisation model. Clearly, in France it was a defiant-defensive act under circumstances that made explicit group activities impossible (Schuster's ban, diaspora of groupuscules, massive internal contradictions, relative isolation, repression of the ambitions of '68 etc); not something freely chosen as an alternative to a group. As soon as circumstances allowed it, the French came back into a real group, since that is the core form of the historical surrealist experience, and more or less the only form which actually puts the poetic imperatives before personality cultivating and career opportunities.

Core home range

The geographical basis of a group is typically a city, to the extent that surrealism is urban. The French surrealist group has always when existent been based in Paris, the "group of Czech and Slovak surrealists" is at core based in Prague, the Rio de la Plata group with argentine and uruguyan members is nevertheless based in Buenos Aires, etc. However, by analogy with international organisations in other areas (most intimately the communist movement and the psychoanalytical movement) surrealism early showed a tendency to speak in terms of national sections – but rarely actually achieving any organising of such national sections. In some cases the group of a major city claimed to be the movement of the country when counting its individual contacts in other, usually smaller cities (Chicago has done it a lot).

So this is usually more on the level of the "extended city group" than of a real national-level organisation. When it has been about fusing groups in two different cities in a country, this has usually meant that sooner or later the group in the larger city assimilates the group in the smaller city, because the most eager members will be encouraged or determined to take part in as much as possible of the activities of the group in the larger city, while the less eager members will become even less determined, sometimes even actively sifted out by the superordinate group, and actual group activity in the smaller city will cease, or go on in a completely informal and less coherent way.

A classic case being how the Columbus, Ohio group was briefly assimilated en masse into the Chicago group in the 70s; other cases of even smaller groups have perhaps not even been recorded in our internal history as such... A more recent case appears to be the swallowing of the Santander group by the Madrid group? I have no detailed knowledge about Czechoslovakia (currently Czechia and Slovakia), but it looks like activities in Brno (and possibly Bratislava?) have been (repeatedly?) assimilated into Prague-based activities.

A different case is that of the current Athens group, which is more of a fusion between the former Ioannina group and another Athens group, a fusion necessitating a reformulation of the basis for both nuclei and resulting in a truly new group. In fact this is very often the pattern by which a lively group is first formed, on one scale or another. The Stockholm group was formed by the fusion of a trotskyist grouplet and a grouplet of industrial musicians. Back in the earliest days, the first surrealist group was formed as a fusion of the Littérature group and the Aventure group, somewhat later joined by the L'Oeuf dur group, the Rue de Chateau group and the Rue de Blômet group, plus several gravitating individuals. Perhaps it is possible to describe the origins of every single group in these terms; surrealist experimentation may start among a small coherent circle of friends, or a nucleus resulting from a split, but it is only when confronted with another circle of strangers, independently doing something remarkably similar yet strangely different, that a surrealist activity finds its expression in an objective and durable form? But since such fusions occur on different levels it might be difficult to rigidly decide where they have in fact already occurred and where not.

National level

Wherever there are two actual groups in the same country willing to endure, they have typically developed different individual characters, often different enough to take part in different international networks or subnetworks, sometimes different enough not to be recognised by the other as surrealist at all. And it is in this area, concerning the two classic Belgian groups, that we find the perhaps only example where a national organisation of surrealist activity has had any constructive organisational meaning, because if it wasn't for an occasional urge to appear as a national section there would probably have been very little collaboration between the very different surrealist activities in Brussels and Wallonia in classical times.

There were no encompassing organisation in national sections in the 30s in spite of the leninist fad, the few that leaned towards that direction were a bit hanging in the air as there appeared to be no international preference for the particular model; some had occasion to give free reign to the impulse only in FIARI, which nevertheless had very few real national sections but mostly individuals outside France (with the Egyptian section as the luminous exception). In the 40s, the "Cause" organisational effort failed before leaving the ground, and during the postwar decline there was no one around to question the tendency that the Paris group kept calling itself "the surrealist group" and involve as signators of various texts more or less the few individuals in other countries they had contact with (as honorary or satellite members rather than representatives of their countries). Ok, technically, there has been many groups which have employed the designation "the surrealist group" without further specifications, in their respective language, but usually then implying "of this particular place"; not so the French group which obviously regarded itself as "the surrealist group" period. Ok, with somewhat more firm reasons for it than others could claim, being led by the founder of the movement and standing in an interrupted but fairly obvious continuity with the original group, yet hereby implying an ontology not recognising the fact that surrealism as such had become (or had been revealed to be at its core) international.

The different kinds of organisations that were possibly or manifestly the local equivalents of the surrealist group in other countries were at least not formally recognised as such in any kind of over-national structure. On the side there was the Surréalisme-Révolutionnaire, and Cobra, and of course the Situationist International, all formally constituted by national sections (in fact Cobra was constituted not by national sections but by real groups representing countries, allowing for Denmark to be represented by two different groups); in SR and SI, several sections were purely nominal, consisting of single individuals, or haphazard constellations of independent contacts who didn't know each other, or they were ran entirely by exiles in the more central cities; at no point in time there were more than just a few sections who had some autonomy and had an actual collective activity. The "organised international" as an organisational model never became much more than a politically inspired projection space.

International networks and scaffolding

When new activities were reflourishing in the 60s, hardly any attempts seem to have been made on the organisational level to account for or respond to this. Even inside France, by irony of fate, the small Lyon group which might have seemed destined to be swallowed by the Paris group, in fact survived the Paris group in 1969. During the late 80s and early 90s there was this polarisation between an alliance of groups working in a trotskyist style for a rigid "reconstituted international" on the one hand, and an explicitly anarchist dissident network on the other hand. The rigid one consisted only of groups, being official national representatives, but the dissident one was not just loosely associated individuals but also comprised groups (often shortlived groups such as the ExTrance group in the absence of a London group, the Agama Expedition resulting from a split in the Stockholm group, and the Chateau-Lyre group as the then current incarnation of the dissident "Melog gang" keeping its distance from all "officially" aiming regroupments in Paris, the Alabama group whose relations with the "official" Chicago group were deteriorating, etc) as well as subnetworks surpassing national delimitations (like Dunganon and later Droomschaar, and networks of Arabic and Chilean exiles). Many countries had representatives of both, but Swiss, Colombian and Japanese surrealists were all "dissidents", and importantly the Prague group was involved in both networks (while the Phases network apparently was friendly with both but, as always, refrained from taking sides?). Based on the "rigid" initiative, three issues of two international bulletins came out, then came to a halt.

In fact this occured as the boundary was getting blurred between officials and dissidents (consider the various signatories of rather different colours of the 1492-1992 tract! ("...mientran sean los viajeros los que ocupen el lugar de los videntes..."/"as long as tourists replace seers"/"...tant que les voyageurs parviendront à se substituer aux voyants...") Even more odd appears the 1991 tract against Marc Eemans ("Saint-Pol-Roux assassiné!"), signed by a motley international selection including representatives of the Chicago group, large parts of the dissident network, plus the secret remaining Belgian surrealists who were staying out of all international organisation, and the old guard of French 60s ex-surrealists who dissolved the French group and tried to impose the ban on the word "surrealism"!

Around the turn of the millennium, there were still or again tireless attempts to reawaken the international bulletin (which came to nothing), still based on a circle of "core groups", but with the "dissident" milieu largely blended into the official groups, and some of the official groups applying an increasingly self-critical, situationist or in itself dissident outlook, the shining surface of orthodoxy was not just blurred but partly merged into the general environment. Today suggestions along the "rigid" line is brought up again at times, but seem very difficult to implement. I'm not saying intensified communication between active groups would be a bad thing, only that it requires either voluntary-based openness or someone's decision of circumscription. It is probably clear that there is no immediate correlation between how "truly surrealist" or "official" a group is and how active it is. If a few well-established groups are widely recognised as belonging to a core, there is a larger number of groups unproblematically counted in by those groups they stay in contact with but regarded with open suspicion by others; either because of inclusion of "unorthodox" elements, just lack of established record, specific doubts about profiles, or simply doubts as to whether they actually constitute surrealist groups (rather than, i e artists groups or other fora for mutual practical help and co-marketing, local surrealist networks without actual collective activity, nostalgic or wishful structures without much content, one active individual sometimes involving friends, etc).

Languages

In small languages, the language community is often an area typically circumscribing the basis for organising. This is not the case when it comes to English, French and Spanish, each spoken in several different countries and often known by people elsewhere. English, French or Spanish- (+ Portuguese) speaking groups will have to be geographically circumscribed and/or have a very distinct individual character.

Especially in very large cities like London and Paris the main groups will gain a certain accumulative character, and attract several members who have the major language as their second or third language only and sometimes have rather poorly developed skills in it. Consider especially the early history of the French group; Paris was the place to be, regardless of whether you knew French or not, and if you were a surrealist, why shouldn't you hang out with the surrealist group? The French group, as several other metropolitan large groups, has often had linguistically defined subsections of exiles mostly speaking their own mother tongue or some other shared language in small open cells, often physically in the midst or near periphery of wider ongoing activities.

Then of course, French as a colonial language but even more as an extranational language for the educated and liberal elites of other countries made knowledge of surrealism travel fast in the beginning, and was what facilitated establishing of surrealist activities early in Serbia, Romania, Argentina, Egypt and Japan; later the French language made Quebec and Martinique strongholds of surrealism of the New World. Language communities have facilitated collaboration between surrealists in Spain and Argentina, or between surrealists in Portugal and Brazil. (Though remarkably rarely between surrealists in the UK and US). There has been something like international networks of Spanish-speaking surrealists, and briefly (as far as I know) for Arabic-speakers. With French as a second language, some groups appears to have been almost bilingual (publishing in two languages in parallell or in a sequence) and nowadays some groups are almost bilingual with English as a second language. Perhaps the only more fundamentally and complexly bilingual group was the French-English one in New York during the war? But then that group was specifically organised as an international group of largely exiles (war-time activities in other havens like Mexico and England might have been equally babelian), claiming no specificity and just providing a meeting point for those individuals having ended up at that spot.

Stockholm group as an example

The Stockholm surrealist group has without any particular consideration about it seemed to find it natural to constitute a pole of organisation for, more or less, active surrealists from all of Sweden (the southern province of Skåne has sometimes had its own epicentra or competing activities), and in fact also scattered heads from Norway and Finland. Notably, the group has never showed an ambition to organise surrealists in Denmark; perhaps this is largely because unlike Norway and Finland, Denmark has a history of surrealist organising of its own (though no recent efforts). The Stockholm group has organised various satellites of all the different categories; a few important "satraps", a few long-standing members exiled in different parts of the world, and also a small number of those with a merely selective affinity. A few of these latter weirdos have weirdly known some Swedish (for unfathomable reasons) but the language has not been a major unifying factor, since so much of the activities and writings of the Stockholm group are in English anyway.

And if we are speaking Swedish, obviously there are people in Finland doing so too, and it is not very different from Norwegian at all, and not so different from Danish. Is there an "ethnic" community? Well, people do speak about "hyperborean" or "thulean" "racial characters" as well as a "scandinavian" "temperament". And we have the general conditioning from cultural forms, national ideologies, and local traditions. Fragments of a shared sense of what is "normal", items of a ridiculous national stereotype which may be real on the statistical level. We are less inclined to recognise all of this, or rather to accept it as something relevant to the aims and instincts that has brought us together under the aegis of surrealism...

Instead the group has a quite distinct individual character. If indeed we started out in "frenzied voluntarism" and orthodoxy, we have nevertheless always emphasised certain things such as collectivity, theory and games, and we've been going frequently in and out of intense focuses on dreams, analytical responses and surrealist organising, and for the past 15-20 years we have continuously emphasised epistemology, objectivity and self-scrutiny, recent years have renewed focus on the imagination, geography, methodology, science, etc. During this we were for brief periods pulled along by the dynamics of certain political movements, of a deleuzian "anti-oidipalism" or a bataillan "low materialism", and of situationism. We've tried very different strategies towards publicity, politics, art and literature, and international initiatives; these do not seem to be constants (but maybe the strategical-experimental attitude towards them is). Our specific way of constituting "personality traits", such as our specific mixture in combining humor and seriousness, polemics and solidarity, openness and closedness, ability and uselessness, silence and noisiness, rush and slowness, soberness and madness, etc, may be far more difficult to characterise, at least for ourselves. And it depends on the angle. People who know us only from our English-language writings have expressed surprise when they meet us and see how much we laugh, while some who meet us in person more than read our writings have sometimes either complained that we drink too little, or experienced us as incurably silly nogooders. As do we all now and then, but then we typically attack it on an analytical level... But we have a strong feeling that our current focus on methodology and its specific methods solidly based in games, imagination, phenomenology and analytical thinking, its strong scientophilic and antihumanistic tendency as well as its silliness and its outbursts of collective and individual creativity, its awareness of the history of the surrealist movement combined with a curiosity towards tendencies of the present, somehow represent something very distinct, something which not only has some clear differences from other groups' approaches but which also has layed bare an objective surrealism in a particular way. Thus, it is possible for some to feel congenial with the Stockholm group's spirit without staying in Sweden or knowing Swedish (and it is possible for a surrealist in Sweden to feel alienated by the group's direction...).

But maybe we are distilling our individual character by not focusing on our native language? We are apparently not much interested in translating things into Swedish for example. Almost everybody in Sweden speak English anyway. Unlike other small languages where it is considered a heroic task to keep the local language alive, among other things by publishing a lively original and translated literature, in Sweden there are few incentives to publish the necessarily very small editions of translations when it is so much easier to read English originals or English translations. Translating something into Swedish is typically more of just an attempted advertisement coup, to try to make the narrowsighted massmedia notice something (and often fail). Of course, translation is fun, and is a good ground for a sometimes very productive intercourse with interesting texts and with languages, but publishing translations all too often seems like a waste of time, effort and invested money. And since we know the subtleties of English less well than native English-speakers, there is perhaps not so much sense in our contributing to translating things from other languages into English either. Maybe we are just rationalising some laziness and the unavoidable bad experiences from the world of publishing here?

And some of our writings may perhaps be more stiff, repetitive and unimaginative than necessary, simply by our more limited vocabulary and more limited fingertip skills in English?

Maybe we are failing to catch on to relevant tendencies of the times, and establishing relevant contact surfaces, and occupying available arenas of subversion, just because we seem, with the exception of certain periods or certain individuals, usually very detached from what is going on in swedish literature and swedish art, and often from swedish politics? Maybe we are simply unable to live up to the necessities possibly imposed on us by a sense of responsibility for being the national node of surrealism? Yet it would seem that to the extent that we actually would be such a node, an important aspect of that would be specifically to not care about all this crap in the midst of it... to choose a direction not consciously as a response to perceived external imperatives but on an overindividual level as the sensibilities and desires conditioning and conditioned by the dynamism of the manifest collective activity as such...

This is all about groups being the core of surrealist activity. Only in a group physically meeting regularly there can be the gradual development of a communicative sense of superindividual association, playing, vigilance; only when walking together and playing games at the same table (or same lawn, or whatever) there can develop a particular sense of overindividual organisms which are central to the sense of surrealist activity. I have no understanding (but this might just be my personality) of being active as a surrealist in a place, or even visiting a place, without seeking out the surrealists there, just to check who they are, see what experiences they have to share, and see if there emerges some particular common ground for further experimentation, play or investigation.

I'm not ignoring other routes. Of course practical collaborations, and communication and friendship between individuals, go on almost as easily with digital communication nowadays. Much more than old romantic time-consuming letter-writing, this allows for a rich development of the network of contacts around groups, for quickly sharing thoughts and works, for instigating various experiments, games and projects that are not geographically based at all but cut across all major subdivisions and categorisations (except that they typically leave behind those who are old or technophobic or poor enough to stay away from the internet), and a rich communication between groups. This is great, but it does not replace the particular sense of communication and activity based on the physical meeting, experimenting, emotionally intense discussions, and worthless hanging around of individuals. Digital communication is rather the next level; a poor basis for acquiring experiences but a great tool for communicating them. Clearly, the networks thus constituted are the suitable global organisation of surrealists: with groups as basic units, and individuals wherever there are no groups and wherever they have either found a group to relate to as their primary group (based on personal friendship and/or recognition of the group's individual character) or they have the time and facilities to establish a solid network node on their own. Since no one controls a network of that kind, every node will establish its own constellation of contacts, and the structure actually consists of a large number of partly overlapping structures. This is what a network is, and this is what we actually have.

There is no use for the national level in organising; nations have little relevance to our non-local aims, our shared tradition and methods, and to our real structures anchored in the combination of solidly city-based groups and selective affinities. There is no use for any n-th attempt to resurrect the dream of a controlled international with sections that has to fulfil particular criteria and be officially stamped as real by those who know best.

Whenever the groups have distinct characters, it is possible for people to join them from a distance and based on selective affinities. Physical distance will of course always limit the participation in the group activity though. Surrealists who are isolated by circumstances anyway will of course be able to develop the most fruitful collaboration with the group they feel the closest affinity with. And dual memberships seem to enhance communication and collaboration. But some people who prefer some distant surrealist group over in fact locally available surrealists, who are not eager to meet and try to find points of contact with the surrealists of the same city, may perhaps act on psychological projections, and, more importantly, voluntarily abstain from the most central sense of surrealist activity, that of collectivity, of the substantial collectivity of developing intersubjectivity in a group of poetic explorers (or super-powered weirdos). That experience can never be removed from the very core of surrealism. No networks based on partly real, partly imagined communities along linguistic, national, ethnic or stylistic lines can replace it.

merdarius

Founding blocks of contemporary surrealism, civilised or not

2011-05-20T10:57:00.000-07:00

Jar of moles, photograph by Paul Cowdell

We have now published a new edition of the surrealist manifestoes (the Bretonian, that is) in Swedish. Long out of print, the translations have now been subjected to thorough revision and furnished with a thorough afterword. In connection with this, I have had reason to think about what constitutes more recent manifestoes of surrealism than the Bretonian, and in what sense they are manifestoes. It is no surprise that most declarative texts in recent decades apply only to particular issues or individual countries. No one has an obvious vantage point to speak for surrealism as such, and no one has quite the overview of the experience of the movement to make a comprehensive summary.

In this situation, it has felt a bit surprising that certain francophone surrealists boldly claim that there is one book which is the foundation stone, the most advanced base camp, of contemporary surrealism; and this is Bounoure's anthology La Civilisation surréaliste from 1976. (The Montréal surrealist group tried to instigate an ambitious international study project of the book before "disbanding", and Ody Saban has given it this particular status in recent polemics against the Turkish surrealists.)

What? La Civilisation surréaliste?

Common place (cf Hydrolith)

I would have thought a candidate would be the "Platform of Prague" (english translation here) from 1968, the French and Czech surrealists jointly and boldly trying to summarise the perspectives of surrealism as an ambitious continuation and updating scheme in the 60s complex transversion between two paradigms of surrealism (which I have called post-classic and post-Bretonian, or 2nd and 3rd generation, in the model of the "three eras of surrealism" (Cf also "Surrealism's Phoenix act in the sixties"). This text is the very first attempt to thoroughly integrate some lessons of changed conditions with upheld surrealist tradition, and there is no wonder that it might have been partly wrong in its hunches, and that the uprising of may 68 in itself disproved some of the points, while the repression against the Czech as well as the crisis and dissolution of the French group made several other points quite obsolete.

I would have thought a candidate would be the "Lighthouse of the Future" from 1974, in which the Chicago surrealists and their associates most strikingly summarised their ultraradical perspectives for a modern living surrealism, which bluntly denied contradictions and problems within surrealism and with a probably tactically motivated carefreeness claimed that this in fact largely modernised and once again radicalised and heroified surrealism was in fact nothing but traditional surrealism.

La Civilisation surréaliste stands in stark contrast to these two texts. First of all, it is ultracomplicated and in fact – for most – almost completely unreadable. It has not appeared in another language, and few of its articles have even been translated – because it is hardly possible. Bounoure's style, which dominates the book, is ultrarhetorical and opaque, he continues the souvereignity and complex structure of Breton's rhetorics while removing most of the lyricism, the almost infallible sensibility (Fingerspitzgefühl), and the playful interposing, of Breton. A sentence which makes immediate sense seems to be for Bounoure a suspect populist sentence and cannot be tolerated. (Certain other contributors are far more readable, but Bounoure dominates the book strongly, together with Effenberger, the opacity of which I am unable to tell if real or increased by the transition into French).

Second, the atmosphere of the book is one of rationalising a defeat and holding up an untransparent integrity under occultation in the hardest of times; it sums up most of the disappointments and ressentment-rationalisation strategies of the French surrealists for coping with the dissolution of the group.

Common place?

Third, it does all this mostly by raising the experiences of surrealist activity to a high level of abstraction, what we usually call philosophical. There is little actual analysis of contemporary society, little accounts for concrete methods and experiences (there are some but they are not a very big part of the book). Instead there is very much of building up complex lines of reasoning based on sketchy antagonistic opposition between conformist and poetic perspectives, all hanging in the air. It deals with language, general economy, communication and play on the most general level. It says nothing about surrealist organising and strategies, and the strategies it examplifies is something like continuing to safeguard the secret potion in the big witch kettle in the darkest hermit cave (the good old "ark" strategy).

And, come on, it is after all thirtyfive years old. I had rather thought that a foundation of contemporary surrealism would result not from the obscure rhetorics of philosophical reformulation in the face of defeat of French comrades in the 70s, but from a comparison of the experiences of the currently active groups. All are important here, but there might be reason to put a particular emphasis on those groups who have rather consistently tried to venture on heterodox investigations while at the same time claiming the whole surrealist tradition (such as Madrid, Stockholm, SLAG (London) and SET (Turkey), and others); and they who seems to have implemented surrealism as a distinct presence in the midst of a broader radical environment (perhaps especially Greece, Turkey and Chicago, but what do I know about this really...), and they who had made particular theoretical efforts, etc... We'll need to insist on covering the breadth of experience as well as the particular characteristics of the contemporary activities in comparison with the classical ones (and here I humbly refer back to our "Voices of the Hell-choir" from a few years ago, which has been superceded by subsequent thought in particular questions but remains an attempt to summarise a point of departure here).

Mattias Forshage

A note on illustration

2011-05-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

A note on illustration

(a postface in the recently released Swedish edition of Amos Tutuola's "My life in the bush of ghosts")

About the illustrations

During the period when I was reading the translation [by Niklas Nenzén] my inner voice said on one occasion:

– That is my favourite novel.

And it was soon obvious from the hypnagogic flow – often just a few details to improvise from, or additions here and there to my already rendered images – that my subconscious was boiling with a very special kind of enthusiasm this time. In a dream, for example, I met Bela Lugosi in his Dracula regalia, and he announced, eagerly but in a very friendly way, his own proposal for an augmentation, including himself, of the illustration of the smelling-ghost that initiates the suite of images. From the outset, two things were clear to me: 1. I wanted to avoid styles that were too obviously reminiscent of African art; 2. I didn´t want to merely, like an empty mirror, give a dutifully exact representation of Tutuola´s specific character. Instead I was looking for the enhanced option, for example, to make the ghost world multifaceted and link it to other ghost worlds, death realms and so on, just as the way one reads a book about Africa, for instance, is not only that one experiences "Africa" but that one also includes one's own environments in a fusion with things one has seen and things one has never seen before. And as usual with the subconscious, there is, for those who enjoy such things, I dare say, plenty of witty points and a funny, peculiar kind of humorous finesse.

John Andersson

Remarkable richness of reality

2011-05-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

Horror cinema and surrealism

Partial in favour of horror? To this crime I plead guilty. Friends of mine have noted that I will seek out and enjoy odd remarkable scenes and atmospheres even in such movies that are quite obviously poorly done, poorly held together, largely banal, or quite despicable. There is an important overall lesson hidden here, in that surrealist appropriation of cinema is shamelessly hedonistic in the sense that it focuses on anything that manifests and stimulates the poetic spirit, regardless of the quality of the craft, the smartness and brilliance, the cultural value, sociological interpretations, deconstructivist interpretations, deliberate populism, cult value or irony. On the other hand, the banalities I happily endure for the sake of these scattered moments and aspects are dependent on my selective affinity for this particular genre – confronted with the same level of banality in action or science fiction, or especially comedy or porn, it won't take me many minutes to give up the waiting for moments of poetic productivity, which are probably there in those genres too.

Nevertheless, I will argue that horror is one of the major forms of popular surrealism. It very often represents that necessary fundamental break with realist conventions, both in literature, film and other media, and in life experience. Indeed, in life experience such realist conventions are even more stifling than in fiction, by reducing everything to a banal version decided by the least common denominator, represented by the least ambitious or hopeful reconstruction of a normality, denying all deep ambiguity, the complex sum of possibilities and determinations, the entire sphere of the unknown... This entire sphere of unusual events, overdetermined and multilayered reality, significant chance, adventure and radical doubt, calling all conventional consensus views and all lazy dull habit into question, is typically labelled as "supernatural", and, wherever the contrast becomes acute with the conventional reductive interpretation of things and thus the strategy of habitual work-consumption-rest treadmill, as "horrifying". So all of this fiction, the popular representations of this entire sphere of events, the popular imagination about its implications, are typically grouped together under the heading of "horror".

It must be admitted that genre conventions abound in horror cinema too, and a glaring lack of imagination is often all too obvious, but there is also a remarkable breadth of subverting, ignoring and going beyond these conventions, both in low budget fan flicks and big hollywood productions. If fantasy and science fiction seem to have to a larger extent frozen in genre conventions than horror, those two genres have somewhat less surrealist potential in that they typically play in more static "other" worlds, which are very often mere allegories or mere displacements of highly conventional quasirealist-sentimentalist drama into exotic settings and exotic makeup. In contrast, horror typically focuses on the transitions-breakthroughs-ambiguities with the "normal" world of our everyday experience, therefore potentially pedagogic-subversive as to the real exploration of such breaks/portals in real life.

This is something which horror has in common with surrealism, which typically also focuses on such convergence points characterised by ambiguity and poetic productivity. It is this inclusive-integrative-dynamic sense of reality which is a fundament of surrealism, making up the simple etymological sense of its "over-reality" as well as remaining one of the several parts of its continuous identity as historically integrating its experiences and strategies.

But what about fear? Some films make me scared, some don't the least. I think that is an aspect which is usually irrelevant for the fundamental points of horror cinema.

I will not give an overview or history of horror cinema here, nor a list of recommendations, nor a delineation-comparison with horror in other genres such as literature and comics. I will discuss some central aspects of horror cinema from the surrealist viewpoint. In an objective manner – yet inevitably my constellation of emphases will be personal.

The real strangeness of things around us

The basic convergence of surrealism and horror has its growth medium in the weird goings-on in everyday life, in the paranoid-type vigilance triggered by them and enhancing them, the willful or resistant abandoning to the attention towards the unusual, weird and potentially strongly meaningful in the world. This is about all the unusual possibilities conventionally overlooked, all the uncanny atmospheres conventionally denied or rushed through. If some horror movies still tend to lean towards on one hand stark rationalisations (it was all just a scheme carefully orchestrated to scare someone) or to bland psychologisations (it was all just imagination), it is far more common to retreat to a kind of loose piecemeal extra-scientific ideology: ghosts, spirits, powers, the supernatural – but what is that? Just a class of interpretations, ranging from lame rationalisations to imaginative mythologisations, of manifestations of the unusual and unknown in everyday life.

It is one of the main points of surrealism to not deny the unusual phenomena and their dynamism, but still reject all these more or less religious poor explanations, avoid succumbing to premature rationalisations. In the movies, let them go on with their fairytale concepts, they're not fooling us, we know that the dynamism of weird happenings, chance and significant casual events is an aspect of life itself, and such a dynamism can be remarkably effectively simulated and savoured in the particular fiction of the horror movie. It contributes to teaching us to see. It orchestrates and emphasises those poetic atmospheres where everything is hanging in suspense and anything seems possible, the moments of the surreal. On the most simple level this is obvious in films of hauntings; all these haunted houses, the poltergeists, the insistent messages and the chaotic disturbances. It's partly very banal, still often very effective, sometimes orchestrating a liberation of the anti-utilitarian, fetishistic or just poetic surrealist sense of the object, sometimes luminous juxtapositions, constellations of things, true poetic images, classic surrealist assemblage. A literally convulsive beauty is sometimes achieved in the very "over-the-top" absurdness of many stories; where strange events and convergences, personal tragedies and emotions are so densely accumulated together with the unfettered expressionism of blood and gore (for this particular line, Re-animator (1985) remains a centerpiece). In a way this is the old formula of Walpolian Gothic, plausible human reactions to implausible courses of events, the mechanics of the mind encountering the world of inclusiveness where anything is possible, the so-called paranormal or maybe the surreal. Yes, on an aesthetical level, this is clearly a kind of expressionism, but since surrealism is not an aesthetic it doesn't mind employing other aesthetics for its purposes...

Another particular point is very strong in 70s horror movies, when theatrical conventions are long abandoned but conventions of realist cinema are still not adapted; the filmmakers have the means to tell a story realistically yet they refuse for the sake of the uncanny atmospheres. They just need to take the time to zoom in on the weird details, to allow extended moments of suspense between lines of dialogue, between action and reaction, between moments, to just skip some of rationalisations or uninteresting details. Neither the directing nor the acting achievements strive primarily to give us some illusion of reality (which is just conventional anyway), but primarily to create atmospheres. This is why the much denigrated Boogey-man (1980) is such a gem, and one of the several reasons why Dario Argento is the greatest horror director today is that he has retained much of this non-realistic storytelling since the 70s.

The notion of atmosphere is partly vague – we typically connect it with situations, we may connect it with persons and objects, we definitely connect it with place. As connected to place can also be a point of convergence between horror and surrealism. The sense of "soul" of place, a sort of intense significance which can be experienced at a particular geographically located nexus, is of course what is in horror quickly interpreted as hauntings.

But it is not just haunted houses, be they the classic mansions, ruins or hospitals, or modern office buildings, factories, garages, tunnels and basements; one can find explorations of such creepy or uncanny atmospheres also in forest glades, beaches, corn fields, old trees, mountains, lakes and bogs, boats, metro systems, open squares, etc – any such place which may be associated with such an atmosphere in real life. (But that old mansion does remain a privileged place; I can't say 60s classics like The Haunting (1963) and The Innocents (1961) have lost any of their direct appeal – and modern examples like, say, Darkness (2002), The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), House of Voices (2004), Saint-John's Wort (2001), The Orphanage (2007), remain so exciting regardless of the various particular deficiencies in the scripts.) What the specific historic factors are that make these places abandoned or obsolete yet charged with meaning and unresolved conflicts varies, and will contribute much to the interpretation and less to the experience.

There are many horror films which are "site-specific" in that they probably really are the product of someone having visited a creepy place, noting "geeze, this place is scary, someone ought to make a horror movie here", and actually having gone ahead and done it. Such films (two random examples picked from the pile: Death Tunnel (2005) of an American haunted sanatorium and Catacombs (2007) of the Parisian catacombs) can actually be seen as a neighboring subgenre of the surrealist documentary-style poetic exploration of atoposes and abandoned sites. They just wanted to convey the real atmosphere of the place, and chose to do it through the piece of fiction it inspired in them.

Those depths of the minds

What is called "psychological horror" is often effectively cultivated in cinema, and also often makes sense from a surrealist perspective. Again, we may not always consider it to be scary, and we may not consider it to be a deviation from a desirable normality, but instead we may see it as more or less admirable, inspiring and informative manifestations of the real ambiguity of things and the actual accessibility of the unknown. The very paranoid-type vigilance connected with the noticing of the unusual details or the atmosphere of place, typically sooner or later leads to some kind of questioning of the self, or rather of that self-righteous phantom which is the supposed monolithic detached integrative distinct individual person. To what extent does the creative mind participate in forming the reality we perceive as external? To what extent do others partipicate in the processes we regard as our own thinking? To what extent do parts represented within us have not just distinct interests from each other, but also different modes of perception and lines of reasoning, to what extent do they have secrets from each other?

Faced with unusual enough events, most people, in a horror film like in everyday life, will ask "Am I going mad?". But doesn't madness then just become a type of hastened rationalisation, just like it was to invoke "spirits", "ghosts" or "forces"? Is just losing control, losing illusion of control, which is the scary thing, or does it have to trigger a particular acute contradiction? And the often fairly obvious psychoanalytical interpretations we can cook up – just because we can point out patterns and mechanisms that will account for the type of phenomena manifested, they nevertheless remains toothless in accounting for the very dynamism of their phenomenology. (Freud just started breaching this didn't he?) But from a surrealist viewpoint it is arguably this phenomenology and its poetic productivity which is the starting point. The worlds they invite us to, how these are included in the field of possibilities. For philosophers, such basic questions are cerebral exercises; for children, madmen and poets they are undetermined and flesh-real: Are my parents actually evil monsters? Is it all a conspiracy? Is someone hiding under my bed? Are they all dead? Am I dead? Do we embody mythological forces and play out some grand drama we don't understand? Was it I who killed my friend? Is it I who am the monster?

The beyond

Parts of this, questioning the delimitation of the self and the mind, have already started looking out at more vast perspectives. And this is perhaps another aspect of horror, the "beyond" – that which far exceeds our understanding and our schemes, Lovecraftian horror, the overwhelming. Perhaps this is an element where it is not possible to do as I have done so far, to calmly claim that surrealism and horror are interested in all the same things, only surrealism wouldn't necessarily care if they are scary or not and may in fact possibly regard the fear as merely a simple reaction against losing control when faced with the unusual – be it pleasureable or not, be it childish for proving the existence of such thresholds or admirable for being a symptom of the seriousness of the contradiction. For if the overwhelming is calmly savoured or sprightly investigated, it seems like it maybe wasn't really overwhelming, but either just an aspect of poetic hedonism in general, or something we have categorised in advance. And indeed, this perhaps remains one of the fundamental differences between religion and poetry, whether one is happy with fitting those glimpses of the strongest psychic dynamism into a traditional and socially utilisable rationalisation, or letting them remain unexplained and dynamic. Sometimes just a bit too dynamic. Difficult to handle. The centrifugal force, the vertigo – the shards of everything broken in the process...

This can be things that are just far too big, too close or too rich, as in a fit of fever or a drug trip. It can also be those situations where it is simply not possible to understand the motives of everybody else, simply not possible to communicate with them. This is when the paranoia has become not just a method but a full framework which paradoxically creates a thick transparent film between oneself and the rest of the world; it has such a wealth of meaning that it isn't possible to grasp, it isn't possible to interact with in some way which makes sense to oneself. This may be cosmic schemes, alien elder races, or it may be, as in those settings which are maybe the most scary of all; those that are very close to the common alienated interactions of our everyday life, in the streets, in the shops, at work and at school, and especially at home. All the modern zombie films, no hope, no communication, and all the most horrifying family drama, with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) as the unsurmountable portal star. Such critique of the family is an example of the sometimes very sharp or profound social criticism in horror. That aspect might be interesting and enjoyable, but again, just like the manifold forms of black humour, and, I dare argue, fear itself, is probably not among the central points making up the attraction of the genre itself.

The body the monster

Finally, to return to another perhaps solidly surrealist point which is indifferent to fear and focuses on poetic phenomenology, there is the monster. The unusual creature, the physical exception, the individual whose being expresses its deviation and strangeness, the body turned image and image turned flesh; the central horror hero.

The transformations into these strange creatures, both physically and mentally, both the ontogenetic metamorphosis and the possession or the empathy, in whichever form, the transformation remains a fundamental trope of poetic phenomenology. (Bachelard's discussion of the animalness in Lautréamont is a classical discussion of this that makes much sense to horror cinema). The metamorphosis in itself; the unfolding of viscera and skin into strange new shapes, these fragments and suggestions of insects, of genitals, of larvae, of trees, of ferocious beasts, of dinosaurs, all the morphological gore.

Monsters are fantasies in physical shape, and they are mythology in its irreducible parts. Strange beings. In this the two categories of monster and superhero often overlap, at least with the classical "film monsters" and the Marvel comic book monsters of the 70s, or with many of the present-day antiheroes, paranormal investigators etc. I've been so impressed by the constellation of moving physical manifestations of weird fates in 13 Ghosts (2001) specifically as a superhero group, and film monsters like Freddie Krueger and Pinhead the Cenobite are commonly recognised as either superheroes or some kind of rockstars. Clearly, with classic literary monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster, just like with modern comics mascots like Hulk and Hellboy, it is very existential, about monster-being; the phenomenology of the outsider. This has a sentimentalist aspect, where one is always at the risk of giving up the dynamics by suddenly becoming accepted into the fuzzy community of the normals, and then a fairly uninteresting destructive dynamics in the resentment in realising that one wasn't fully accepted after all. More importantly, monsterdom has a shamanistic-Rimbaudian aspect, this systematic disorder in the senses, the strange series of hardships and pains and pleasures, in order too see more clearly. The poet role. One we perhaps have to approach to the extent we want to make ourselves available to all these unusual phenomena, this wide range of possibilities, this abundance of meaning, which characterises horror, and even more poetry.

Again, the surrealist potential in horror appears to have little to do with to what extent it invokes horror. The most important part is that it is a relative free zone from many realistic rationalisations and constrictions, and therefore in fact will be able to show us more of that which is actually real, and be poetically productive in much the same way as reality itself is – if we only allow it.

Mattias Forshage

(published in Patricide #3 2011)

the surrealist object part I

2011-05-19T07:53:00.000-07:00

Two realms of objects

Gestalt psychology once emphasised the fundamental difference in the phenomenology of natural objects and artifacts. So as not to assume any particular metaphysical implications of these, we might rather say that there is a fundamental difference between discrete single objects as typically examplified by artifacts on one hand, and non-discrete objects as typically examplified by natural objects. So, artifacts are usually discrete, easily distinguished from each other, usually geometrically regular (or more or less complex assemblies of individual geometrical units), usually brightly coloured, easily sorted, stacked, and counted; they can be understood teleologically, in terms of intended function. Natural objects are usually the opposite: usually merging together, difficult to separate from each other and to understand the individual units among, indeed quite ambiguous in such ontological terms, and furthermore typically geometrically irregular and with heterogenous and often diffusely blending colours, unintelligable in terms of intended function without advanced theories (either a "secondary teleology" through a functionally focused adaptationist evolutionary biology, or theism).

Of course this is by no means a sharp border, there are several untypical objects from both sides. Every archaeologist will complain that it can be very difficult to separate artifacts among natural-looking objects. And there is nothing stable about them. Things are pulled out of the diffuse logical flow (in this sense "natural") and transformed into artifacts by slight manipulations and sometimes by this act of choice and removal out of original context itself. An obvious example is how shells, beautiful stones, interesting roots, dead insects, skeleton parts, etc, are picked up, collected and transformed into aesthetical and occasionally scientific objects, and how fruits and other plant parts as well as dead animals are picked up as food items. On the other hand, discarded and abandoned artifacts enter the sphere of unseparable natural objects; littering and ruins. In a sense, art is a big endeavour to create artifacts with the opacity of natural objects, which will be able to produce meaning far beyond the simple statement of their intended function, in a way that simulates or indeed becomes nature.

The distinction approximately corresponds with that between indoors and outdoors environments. An indoors environment is one intentionally structured, usually geometrically arranged, dominated by artifacts and their rational arrangement for a purpose. Outdoors is structured by other factors than reason and intelligence, and is dominated by natural objects - though in many cases, such as cities, baroque gardens, and agricultural fields, there will indeed be a superimposed artificial and gemetrically regular structure, but however one which will be immediately subverted by the action of weather, plants and animals; there will be leaves, twigs, dust and seeds moving around, snow and pools of water, emerging plants and mushrooms, as well as a more or less rapid weathering and irrational rearranging of the artifacts through the actions of weather, irresponsible or responsible humans, as well as by other animals and plants of course.

It seems like the ambiguity and transition in this respect has often been interesting to surrealists. The transformation of natural environments into manifested projection spaces for the imagination have often aroused a great interest; brut architecture, utopian city planning, theme parks, park planning, japanese gardens, futuristic visions, have all had their share of attention (often including suspiciousness) from surrealists. So has, and far less ambiguously so, that which moves in the other direction in the relationship, becoming secondary nature: ruins and abandoned environments, worthless places, vast ruderal areas, junkyards.

And a special polemical case in this very matter is the category of surrealist objects. Surrealism takes objects out of their functional context and allow them to develop a natural-like semantical richness. The shared component in all surrealist objects is that they have been made poetic objects by having been taken out of their given context and allowed to develop a network of relationships, associations and determinations that are unrestricted by functional context. Then for the artifact-type objects this means more to take them out of utilistic context, and for natural objects to take them out of natural context. However, in both cases we must take care not to fall in the trap of establishing a new quasi-functional concept based on aesthetics in the narrow sense and/or anecdotal/selfbiographical sentimentality. Those objects which are put on a piedestal for being beautiful or for reminding someone of a beautiful event or period in life are only "liberated" in a weak sense, they are transposed into another utilistic context, less restricted for sure, and since that particular purpose is largely conditional and focused on a subjective level (also where the objects are marketed as commodities) they often have occasion to transgress it. Because it is only when they are allowed to be "worthless", to be isolated and reconfigurated without particular goals, that they can develop quite new unexpected relationships and insights. This state is far easier attained in an unordered accumulation of curiosities, or in a playful assemblage, or in a crowded exhibition, than when tastefully displayed with appropriate margins and spaces, but its not impossible among conventional aesthetical objects, nor in conventional art, or low-brow home decoration in general, nor by chance in the toolshed, the cellar, or even the marketplace.

Natural objects, merged as they are in the environment, are mostly in a sense asleep: associatively, imaginatively, symbolically, communicatively – and remember that these four aspects are all different, even though they partially overlap with each other. Bringing them out of context is a way of stirring them to wake them up, and it may be to an existence in slavery under some practical work task, or in tragical-pregnant isolation stretching out to establish relationships in all directions... Surrealist objects lie around longing for their freedom, planning for it, and occasionally allowing us to catch a glimpse of it, everywhere.

Some clarifications

I hope I don't have to say that it would be absurd to interpret these distinctions in terms of value; all different modes of being an object are perfectly legitimate ways of being an object. Of the two sleeping modes, the artifacts are characterised by their straightforward rational use value for us, and the natural objects by their non-rational use value for themselves (which may seem excitingly alien to us). The awakening mode, the objects released from utilistic connections from either camp, assumes a poetic use value, for themselves but in complicity with us.

If we are nowadays rather immune to the danger of getting dazzled by the artifacts after progress and rational solutions proved to be of limited application, there may still be an obvious risk of romanticising natural objects simply by being inexperienced with them and remaining uninformed about them: they may all seem so admirably inhuman, irrational and free for anyone who has no analytical tools for observing patterns in nature and thus keeps missing their modes of connection, modes of repetition, modes of labor, modes of economy, modes of utilism; such a person would believe every natural object encountered will be in itself free of determinations and thus a surrealist object. But of course, that person is likely to mostly stay in the city or at least not look very carefully around, in order to maintain that strange bias where only artifacts are typical objects and all natural objects are strange harbingers of a hidden world of wonders. It would be alien to me to suggest that natural objects are not interesting, exciting and beautiful objects in their capacity of natural objects, their own utilistic connection, (which is partly about their negating the artifact mode of utility and partly about aesthetical and psychological response to their general morphology, their organisation principles, their visual signals, etc) - but still that is what exactly what has to be superceded to make them surrealist objects rather than either scientific objects, aesthetic objects, objects of mere wonder and entertainment, or natural objects in their own right. I am talking about where they too are taken out of context. And this does not mean the vast sphere of antropomorphising, to regard the facial expressions of animals, the atrocities of insects, the mysterious behaviors of plants, as mere jokes for their unfettered variations of human analogues. I am talking about new and poetic contexts, where they may or may not evoke wonder or associations to their lifestyles and evolution, may or may not evoke transgressions of the notions of the human, but regardless of whether they do or not, remain open to establish new connections. Releasing them from their utilistic connection simply by stubborn ignorance of it is a very fragile form of liberation; it not only demands the same ignorance and non-familiarity of every observer, but tends to nivellate and therefore in the long term depreciate the whole world of natural objects.

Just like the poetic use of a shoe seems to presuppose observing the very transcendence from being a vehicle for containing feet and separating them from the possibly hostile ground into something else, and would not be the same thing for someone who had never considered using shoes; in the same way the strange shape of a mushroom will be a carrier of poetry rather than of superstitions when it is first understood and then abandoned that it is a mere temporary sexual organ of the fungus body interweaving the ground, and its sudden appearance comes from a very determined structure of chitine growing fast by absorbing very much water but then manifestating that structure only in an irregular form exactly conforming to the temporary configuration of the surrounding - now all of this is perhaps a bit mysterious indeed, but if we are excited about that, we are excited about the life of fungi, which biology has far more to teach us about than poetry has. There is a sense of wonder about a mushroom which simply does not depend on whether one associates to the particular forest habitat where it grew or not, whether one knows how it tastes or not, whether one has seen hundreds of mushrooms like it or not, whether one knows about the sexual mysteries of fungi or not, etc - and it is only when that particular sense of wonder is succesfully invoked that the mushroom becomes a surrealist object, a "liberated object", rather than an object of exoticism.

M Forshage

the surrealist object part II

2011-05-19T07:51:00.000-07:00

- the first steps in poetic semantics of objects

You have noted that so far I have been talking only about the act of constitution of the surrealist objects, the moment of sublation away from the utilistic sphere, the conditions for poetry to possibly emerge.

At this level, surrealist understanding of the object up to now has claimed to rest on mainly two foundations, first that of the object primarily being an object of desire (thus actualising the whole background of Freud's theories) and second that of the object being a unit of objectivity (thus actualising the whole background of Hegel's philosophy). The Freudian and Hegelian contexts are preconditions for the surrealist concept of the object, but it is very likely that the relaxed way they are assumed are missing aspects of the respective theories which it will be interesting to return to before the end.

Equally important but often less explicitly discussed in a theoretical context have been the recognition of the aspect of sensory-imaginational realism, clearly at heart of surrealism but developed theoretically rather in parallell by gestalt psychology, and by Bachelard's and Alleau's symbology (and in some way, but often rather twisted, and I don't them well enough anyway, in structuralism, philosophical phenomenology and semiology?)

So the next step is what goes in the poetic moment, when this "liberated" object actually starts establishing all new relationships it might, largely by means of our associations. I am just beginning my analysis in this field. And since I have recently been talking in a few places of the characteristics of poetic semantics, I hasten to say that this is exactly the same question, and it is probably the same as in the case of pictorial art too, only it will hopefully be easier to see some basic patterns if we retrict ourself to "assemblages" (= the meeting of objects) because we don't have a big problem in circumscribing the least signifying units there.

* There is one sphere of epistemic associations, or metonymical in the narrow sense; the ones that evoke aquired knowledge of previously established associations of the object, so-called background knowledge, which so to speak restores the object into the context it was taken out of. Obviously, this is an ambiguous category here.

* There is one sphere of biographical associations, the arousal of memory of (real or imagined) events where the object was brought up. This is a sphere which involves very individual elements, is partly dependent on simple empiricism and "life experience", and a sphere where most of the strictly speaking emotional response is evoked.

Those two spheres are in a sense central, because they will make up a big part of the experience, in spite of being quite different and separate from a response on the poetic level, but will, once the poetic-level response is there, often be hijacked by it and integrated into the poetic experience.

The poetic response itself is largely on the level of analogy. Or, say some, symbolism. There is a great deal of terminological conflict, ambiguity and opacity here, and care has to be taken in the end (if I may, just by pleading, not wake some of my friends' hobbyhorses red in tooth and claw here? cf i e "Laws of motion")

In here, let's first make a distinction between a static and a dynamic sector.

The static sector is that of established signs, those things that we may not call symbols but rather synthemes if we follow Alleau; the things that have a simple or unambiguous translation or refer to something deliberately hidden. This is the sphere of conventional signs, of conventional systems of symbols, of symbols in Freud's sense, and of those associations that some claim have a biological basis. (In fact, even though evolutionary biology and developmental psychology will have some interesting things to say about this, the old question of environment versus heritage is as uninteresting as usual, because as usual the biological perspective is unable to demonstrate something else than uncontroversial fundamentals as long as it sticks to its own strict methodology and avoids mere speculation, while the empiristic social science perspective is unable to demonstrate anything else than the variability of traits and never their origin or meaning. Both perspectives might deliver interesting suggestions, but when they claim to contradict or even disprove each other they are usually out of their league.) Concretely, this sphere will try (and sometime succeed) to impose certain limits on associations, and it may clearly increase the field of epistemic-metonymic associations (my first category above) by relating to usages in various traditional mythologies, secret languages, folklore, magic and religion (which, in their turn, will also invoke more or less reified moments of dynamic symbolism, to which we then turn):

The dynamic sector is the one we surrealists know well from Reverdy's definition of the poetic image and Lautréamont's standard example, and moves in the direction of symbols in Alleau's sense; connections that produce meaning rather than refer to a preconceived meaning. This is the sphere of poetry strictly speaking. But it must be noted that poetry is an integrative framework that will at will employ all the other modes of association in a dynamising movement. And that by becoming productive, triggering poetic response, cascades of images, atmospheres and suggestions that in turn will provoke concrete suggestions on different levels of both poetic creativity, extrovert action and transforming life experience and life strategies, this is also where they fulfill the famous Feuerbach thesis and start changing the world. And once I have reached this point in my argument, I need to halt and go back to work – maybe this is all in vain and already solved in either of those obscure disciplines that I'm not quite oriented in...)

A suivre.

M Forshage

The image, collage and eroticism

2011-05-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

The Madrid surrealist group sparked a well-needed discussion within the movement about the function of the image, a discussion which nevertheless coagulated in a polarised situation, where the simplest sensible statements may seem like major revelations against the background of some of the polemical simplifications reached.

So, one: let's not shy from critically looking at the ambiguous function of the image, but two: let's not jump to totalising rational conclusions which go against the poetic dynamism of our project. In fact, the conclusion that the image is after a certain point in time completely a vehicle of oppression is just an expression of a certain figure of dynamism in thought which combines a deep longing for total pessimism with a deep anti-empiricism and a complete faith in discursive reason, which are typical for a certain major 20th century french thinker named Debord and constitutes his perhaps most seductive and most destructive side as well as his personal twist to the most distortable aspects of Hegel's philosophy.

What maintains a poetic content is not decided by reason but by poetic phenomenology. It works or not, simply by the capacity/probability to establish a particular kind of dynamic relationship with an inflammable mind. Subversive content on the other side is a completely different thing. Even more, it too will consist of its potentiality and be tested only in hindsight, but it will be investigated by careful assessment of the relationship between the temporary objective conditions and the psychic dynamism of the content. Thus: will not be a matter of principled beforehand certainty.

Let's compare with an analogous case; eroticism. Let's acknowledge how the Frankfurt philosophers, some poststructuralists and various brands of radical feminists demonstrated in the 60s that the then so-called "sexual revolution" was a sham, a partly commercial and partly ideological development, and that contemporary eroticism, definitely in its public exposure but also in its domestic applications, was indeed used as a force and a vehicle of psychic oppression and of human hierarchies, injustices, bondage etc. Nevertheless, only a very small minority concluded that this means eroticism has inverted its historical meaning and must from now on be abandoned. There was still a whole lot of human aspirations and human sensibility which needed to be expressed in the field of eroticism. And which managed to do so in places where such actual necessities were distinctly stronger than the contemporary conditioning.

But let's take a step back here and talk about something else: Art production in surrealism. There is in fact a whole lot of bad art being produced in the name of surrealism, even by the most honest adherents. And why not? Typically, good and bad art is not the primary concern in our activities. We all produce images as products of the collective poetic investigations which lie at heart of the surrealist adventure. This is a means of investigation, of inviting chance and objective poetry, of exercising some of our means of imagination and sensibility. It is not necessarily good art. Well, it is in a sense, since we can expect it to betray an honesty, playfulness and investigative spirit that will look fresh in comparison with much of the nervously or cynically careeristic bullshit of the professionals and wannabes. But this argument is polemics not proof. It only says that a great part of creativity outside the narrow confines of official art is of course better art than a lot of what is produced inside this sphere with its prestige hunt, cultural trends, conformity-teaching art schools etc. This is obvious. But generally it means that the hierarchy which places official art above non-official art is invalidated, not that it is thereby automatically inverted, which is a completely different thing.

So from the earliest days of surrealism there was an obvious, and valid, point that the results of our games are often better than the oh-so-seriously manufactured oeuvres of who want recognition as artists. Nevertheless, that simple polemical point is not always the most relevant aspect, and doesn't mean that what we do is necessarily valid also in comparison with recognised art. Often one gets the impression that surrealists circulating some mediocre results of experimental investigations as artworks perhaps resort to some aprioristic reasoning of this kind. When not faced with any actual criteria, the grounds for evaluation very often again becomes frenzied voluntarism, identity politics, ghettoism: and in the end the grotesque over-evaluation of conscious intentions and opinions of the artist over real manifest poetic dynamism of the work. Who's done it and what aspirations it can be seen as having come out of, not what it actually contains itself and what it has the potential to produce.

And, I would say, this becomes acute especially in collage. Everybody can make collages, which is one of the things conditioning their very attraction from the surrealist point of view. But playfulness, openness to the dynamic paths of chance, or particular sensibility, is necessary to make collages that go beyond what we've already seen, to make the new combinations into real suggestions for the imagination rather than mere variations. We accept hundreds of collages as passable for quite superficial reasons. This could be because they remind us vividly enough of classical collage of Max Ernst or others, and may possibly create a fruitful ambiance in the tapping into that very world, or because they are effective simple puns. Another possibility is that they look interesting because they include single elements that are visually forceful and stimulating to imagination on their own, such as animals, body parts, certain landscapes. And here I'm not talking about the more "brut" type of collage where beloved objects are kidnapped and made into worshipped fetishes with mythological qualities, and therefore not standing on their own but in fact stand out in their new poetic functions as integrated into a living personal mythology. No, what I refer to is those more traditional casual collage compositions whose visual appeal rely solely on a particular beautiful integrated object.

So, in neither of these cases the collage itself has really managed to create something. But still, they may be, in some sense, good collages. Far worse are those that are mere vehicles for quotations or allusions to emblematic components in the surrealist tradition. A little Breton or Lautréamont or Magritte, or the titles of their famous works. Indeed variating the contexts and constellations entered by such emblematic elements is a mechanism of selfmythologisation, which in this particular form more than anything else fulfills the function of identity politics, of reinforcing a canon, and strengthening the identity of belonging to it and the mutual recognition of those who have chosen to do so. And usually completely uninteresting on the level of imagination or poetry.

In my opinion, it sometimes gets even worse. And, to start tying threads together here, I'll claim that erotic collage is the worst. As a lasting theme in surrealist art, eroticism did have a peak in the 50s and 60s, and since then, I could claim (at the risk of upsetting some friends) that erotic surrealist art has been weak on the whole (anyone digging deep enough will find some exceptions, of course). In erotic collage we see the most obvious examples of creators feeling fully content with having put together a witty or fully banal sexual joke, or an artistic excuse for an exciting nude portrait or a mere bodypart. If erotic elements naturally draw our attention for biological reasons, and even more so due to the conditioning from the commercialisation of the erotic and the erotisation of the commercial, it seems like their uninspired use in art is itself a mere recognition on the artists' behalf of that uninteresting capacity of such images and the further conveying of the same function in a slightly altered context of the artists own, without the integrity to transform them into something different, something related to the unknown. Marcel Mariën's work is perhaps emblematic for this, largely consisting of a boyish "daring" complacency with crude sex jokes, the banality of which is only occasionally overshadowed by their entertaining silliness.

Then, drawing is, in my experience/opinion, not in an equally poor state as collage. Drawings too range from often inconsequential large quantitity exercises to inspired or unexpected real poetic visions. But an uninspired drawing still needs a little effort, a little imagination, probably far more than a bad collage. The sexual component has different implications too. Resorting to sexual puns and ever-returning genitals in drawing is less a further-conveying of a conditioned overexposure, and more of a recognition and interpretation of a particular element in ones actual creative processes – an interpretation that may perhaps often be a somewhat hasted rationalisation (turning certain shapes into genitals instead of letting them remain in the uncertain to see if they will transform into something unexpected), but it is far from a lack of or belying of real imaginative content. It is returning it to a possible source quickly, which is not untrue to it, just missing some other possibilities.

If we should in some connections take care before releasing images, without adhering to a ban on pictorial production, we should at least especially think twice before disseminating poor collage (which devaluates our intentions) and superficial eroticism (which objectively takes place in current ideological and sexist offensive against women and against emancipatory potential of eroticism). It's worth trying, but it's worth trying not as a concession to purely external concerns, but rather to halt and make sure that our attempts are in fact objectively different from the trash noise they will take place in so that they will actually retain some subversive potential.

M Forshage

(Sex joke – rather funny)

Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum

2011-01-30T06:31:00.000-08:00

– working out grandiose galleries inside the protected environment of a drying cowpat

Some of merdarius's deeds are intended to be a little more longlived, and often they end up at the Stockholm surrealist group webpage.

Some time ago, merdarius got his own linklist there, which is one of the most comprehensive yet reasoned compilation of surrealist links available, and now, we announce that pdfs of merdarius's writings from this blog (and those of some other author's subjects based in the Stockholm surrealist group) have now been made available in the form of a pdf library.

Indeed screen reading and typographical restrictions imposed by blog/website presentation/software are not the most suitable for long theoretical texts, and these pdfs will indeed make the material far more (technically) readable.

We are also interested in the images surfacing of the architectural/structural properties of this library, which ghosts haunt it, who the librarians are and what education has been proper for them, etc.

A few things are of interest regarding common themes that are common on this site, without having been presented here earlier, as well.

The example of Swedish romanticism

2011-01-30T06:28:00.000-08:00

Proverbially, surrealism proudly admits being the "prehensile tail" of romanticism. The rich history of the romantic movement in Sweden has been fairly unavailable in an international perspective though. A new text by Mattias Forshage, available as a pdf from the Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum, presents an overview of the situation, ideas, aims and poetry of Swedish romanticism and suggests how it has been important for surrealist activities in this country.

(also available in a swedish version)

Dream geography

2011-01-30T06:24:00.000-08:00

Some of the theoretical foundations of presently ongoing studies in dream geography by the Cormorant Council, and often presented long time ago at the cormorant council blog in swedish only, if openly at all; are now available in a neat pdf in english at the Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum.

history of surrealism in sweden

2011-01-30T06:11:00.000-08:00

Mattias Forshage's detailed outline for a historiography of surrealism in Sweden has been available for a decade already to those researchers who have dared ask, but it now left "definitively unfinished" in three parts, the first two parts of which are now available without restrictions, at the Bibliotheca onthoplanctorum

Anti-art and plain poor art

2011-01-03T01:26:00.001-08:00

IF ART usually makes me suspicious, I still find "anti-art" usually far more stillborn, and usually an even narrower ideology than art. Anti-art is commonly a false denominator, used by people who want to snatch whatever art holds of legitimity, privileges and alms for their own part rather than really question or actually dethrone it.

Often the aim is to reduce art to something completely different (either political activism or philosophy). Otherwise, or simultaneously, it may be about self-marketing in two steps: first one ultraliberal nivellation: art is dead, and no art can claim to better than any other; and then the logical fallacy of self-assertion: if there is no rigid scale of values, no absolute hierarchy, then that means automatically that my own works are just as good as those of all the established artists, regardless of how they actually look. (The argumentation can be recognised from that of the creationists: when the scientists themselves admit that they don't know for certain exactly how evolutionary history took place, then every other theory is exactly as good, for example our theory about divine creation, regardless of whether it completely lacks support.)

"Poetry must be made by all" has been reinterpreted into "poetry is only what everybody already do" or "poetry is done by all, so this means that whatever I do is really good". Under the flourishing of anti-art in the 60s, it became quite obvious that its underlying shared common formula actually was "all we ask is to be recognised as art". This formula is clearly alive today as well, especially in the more or less postmodern-inspired pseudo-vanguardism that makes up the tiresome standard level even in most underground forums today (and which, of course, many single practicioners active in such forums dramatically rise above simply by cultivating a poetic vision or even just a genuinely playful praxis of one or the other kind). It stands perfectly clear that many modern forms av Art with a capital A stand very close to anti-art to the point of being exchangable.

Anti-art in all its varieties (and we've seen a plethora, not just among situationists, anarchists, neodadaists and postmodernists) has its favourite genres:

1. Spontanism, unconcentrated on principle (excessive daub, graffiti-naïvism, absentminded beat poetry, etc)

2. Dashing performance art ("payed play-leader spontanism", "pee-and-poo-humour" etc)

3. Performance art boring as hell ("realistic" minimalism)

4. Conceptual art boring as hell (small gestures illustrating a usually staggering philosophical argument or a thoughtless actualisation of some topic theme)

5. Documentary realism, soul-less on principle (reality tv-shows, selfbiographical comics, underwear- and trashcan-conceptual art)

6. Simple propaganda and simple political campaigning

7. Other simple utilistic communications: classified ads and pick-up lines, humour, porn, vandalism, etc.

Parts of this philosophy, and even more, parts of this political activism, may have its points, but in that case as philosophy or politics respectively, and hardly as art. And parts of spontanist art, in its chaotic expressionism or raw naivism, may have a great poetic and artistic value, which is hardly reinforced by its polemically noisy and nivellating frame.

* * *

Situationists and their followers never grow tired of repeating Debord's 1950s formula "The dadaists negated art without realising it, the surrealists realised art without negating it, it is up to us situationists to simultaneously negate and realise it (NB paraphrase). Apart from the immediately suspect in the combination of progress-faith and grandiose self-image it expresses (that specific combination which is the very foundation of vanguardism), it is hardly a correct image historically.

The activity of the dadaists was hardly aimed at negating art, and reducing their activity to that can be done only on the basis of anti-empirical french-hegelian methodical speculation. What the dadaists did themselves was to manifest how bourgeois society had lost its legitimity, and especially how its alleged crown jewel, culture, so obviously stood without any support for all its claims to being dignified, all-human, cultivated, peaceful, rational and good. So yes, the dadaists launched a nivellation, but not an arbitrary nivellation, rather a two-headed: your art is not better than our intoxicated fantasies (which are often really good), your art is not better than our found objects, game results, automatist exercises, chance methods (which are often really good), your art is not better than our silliest provocations and most speculatively headless pathetic gestures (which are not good at all, but entirely on level with much of bourgeois culture).

Dada accomplished much poetic results that cannot be reduced to anti-art: an emblematic incarnation of the radical negation and the radical departure as a starting point, automatic writing, chance methods in general, the poems of Huelsenbeck, Arp, Schwitters, Serner, Breton, Soupault, Tzara, Eluard, Péret and Kassák, the paintings of Ernst, Grosz, Arp, Duchamp, Ray, Picabia, the photography of Ray and Schad, the collages of Ernst, Hausmann, Heartfield, Höch, Charchoune, Citroën, Schwitters, the assemblages of Hausmann and Schwitters, the sculptures of Arp, Täuber-Arp and Schwitters, the films of Eggeling, Clair and Richter, yes even the sound poems of Ball, the quasitheoretical speculations of Tzara, Arp, Picabia and Duchamp, the chaotically experimental collective poems and noise music, the cultivation of the soirée format, the particular typography, etc etc.

The major part of such concrete poetical results and the methodology that gave rise to them were integrated into surrealism. Within surrealism, the privileged position of art has been denied, but without raising quietist rules of abstention; a poetic experimentation has been cultivated inside and outside art. The forms that were demonstrated for cultivating poetry outside the poem (usually not original for surrealism but realised also in romanticism, symbolism, dada and russian futurism) were picked up by the situationists and proclaimed to be the only legitimate expressions of poetry. And some time after the formulation of that theory, the situations found some support in identifying it with situations of social revolt.

But that was around the same time as the situationist movement split, partly over the question of art. But it must be admitted that those art historians are right who claim that the situationist movement did not split in a simple contradiction between artists and political activists. Both sides had artists, and neither side had political activists in any modern sense of the word; both had an interest in artistic and political concerns. Both wanted to negate art and continue making art. But one side had an artistic praxis at its base, which banalised the poetic by identifying it with this spontanistic praxis of theirs, and they developed theoretically inferior theories where radical art was paranoically-querulantly identified with freedom of speech; their political activity was noisy, querulantic and populistic. The other side avoided any basis in artistic praxis, and thereby made the poetic into something abstract since it could only be concretised in theoretical examples, and they developed an advanced and coherent theory by focusing on the field of social theory; their political activity was the intellectual leftists' usual positionings visavis ongoing struggles which they had no direct relation to (but they focused on important aspects that few others saw, and eventually the situationists and the ongoing struggles came closing in to each other and the situationists became activists too). One side's art was the other's anti-art, similar to the point of confusion, a self-righteous noisy mix of spontanism and propaganda (not without poetic ingredients).

* * *

Within surrealism, there has been a continual insistence on the confinedness, rottenness and ideological character of the art sphere; and an emphasis that those meaningful activities that many people would like to direct there could advantageously be cultivated in completely different connections, openly collective, experimental, playful and nonconformist ones; either in the surrealist movement itself or in local initiatives, on-the-side forums and utopian workshops, festivals or mystifying everyday initiatives. Many like to emphasise the polemical denial of the art sphere further, and when this is combined with an interest in the situationists' social-theoretical criticism of the image, there are occasional attempts to launch moratioria against some or all forms of artistic creation.

In fact, the surrealist manifesto of 1924 was nurtured by the vanguardist hope that automatism and surrealist games and mediality shortly would completely replace artistic concerns and the entire art sphere. This soon came to a disappointment, not the least since it turned out that questions that were in one way or another artistic questions remained central even for the surrealists themselves and seemed partly central in the cultivation of poetry. Successively these claims were weakened until abandoned with the 1929 manifesto (where surrealism effectively ceased being a vanguardism).

Yes, if the situationist movement in its entirety is seen like an extremist sect within the broad surrealist movement, then the Situationist International after the split 1962 was one such instance of denial-moratorium. And at the same time it held exhibitions and designed journals, and insisted that this was something completely different than the confusingly similar art.

The Stockholm surrealist group too suggested a moratorium in the declaration "Open letter to Guy Girard" in the 90s. No formal evaluation has been done of this, but it became obvious that none of the extra-artistic forms at hand were completely satisfactory substitutes for the directions of investigation collected in artistic creation.

Then the Madrid surrealist group came with their declaration eventually widespread as "The false mirror". In the original version this text relaunches the situationist critique, but makes an explicit exception for the artistic praxis of surrealism itself. Over time however, application was sharpened, and led to the current point where the Madrid group has an apparently complete inner ban on production of images (which strangely enough mainly covers painting, while documentary photography and poetic writing can go on) and still keep arguing for it within the surrealist movement.

And art-stopping can still be relevant, mainly as an experiment. A moratorium against artistic creation in the right situation is really an interesting way to explore what ways the creative impulses will then take, and may reveal new possibilities. A moratorium that is permanented becomes ideology. A moratorium which isn't even a moratorium but excepts one's own praxis is not just ideology but pure self-deception and marketing.

* * *

"Art for art's sake" is on the literal level obviously pointless, but the formula has occasionally been one to gather around to hold various utilistic demands on art at bay, defending creativity in accordance with inner necessity against various political and commercial decrees. Nowadays, it seems like the vast sphere of antiart and neighboring conceptual art, performance art and political art (selfbiographical art, postmodern art, etc etc) strangely subscribes to it in quite another conditional sense, wanting to paradoxically conserve the privileged place of art while claiming the obsoleteness of traditional criteria (or any criteria at all) so that the art sphere simply becomes a pool of available resources that we can all compete for in a big free-for-all. Some are happy with securing exposure for their political propaganda (usually exposure in confined art connections where it makes very little sense), some are happy to remain underground artists as long as they get regular stipends and grants, while many are violently competitive over the favors of the bureaucrats (on stipend boards etc) and intermediates (agents and gallery owners) and the sales figures - increasingly less as a means of even old-school humanist-style bourgeois "personal development" and increasingly less with the actual art as their argument; increasingly more as a naked competition game about impressive cvs, useful contacts and effective marketing strategies. For many bourgeois feminists, some upward-mobile working class heroes, and for some ultraliberal cynics in general, the right to make a career (also without really having anything to say) becomes a political agenda itself.

The only radical general view on art remains that creativity must accept no external decrees, and no isolation from other areas of life. It is then of uttermost importance that the latter must be implimented not in the reduction of art to already available utilistic concerns (income, propaganda), but quite on the other hand, the demand to adapt daily life to the inner necessities and the profound curiousness and overall creativity that can't be confined to art.

Thus, the point where art by its own dynamics will and must coincide with politics (even in the narrow sense of the word) is in the struggle against work. The ongoing struggles to reduce the workday, to subvert work ethics, to find alternative collective solutions, to defend play and laziness and mad herculean tasks, is also the most immediate political question of art, and the one where it may make sense to be an activist in the role of artists (apart from that it is very difficult to see how artists would be politically active as artists rather than as anybody, or not). The immediate need to secure time and circumstances for everybody to do what seems meaningful and to be able to organise their sociality and habits according to real demands of creativity and curiosity rather than this ever hardening imposed nonsense, which not just exhausts and exploits, but poisons the spirit and recreates life in its own image.

The art sphere needs to be set aside, not inflated by incorporating thousands of vain gestures against it. Bickerings over the concept of art, over recognition as artists, over the distribution of subsidies, have very little to do with the human creativity, imagination, curiousness and playfulness that will keep going on in other spheres in life, and, for the time being, even in art.

Accumulation and subtraction

2011-01-03T01:18:00.000-08:00

I was going to write pieces about the three major transition periods in surrealism (as announced in "Three eras of surrealism"), but it seems that the 1947 transition is so crucial that it can't be satisfactorily covered with a single essay, so why don't I just write about the aspect of subtraction and accumulation as a part, and consider the obituary of Sarane Alexandrian (as posted here within "experiment and failure revisited") a preformed part, and leave the third part unwritten for times to come? To draw many conclusions about this fascinating and still enigmatic period within surrealism will clearly require more research anyway.

The appearance of surrealism changes. Themes are added and subtracted, some themes are constant, some keep changing and look very different under different circumstances, some are integrated only in some surrealist actvities, some become part of the wider thing.

Non-vanguardism

So, surrealism is importantly subject to historical change, and maintains an active relationship with its contemporary historical situation. Still, it takes caution to remain untimely, and pride in being so, and has no ambition whatsoever to justify itself by claiming a particular shortterm historical mission. The latter in fact means that it is not a vanguardism. It will not contribute to development, it is not allied with the forefront of current change, it does not despise that which is old. In that sense it is also not a modernism, if we employ the term in the sense that many, for example Michaël Löwy in his books about romantic anticapitalism, does. There are other senses of the word modernism, several of which will fit surrealism though. As long as we remember that it lacks the often central aspect of being a vanguardism.

However, we cannot say that surrealism "is not and has never been" a vanguardism. During its early years, it was one to the extent that it felt that its remarkable discoveries might be just what was needed to replace art, literature, aesthetics, entertainment and to fuse poetry and everyday life in a large and historically determinant scale. From 1925 on, doubts were surfacing. It was recognised in Breton's "Surrealism and Painting" that the surrealist aspect of pictorial arts probably was certain tendencies already present rather than something which should be made up de novo after a tabula rasa with the past; it was recognised that the category "poems" was not obsolete and it took its place in the journal beside the "purely" surrealist forms of texts, namely automatic texts and dream accounts; it was recognised that political action was not something to reinvent as a pure expression of surrealism, but perhaps political organisation and activism was rather a necessity on the side, a practical-historical, subjective and objective alliance, with imperatives and forms that could be very different from surrealism's own and yet still relevant to it. All of these concerns undermine the vanguardist claims, and the final expression of this "retreat" came in the the second manifesto, of 1929. In that text, the untimely character of the movement was emphasised, as well as the need to relate in specific ways to the historical circumstances yet still escape the public eye and (for the moment) stay in the shade, as well as keeping up experimenting without sticking to certain forms as if they were solutions.

So, after 1929 surrealism is not a vanguardism, even though many of its sympathisers and participants, especially in peripheral countries, still believed it to be one. And with the revolutionary upheavals and the rapid dispersion of surrealist concerns in art in the 30s, it still appeared like it might, allied with the most radical forces of the time, have stood amidst the forefront of historical change – until the defeat of the spanish revolution, and the general abandonment of hope and critical thinking in rallying to either side of the world war in its manifest slaughter, barbary and cretinism with unrestrained nationalist, chauvinist and rationalist ideologies. Therefore the surrealism that reorganised itself after the war was objectively something different again; something that had lost a cause. And even though it had a very favorable wind in the immediate postwar years, it was without the particular historical hope, it was a bit more like a worthwhile personal way and meaningful pastime among likeminded. Nevertheless, it refused to summarise and evaluate this experience.

Accumulation the 1947 way

Several have noted that there were two major tracks in the surrealists' experience of the war. Those who spent it in nazi-occupied or otherwise openly fascist parts of Europe (such as France, Belgium, Denmark, Czechoslovakia & Romania) represent one track: to maintain or even sharpen some of the ingredients characteristic of mid- and late 30s surrealism: hegelianism, marxism, political organising and intervention, interest in natural science, bachelardism, gestural automatism in art, an almost cynical ideology criticism, etc (this complex of themes was famously emphasised in Fauré's history of the La Main á Plume group, but probably others had noted it before).

Those who spent the war west of that, far from war scenes and/or in bourgeois democracies, regardless of whether as exiles or natives, (UK, Mexico, the Caribbean, USA) typically downplayed these currents and emphasised others, that were there in surrealism too, but mostly had been far more of subcurrents during the 30s: hermeticism, mythology, politics as removed from concrete intervention (utopianism and eternal anarchism), ethnography, an antiscientific stand, romanticism, naive or mediumistic mythology themes in art, etc. (As usual, it is necessary to take caution; both paths contained local variations and contradictions of course.)

In this situation, and with a far larger number of surrealists around than ever before, it was a delicate task to reorganise the surrealist movement. Some wanted to confront and evaluate. This tendency was associated with "Cause", the new office for coordinating international and external surrealist relationships; where, it seems, some of more systemally minded french surrealists were trying to improve organisational forms together with the more theoretically impatient currents in other countries, like the Czech surrealists, English dissidents, Egyptian and Romanian hotheads. But what happened was that there was a major accumulation instead of confrontation, that the western war experiences were made the main focus in a broad integrative way that did not actually deny any aspect of whatever surrealism had once been. It was decided to focus on arranging a big impressive exhibition on a mythological theme displaying breadth and continuity to the public. The ideas to gather an international meeting to discuss experiences, directions and differences internally were turned down, and Cause soon closed down.

The nazi war experiences, or the differences in war experiences, were not subtracted nor openly denied, but they were not given a special place as a crucial theme or topic. At that point, surrealism suddenly became not just untimely but in a sense timeless, climbing up from its actual place in history to some imaginary vantage point in thin air. And still, by doing so at that particular time, it was of course also fulfilling a particular historical function by negating, in an untimely way, the post-war optimism, consumerism and faith in progress, dismissing all of capitalism, nationalism, stalinism and americanism alike. And of course, many of the surrealists of nazi war experiences, and newcomers during the war, were estranged in this situation, some of them turning out as isolated dissidents, but many making the remarkable mistakes of rallying back to stalinist communist parties, or launching new minuscule avantgarde movements, or both.

All themes were accepted into the group, and indeed the different subgroups that had joined together in 1946-47 or had emerged in the crowd there had quite different special interests and perhaps not so much common ground except a general commitment. The "La Revolution la nuit" group had joined as a unit, but the circles around other recent rallying points like the "Clair de Terre" and "Troisème convoi" and especially the main wartime nexus the "La Main à Plume" group were only partially absorbed; the "dandy surrealists" emerged; there were philosophers, bataillans, occultists, architects, cineasts and jazzfans; people returning from exiles in the US, Latin America, the UK; old seasoned activists, antifascists, trotskyists, syndicalists; groupuscules of recently arrived exiles from Czechoslovakia, Romania, Egypt; etc. Perhaps there was a similarity to the situation in 1925 in that no obvious direction was to be discerned, especially not since the option of assuming one had been actively turned down in favour of a unified broad manifestation? Obviously it wasn't enough to focus on some rather nearby enemy, such as the soon emerging coalition of surrealists of nazi war experience that weirdly tried to return to the fold of the stalinist Communist Parties, or the fashionable existentialists, eager to replace surrealism as a trend, while the surrealists didn't give them much attention at all back. The series of purgings taking place 1948-51 still seem strange, hardly warranted by the reasons given, and it has been suggested (Richardson & Fijalkowski) that they were in fact consciously or unconsciously a ritual fire bath to create a new sense of tribal cohesion in the new period with the new people (almost all prewar members were thrown out in the purgings).

An apparent historical nivellation of surrealism's perspectives and themes, which turns out to be instead merely a clean sweep with the plethora of available contradictions and personal varieties and reservations, is that what it is? Which indeed guaranteed surrealism's survival throughout the low tide of the postwar decades, among other things by making it something of a secret society, which had a mission on the eternal level which it would usually not put to test against petty situations and contradictions in such unimportant times? An ark, simply put? (famously, the "second ark" was the title of Breton's catalog preface when the 1947 exhibition moved to Prague). It was quite obvious how the beloved ark metaphor became very fitting for the Czech group with the repression and censorship they were facing, but in France? At least it is not strange that a lot of surrealists or would-be-surrealists were unsatisfied, or disappointed, or pissed off, when they wanted to act on the basis of their own war experiences, and when they wanted to apply tools of pre-war surrealism in particular strategic ways on post-war situations, or just keep the level of immediate subversion relatively high; and found no support for it. It is not strange that the emergence of the new popular movements in the 60s created an unbearable tension which seemed to demand a rebirth of surrealism.

Accumulation the 60s way

It was quite another thing for the new groups emerging in the 60s. When thus reinventing a movement it seems necessary to assume the right to the freedom of picking up any themes from the past that might fill a new relevance in the new context. It might be necessary of course to understand the steps, abandonments and departures made throughout history up to then, but it is not necessary to defend the victorious or the orthodox part in each such contradiction. All of these old fights and positionings were necessary in order to take us where we are today as an inclusive collective and a real movement, but it is not always necessary now to take sides – and especially not to take the side that won – in conflicts that already have had their historical effect. Some decisive turns may be reconsidered, and understood as strategical mistakes or expressions of historical necessities of very limited extension.

When starting a new activity it is about trying to find the angles and attack points of surrealism's many-faceted body that seems most relevant to one's own historical situation (often by potentially negating the immediate expectations in that situation) and to one's own subjective desires (often by replacing known wishes with unknown wishes and wishes for the unknown); in that sense, surrealism is confusingly rich and the options are numerous. Yet not arbitrary or wide open. Any version of surrealism concocted must have an inner coherence and make enough sense in relation to other points of contact within the surrealist movement, be they recent, old or very old, to allow for joint experimenting and investigating, and eventually for mutual confrontation of directions.

Thus, the new activities arriving in and reinventing surrealism in the 60s based in the new radicalism paradigm of the day, was just like the 1947 historical compromise on one level a timeless-like smorgasbord of surrealism's entire width of themes and standpoints. And yet they were not all represented there. One of the main points was to pick up and combine the radical aspects of marxism, anarchism, psychoanalysis, anthropology, hegelianism, hermeticism and popular culture – and not just to pick up and combine them, but also to emphasise that some constellation of that general kind is necessary for each to develop its emancipatory content, and to emphasise the very political edge of them at the same time as the imaginative potential, and the aspect of humour. This is most easily seen in the Chicago group (and emphasised as such in for example Ron Sakolsky's Surrealist subversions) but something similar was present in some form in all of the new activities of that time.

Thus, we see that these two historical cases (1947 and 60s) of reinventions of accumulated or timeless surrealisms, constructions of a surrealism beside time, did not create arbitrary selections nor a neutral nivellated smorgasbord of themes, but instead were specific responses to particular historical demands on the organisational level. The 1960s one appear fairly unproblematic, but the 1947 one was controversial and still remains so.

Attempted subtractions

Let's, on the other hand, take a quick look at some subtractions popularly attempted. Many try to subtract politics; especially people in the process of making careers, or hoping to attain such by appearing to be in line with current trends. Many try to subtract the historical break with purely aesthetic concerns, or the historical change of arena from the high society and careers of art, literature and academia. Some even try to subtract the historical break with christianity. Some try to subtract collectivity, feeling content to do their little experimenting alone, or shy. Some try to subtract hermeticism, somehow constricting the "open rationalism" central to surrealism into a more or less narrow rationalism, as a clumsy overexaggeration of the combat against the misconception of surrealism as an irrationalism, and against current religious horrors. Some try to subtract artistic creation, as a clumsy overexaggeration of the combat against artistic careerism and spectacular functioning of images in society in general.

Obviously, subtracting either of these particular big parts makes such a big difference that it may become very difficult to be solidaric with the history and experience of the movement, and perhaps difficult to attain any coherence of the project that is not just personal-eclectic or short-term instrumental. Of course, it remains open to give each of these aspects more or less emphasis in one's own activity, but to actually subtract them appears to create a platform which may perhaps no longer be surrealism.

What's your favourite subtraction? In fact, many subtractions are possible without a fatal effect. Indeed, with most of surrealism's classic positionings and classic sources, it remains healthy and partly exciting to reinterrogate, reevaluate and scrutinise them.

If some want to subtract the pictorial world of 30s surrealism, this is obviously not a problem since it was a particular field of investigation. If some want to subtract automatism, this is obviously not a problem since it is a method among others for exploring the poetic world; or rather, an attitude or disposition that takes expression in certain methods, so that it will possibly always find expression in the field of surrealist experimentation, voluntarily or not. If many people want to subtract say communism, this is not a big issue because communism as such was never an essential part of the surrealist project, it was, and in fact repeatedly turns out to be again, just one reasonable political application/alliance of surrealism's essential revolutionary and emancipatory quest. So subtracting communism is strictly speaking in a sense not possible, when communism as such has never there been as a basic component part to start with. Some of those who want to subtract communism are perhaps convinced anarchists, who want to reinterpret the eternal sympathy and undeniable similarities between surrealism and anarchism as something which also would mean a necessary association on that level of practical political alliances, thus violating the more fundamental surrealist attitude that such alliances are necessarily conditional and temporary. Others who claim to want to subtract communism, seem to be those who in fact rather would like to subtract active politics, practical solidarity outside a chosen circle, constructive applications of nonconformism, ardent anticapitalism, and revolutionary aims in general, and that, that is a bearing balk which cannot be subtracted without fatal consequences, but on the other hand always will need reinvention as particular implimentations proper to the specific historical circumstances.

Mattias Forshage

2011-01-03T01:17:00.000-08:00

Initial suspension

2011-01-03T01:16:00.000-08:00

Of the several periods within the history of surrealism when the direction ahead has been uncertain, perhaps the most crucial was the earliest one.

Automatic writing and most of the immediate sources of surrealism had been discovered already in 1919, but only in 1922 when Dada had risen and declined in Paris, these themes were made a rallying point for the radical poetic circles, and only during the second half of 1924 they were launched to the general public (with Aragon's manifesto "Une vague des Rêves", Breton's surrealist manifesto and the "Poisson soluble" collection of automatic texts, the opening of the Bureau of Surrealist Research, and finally the journal La Révolution surréaliste).

But even at this point the group was very heterogenous and the direction somewhat scuttling. In fact very soon after the public launch, already in 1925, activities were becoming poorly held together, and the future was uncertain, Breton stayed at home and thought about quitting, all kinds of revellings and jokes were suggested to be among the central activities, personal contradictions thrived. While the last bonds of collegiality with the cultural circles were finally thrown aside in the huge scandal of the Saint-Pol-Roux banquet in the summer of 1925 (where famously a quarrel over nationalism at a cultural dinner lead to fistfighting and wrecking furniture), there was at the same time an open conflict between three animators in the group trying to pull it each in their own direction.

There was at the time a kind of "constructive opposition" taking shape through the politisation of the group. Most people were radicalised by the revolt in Marocco; Breton, Masson and others started reading Marx and Trotsky; certain individuals joined the Communist Party. This politisation also lead to finding new allies, foremostly the Clarté group of communists, but also the young philosophers of Philosophies, and some old dadas, and with the emerging Belgian and Serbian surrealist circles, and several other individuals; all of these collaborated on the manifesto supporting the Maroccan Rif rebellion in august 1925. The collaboration with Clarté and Philosophies was formalised, for a short while almost to the point of fusion, which was one of the things breaking up internal continuity in the surrealist group. Visavis this collaboration and visavis the revolutionary movement in general, the sense of autonomy of the surrealist group was vividly discussed among its members, and very differing strong opinions were represented. Also many other fundamental questions were heatedly debated. Including art, where Naville claimed that it is self-evident that there is no such thing as surrealist painting (and Morise had said something similar before), but soon thereafter the Galerie Surréaliste was opened and Breton started writing Surrealism and Painting.

The three alternatives can be discerned as follows: On one hand the seductive pessimism, maximalistic, individualistic, voluntarist on the spiritual level, foremostly animated – and given a very gnostic tinge – by the personal demonism of Antonin Artaud, very effective in formulating and fuelling radical opposition to not only society on the whole but the human condition in general – in early 1925 this seemed to be the dominant mode of the group, and very obviously productive. Secondly, the more methodical moralism, collectivistic, intellectual, voluntarist on the moral and organisational level, leaning towards a conditional collective involvement in politics, and based in the growing but not yet solid personal dignity, reliability and trust of Breton. Finally, a directly political voluntarism was slowly taking shape, based in consistent revolutionary defeatism, claiming that only proletarian revolution can create a surrealist revolution and make real the movement's demands and desires, therefore that political activism must be prior to surrealist activity from a surrealist viewpoint – this direction was energised probably more by general polarising dynamics of the times than by its major proponent, the not all that charismatic Pierre Naville. (It is too simplifying, and too eager to legitimate the winning alternative, to suggest that "artaudism" was only about spiritual revolution, "navillism" only about material revolution, and "bretonism" about combining the two – it tends for all three to obscure their main point and attraction – neither of those two alternatives nor their simple combination can be regarded as specifically surrealist!) Now if many other members wanted to moderate or combine these three paths, nevertheless these three characters insisted and eventually ended up in an implacable opposition towards each other (all three threatened to withdraw from the group at some point!). For one year it was quite uncertain which direction the group would take, and also whether it would actually survive this inner conflict.

But the outcome of the tug of war soon cleared. Breton had grabbed the editorship of La Révolution surréaliste already in 1925 explicitly to counter the "artaudian" negativist dynamics. Politics became a major interest for a large part of the group. Artaud left the group in 1926, at around the same period as a couple of literary figures uninterested in politics (like Soupault & Vitrac). Somewhat later several leading surrealist announced their individual and critical adherence to the communist party, (where they got constantly harassed by the stalinist officials of course). Politisation was still held up as an active problem, and Naville's book La Révolution et les Intellectuelles (1926) was appreciated and remained under discussion, but the surrealist group had become more of a coherent collective with a distinct direction, with a distinct mode of collectivity, and, with Breton as the undisputed central figure. Finally, Naville left the group to become a leading Trotskyist. During these years in the late 20s, surrealist painting was explored and surrealism largely stepped back from its claims to be able to replace the entirety of the forms in bourgeois culture with automatic texts, dream accounts and games, while the internationalisation of surrealism continued.

In 1929, Breton's new manifesto was published launching some new themes or strategies for surrealism, and a lot of people left the group, but it is not the turning point that most historians have wanted to make of it. A widespread misunderstanding is that everybody who didn't want to get into politics were expelled in 1929 with the appearance of the second manifesto. In fact, most of the apolitical members had already left long before (Soupault, Vitrac, Artaud, Delteil etc), and most of those who went in 1929 – before the second manifesto was published – were communists, or curious about communism, just like most of those who remained. One factor that has been held forth recently is that Breton's marriage collapsed at the time, causing some close friends of Simone Breton to leave the group in sympathy with her (at least Morise and Queneau). But it clearly seems like most of those who left were just inconvenient with the eagerness to regroup with larger coherence, with a sense of occultation and without vanguardism, with full moral commitment to an integrative poetic revolutionary project. It was people who wanted to be able to remain half-time surrealists, or couldn't accept other's critique of immoral and despicable activities under the excuse "to make a living", or were still hoping for literary, journalistic or political carreers. And since there were new members approaching, this indeed came to a dramatic decantation – a quick headcount of members of the surrealist group (the headcount cannot be anything but quick, because otherwise we'd need either to decide on particular criteria on whom to count this time, or to debate a large number of uncertain cases at length) says there were almost 40 members in the group in the beginning of 1929, but 22 in the end of the year, and with an overlap of only 11 persons. A dramatic decantation, but not a major course shift, rather a final realisation of the nature of the commitment demanded by this project at this moment in time.

Flowershop schematics

2010-12-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

A recent little flair in organisational discussions sparked by events of no public concern has provided a pretext to formulate some new general thoughts and to return to some old favourites (the particularities of post-classic surrealist organising, the sense of surrealist antihumanism, the joy of curiousness, the importance of error, the role of strategy) some of which have particular applications in recent, ongoing or upcoming discussions.

Surrealist quasihumanism

Even if curiosity appears like a force of nature, the standard "stand-by" mode of the poetic organ, it can be considered on an intellectual level too, and not just ending up with Freud suggesting it to be the twisting into a socially acceptable goal of the given drive for investigating the physical differences between the sexes and the enigma of where children come from. We were discussing curiosity towards other surrealists.

For me, in fact, every single other surrealist has things to teach me. To begin with they often have anecdotes and personal characterisations of surrealists that I haven't met, and more importantly they often have experiences of their own failures and successes in terms of organising and experiments, but the major point is that in the end every single one of them has a unique way of having acknowledged, approached and appropriated surrealism and therefore a unique constellation of angles and particularities constituting that individual reflection of surrealism, and therefore also something to teach me about surrealism itself as such.

The point is not whether I will enjoy their company or not, whether our social skills or lack thereof will match, more that everyone will make an example worth consideration, a worthy suggestion.

CM Lundberg: Groundless action

To this "surrealist quasi-humanism" it might be necessary to also add a disclaimer. In many cases, people's personal vanity, or eagerness to stick to banal misunderstandings, represents a serious obstacle on the practical level that will make this unique angle virtually inaccessible or at least hardly worth the effort. Among these unique angles, many are exotic distorsions based on personal instrumental needs, that are interesting primarily as negative examples...

Surrealist antihumanism

One important point of anti-humanism is to get rid of the perpetual obsession for self-justification and self-defense that keeps people from discovering anything new, taking risks, pooling our resources, and truly communicating.

Ok, I certainly think my own perspectives can be argued for, and my own impression of people has a validity; but my own sensibility and my own judgment are but tools, in fact my self, my existence as an individual, is but a tool, for the large-scale machination of the chaotic interference and reciprocality of passions governed by none which is the poetry of the world, and more specifically, I have put my own sparkling and ridiculous person in the service of that great conspiracy of cultivation of that poetry known as surrealism. Surrealism is my weapon of choice to some extent, but I find the other way around much more crucial, how I am a strange flower in surrealism's arsenal.

I too prefer people I like to people I dislike, and promising atmospheres to suffocating ones, but I remain suspicious that any such assessments of mine may be made on the basis of comfort, which is objectively misleading from the viewpoints of both poetic, epistemic and social dynamism, or that I may be simply mistaken. I could dismiss an association for lack of dynamism (for repetitivity or predictability or banality or comfortable habit) or for lack of seriousness (superficial noise and craving for entertainment) but if I would do it for instrumental reasons, or spontaneously, or strictly based on emotions, or strictly based on an argument, I would take great interest in doubting and questioning that judgment. Because intuitions, emotions and rational reasons are, in my view, merely functions whereby that approximate entity known as my person tries to find its path, and there is nothing in them that I consider worth eagerly defending or identifying with the focal point of my sensibility, which is necessarily an ambiguous and errant point. Just like in science, it is strictly speaking easier, as well as more meaningful and more constructive, to demonstrate something to be wrong than to be right. To be proven wrong is simply one of the most obvious situations of epistemological privilege where the configuration of the world is unstable, prejudices topple, the field of possibilities opens wide.

(If I argue at length for some of the positions I take, it is more in the purpose of conveying all facts, laying the cards on the table, demonstrating what conditions and logics that determine that position, in order to make it transparent, and to invite objections on a level as advanced as possible, rather than to convince someone or to justify my position. I am not making a fetish of arguing, since most "critical discussions" remain in sterile bickering over semantics, and many ideas have an inspiratory power regardless of being flawed or false...)

CM Lundberg: Manifestation with fishes

(Let's repeat that semantic point about intuition once again. I have here used the word in the cynical sense of "the total configuration of unconscious and preconscious prejudices", or what we call spontaneous judgment, good for most practical purposes. I have often ended up in quarrels over this, as some people, and sometimes myself too, instead use the word "intuition" for designating the very "focal point of sensibility" conducting the choir of epistemic means at hand. It remains important to note in this connection, that since rational reasoning has a limited range, dead angles, and is easily manipulated, and other particular methods have only specific applications, it is only such a higher-order intuition that is able to identify truth in some substantial sense (beyond both the instrumental and the scientific senses of conditional truth) and more importantly to distinguish between the interesting and the uninteresting, but that is an intuition which must have passed through thorough self-scrutiny, self-questioning, and the experience of systematic disorder of the senses... )

CM Lundberg: Houses of the rising sun

Surrealist anarchism

Surrealism looks for the point of no rule. But just like any formal anarchism it must ask itself "who rules if no one rules?" and dismiss a large number of alternatives. First of all, if there are no effective mechanisms to keep power in check, of course the one who had most power before, or most money, will rule; liberalism. If there are mechanisms restricting ascension to power, habit will rule alongside silent manipulations. Excessive behavior might multiply, but excessive behavior manifesting the same banal desires and ressentiments in mere pathetic gestures again reinforcing the rule of the normal order. Only where habit, banality and prejudice are actively counteracted, the path of no rule will truly be a path towards freedom. And it is therein that a fundamental anarchism of surrealism lies. We wish to live a life that is not just not in the control of some particular other force, but a life which does not conform to somebody's control at all, and therefore would disenvelop according to its own dynamics.

Anarchism itself remains the only political theory based on unrestricted democracy. Thus it has a strong focus on procedure, which is the first step of a methodological attempt. But usually, as it were, stopping short, in the fluctuation between decision-making so ultrademocratically slow as to be practically impotent on the one hand, and bonehead spontanism to counter this on the other hand. There is very little strategy in anarchism.

CM Lundberg: The voyage of Randolph Carter

While surrealism, sometimes consciously, and sometimes merely implicitly due to its interest in methodology, is quite strategical in its long-term quest for a truly anarchic life. On the everyday level, surrealism strives for nothing but to "tune in" to the dynamics of the unknown, long-term striving to open portals and "slight disturbances" that change "business as usual" into a state where effectively no one has the power to impose any of their prejudiced aims, avoiding most of the noisy and predictable gestures of spontanism and looking for the truly strange angles, where everything is a windling path fuelled by the interplay of desire and chance through enchanted landscapes full of monsters.

Surrealist horizontal organising

An anarchistic organisation of surrealism in a decentralised and diffusely circumscribed network of heterogenous contact points differently linked through selective affinities, is the inevitable result of the death of the founder and (somewhat later) the subsequent (temporary) abandonment of organised activity in its historical centre of Paris. It is neither a regrettable organisational incapability, nor a consciously adopted implementation of anarchist ideology, but merely a historical effect. With particular possibilities inherent. Which seem particularly adequate in the present historical situation where available knowledge of democracy and vigilance towards everyday injustice is far greater than before, strategies of resistance and of cultivating various aspects of freedom have multiplied, while miserabilist organisation of life is reinforced by rampant conformism and ever-increasingly aggressive exploitation.

Any dreams of reorganising a surrealist international according to a leninist vanguardist model with national sections, a central line, or just the unambiguous line drawn to separate the true core from the rest, are just as practically unattainable as pointless today.

Real meetings between people are still at the core of this (groups, for true synergistic, overindividual and antihumanistic effects, for mutual moral criticism and poetic encouragement, for manifesting a collective thinking, playing, creating, etc). Nevertheless, international collaboration goes on at a daily basis through digital communication, and numerous projects and even groups are organised according to other delimitations than geographical ones. (Still, I find it difficult to see reasons not to take opportunities to meet any surrealists physically available.)

Within this, we will keep elaborating our principles and investigating their consequences. Some of us will keep emphasising the importance of our history and continuity as well as of the chosen designation of that tradition (surrealism in the letter). In bilateral terms here will be approachments, brawls, romances, ongoing tensions as well as dead zones. We will keep cultivating our friendship and collaboration with those who are interested in posing a similar kind of questions, investigating a similar type of experiments, provoking ourselves with similar atmospheres, regardless of which country they're in and regardless of how great their knowledge of the surrealist tradition and how devoted to the surrealist letter they are.

/M.Fo.

In praise of infighting

2010-12-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

From the inception of the movement to the present day, Surrealists have been devoting time, energy, ingenuity and material resources to hating each other’ guts. We have a glorious history of splits, infighting, self-destruction, cannibalism and general fuck-uppery. When we fall out with each other it is rarely a case of politely agreeing to disagree. We spit, we scratch, we scream, punch and kick, tear at each others’ veins, banish each other to outer darkness, drag each other through the shit, and every fight is always to the death.

The attitude of many Surrealists today seem to be that this kind of infighting is a bad thing, at best unnecessary, at worst potentially fatal to the movement as a whole. The same plaintive cries go up at every fight, not just from the appalled bystanders but also, as often as not, from the protagonists of the infighting themselves. Why do Surrealists fight so viciously, and so often? Shouldn’t we be fighting our enemies instead of each other? Why can’t we be more united? Aren’t we all struggling for the same goal?

I’m not interested at this point in the rights and wrongs of particular splits and fights, including those that I’ve played a role in myself. I’m also not very interested in arguments to the effect that open disagreement and/or free expressions of anger within the movement are ‘healthy’, because the imperative to psychological or emotional health seems is something of which Surrealists should be highly suspicious at best. Instead I want to take a step back and to reflect on some possible alternative ways to think about Surrealist infighting.

To start with the idea that we shouldn’t fight because we’re all ultimately struggling for the same goal: what, then, is the goal of the Surrealist movement? The pat reply to this question is usually: to change life and transform the world. That famous Bretonian watchword uniting Rimbaud and Marx sums up exactly how and why Surrealists do not, in fact, share a common goal. The Surrealist movement, as we all so fond of repeating, is neither an art movement (because we regard the social revolution as a burning Surrealist necessity) nor a political movement (the annihilation of one’s being into a diamond which is no more the soul of ice than of fire is hardly a comprehensible political demand). Our insistence on the simultaneity of Marx and Rimbaud, life and the world, social revolution and the imagination triumphant, is what makes Surrealism – regardless of the specific political commitments of individual Surrealists – in its essence a utopian movement. Our goal is utopia: our goal is nowhere: we have no goal.

So we are not all pursuing a common objective which we will attain that little bit sooner if we unite and work together. Unity is a red herring. Surrealism is a collective adventure, but collectivity is not the same thing as unity, any more than adventure is the same as pursuit of a goal. And insofar as splits and infighting are searing shared experiences of rage, passion, pain, mutual hatred and destruction – not to mention hilarity and exhilaration – don’t they count as particularly intense expressions of, precisely, collectivity, shared experiences not just within but also between the warring groups? Even perhaps – let’s push the argument – peculiar forms of collective adventure in their own right? Surely there’s no one in the movement who thinks that collectivity should be safe, agreeable, or merely positive in any generally accepted sense. Negativity is a vital dimension of any truly collective dynamic, and I’m suggesting that it is more exciting and productive to embrace and investigate its periodic eruptions than to regret or condemn them. The forest of the unknown is full of horrors as well as enchantments.

Embracing and investigating collective negativity requires inventiveness, courage and terrifying honesty. This is not the least of the reasons why we are usually so reluctant to do it. Nobody wants to spend their time at group meetings or on collaborative projects gnashing their teeth and drinking their comrades’ blood. But while the group members sit around the table, having their discussions and playing their games, the maw of the group’s collective unconscious is ever open. The more ‘successful’ the group on its own terms – the more it exceeds the sum of its parts, the more exciting, the more intuitive and creative it becomes – the wider the jaws, the sharper the teeth…

So let’s embrace and investigate the monsters that this collective unconscious vomits forth. Here comes one now, a real whopper: his name is Oedipus, and if we ignore him he most definitely will not go away. For those individuals who have grown up under the sign of the nuclear family – which is probably a fairly large proportion of those currently active in the Surrealist movement, given its geographical and cultural distribution – the dynamic of the Oedipal family romance is one of the most readily available patterns of group interaction, and one against which we all need to be constantly and explicitly vigilant. The danger lies precisely in the fact that the family romance, in Surrealist contexts as much as in mainstream ones, often dissembles its more blatantly oppressive aspects behind the compensations it offers in return: companionship, comfort, a sense of shared identity, an occasional refuge from a fucking horrible world. The danger is that the collective unconscious (whether of a formally constituted Surrealist group, or of a looser or more temporary collective, or even at the level of the movement as a whole) may all too easily lapse into an Oedipal mode and silently form itself into the private haven of a ‘family home’, complete with nursery and servants’ quarters. There’s the parent-child dynamic: respect your elders, do your homework, nurture my potential, change my nappy. There’s the sibling dynamic: you’re my brother, you’re my sister, you’re my rival, they love you more than they love me…

The family romance plot is almost certainly present in the collective unconscious of almost every current group and collective, because for most of the participants it is not just the first pattern of group interaction they ever knew, but the one which formed their ‘personalities’ at a basic level (and this is also one of the reasons why Surrealism must be anti-humanist and opposed to ‘personality’). The intensity of rage, pain and joy unleashed by really serious infighting probably comes in large part from this unconscious family dynamic. What can be more thrilling than to kill one’s father? What more appalling than to be attacked by one’s child, or more paralysing than to watch one’s parents and siblings tear the family apart?

The monster of Oedipus demands constant and explicit vigilance, then, and the deliberate invention and cultivation of alternative forms of collective life. All kinds of alternative models are already to hand and many more remain to be invented, from superhero teams to libertine conspiracies to wolf packs. The difficulty is always to make those models work as really operational egregores rather than merely as rhetorical self-exhortations, and that will only be possible if we first accept and embrace the power of collective negativity, including Oedipus, as a creative force in its own right.

The trick is not to fight the monster, but to embrace and transform it into something else. Tam Linn is transformed into a newt, an adder, a bear, a lion, a red-hot iron and a burning coal, but it’s precisely because Fair Jenny refuses to let go of him that he finally becomes her beautiful naked lover.

/M.Fl.

Surrealism's phoenix act in the sixties

2010-12-07T06:43:00.000-08:00

(This is one of the transition expositions promised in "three eras of surrealism")

In the 60s the tension grew, when the traditional basis for surrealism had shrinked back into being a rather self-contained (untimely indeed) small circle of radical intellectuals passing on the tradition, a sort of secret doctrine (in fact exactly like waning anarchism at the same time!), while at the same time there was a completely new paradigm of radicalism emerging, partly more integrative and experimental and easily congruent with surrealism already to start with. The surrealist groupings that were surfacing at this time (Chicago group, TransformaCtion in the UK, BRSH in the Netherlands, the new Bruxelles group, etc) appear to have been so much more unproblematically based in the new paradigm, with everyday politics, counterculture identity, direct democracy, psychedelia, reinvented anarchism, youth culture and youth revolt, situationism and other modernist-ultraradical currents, etc (and were perhaps partly lacking the background), while the Paris group seems to have been emphasising the heritage, the ark function, adapting to the new ideas only slowly and as something external.

I keep reading the old issues of l'Archibras and the Bulletin de Liaison surréaliste, and Joubert's revealing book Le Mouvement des Surréalistes, ou le fin mot de l'Histoire as being to a rather large extent about the problematic inception of new radicalism into french surrealism. It has been said many times that the dissolution of the french group in 1969 was an effect of the demoralisation following Breton's death and the failure to engage immediately, collectively, effectively and organically in the '68 movement which instead appeared like a sudden external confirmation of much of surrealism out of the blue. Some people have emphasised, and it is clearly demonstrated in Joubert's book, that this is to a large extent due to mistakes, irrelevant ambitions, blind spots and erroneous priorities of the leadership of the french group at the time (Schuster et cie). However, what is also dramatically striking in Joubert's book is the lack of democratic structure in the french group in the 60s, the immense damage a faulty leader could do simply because everybody followed him or else they were isolated. In that sense, it was not only the case that the things going on in society leading up to '68 was ignored because a leader didn't know where to look, but also the very fact that everybody was following a leader was itself a symptom of the ignorance of the currents of the time.

Now of course this polarisation is not clearcut, with each real surrealist activity comprising certain elements of both paradigms. And especially Prague appears to have had an ambiguous role, resurfacing apparently part of a new broad movement, yet with most of their critical edge and impact due to a strong traditional approach. Indeed the czech had been carrying the torch through decades of darkness and clandestinity, taking great care not to allow any compromise of the doctrine, yet still when they reemerged czech surrealism had a distinct flavor of new radicalism, new everyday politics and psychedelia, while clearly demarcating itself against (though of course not necessarily denouncing) much of such more "popular" forms of resistance. In the Bulletin de Liaison surréaliste – the organ of the French "antiliquidationists" but also very much devoted to expressing the international movement and especially being an organ of the czech almost as much as of the french (this was in stark contrast to other french post-war surrealist journals, that were purely french journals with individual contributors from abroad and occasional letters or notes reporting about there being surrealist activities in other countries) – the new approaches are in focus, but still rather much in a classical framework, and much of the content is still about keeping the old flame alive in the face of official liquidationism. This tendency is far more dominating in the subsequent anthology La Civilisation surréaliste, clearly represent a hermetic approach, caring for the secrets, establishing a hidden place for the eternal flame, keeping the voice down, focusing on an irreductive epistemology and endless problematisations, refusing all simplifications – all in a very clear methodological opposition to the ultraradicalism, pedagogic and propagandist simplifications, quick alliancemakings and proud orthodoxy of especially american surrealism at the time (but, it must be noted, not at all in polemics or antagonism towards that current; instead they were the two fraternal poles of the field of postclassic surrealist activity against the liquidationists).

(Another issue where this image/categorisation seems compelling to me is in various recent bickering between the Madrid and Stockholm groups – with both being partly troublesome mavericks of the surrealist movement one might expect Madrid and Stockholm to have a lot in common. Yet I think there might be some explanatory power in regarding Madrid as founded in a very classical surrealism and moving along the path of ultraradicalism and iconoclasm, while Stockholm is founded in the "modern" paradigm and recently moving into focusing on a defense of surrealism; setting out from opposite directions, Madrid and Stockholm meet at the open sea at night, without really sharing a critical language, exchanging some fireworks in a thick mist...)

So what was born in this specific transition was modern-day surrealism, post-classic surrealism, 3rd generation surrealism, or post-bretonian surrealism. Something completely different than, yet exactly the contemporary manifestation of, classic surrealism. Far more democratic, even more internationalist, even further removed from within-artistic concerns and art world, more underground, even more activist, just as nonconformist and uncompromising and antiutilist and non-pragmatic and hermetic and traditionalist, far more interested and versed in popular culture and new popular forms of resistance, even more insisting on collectivity and game-playing... here we are.

The ecology of trash: the memoirs question and my american dung trowel

2010-10-05T10:15:00.001-07:00

The ecology of trash

There is a famous definition of dirt from anthropology (Mary Douglas) as "whatever is in the wrong place". This emphasises the relativity of trash, and provides little for the understanding of what trash actually is. As a biologist, I consider it absolutely necessary to make a first distinction between rubbish and pollution. Rubbish are the things which do not interact much with the system, are not quickly degradable, and the human reactions against them are therefore primarily aesthetical. Pollution are the things which do interact easily with the system, are quickly degradable, and the human reactions against them are often based on concerns for the ecosystem.

Thus, rubbish are the things anybody may keep recognising as traces of human presence for a long time – artifacts of plastic, solid metals, concrete, glass, stone, treated wood etc. They have little fast interactions with the local system, and there is no good "ecological" argument against rubbish (there certainly is against the mass production of non-degradable and non-reutilisable packages in general, but not specifically against everyday-level littering). Therefore the problem is mostly that littering could be a sign of lack of orderliness or "poor morals" in the human population. In the city, it is still active in contributing to circulation because it keeps a class of lowpayed workers occupied, and it exposes brand logos without expensive advertisement costs. Outside the city, such as in the forest and on beaches, it is less active but may cause controversy when it keeps reminding romantically-minded nature-lovers that the landscapes are not pristine, and in a similar way may to anybody sabotage the atmospheres experienced by adding compulsory irrelevant associations. Thus, rubbish is an aesthetical category, it is about the economy and dynamics of sensory impressions and associations. And here we are definitely in the sphere of the relativistic anthrolopological argument: many people would say that paved roads, cars and buildings are rubbish only when they are abandoned; some will say they are rubbish also when in use.

Pollution disappears from sight more quickly because it contributes to the local system (paper, food scraps, excrement, urine, ionized metals, carcasses, untreated wood, toxic waste, "chemicals"), and we can make a proximate distinction between poison (immediately toxic to organisms) and fertilizers (short-term advantageous for organisms). Fertilisers can be far more dangerous than poisons though. To start with; adding nutrients will usually twist the species composition so that few common competitive species will thrive while many rare species will perish. Then, the increased mass of organic material will consume a lot of oxygen when degrading, and in a habitat with a limited oxygen supply it will run short, and dead areas are created (*).

The distinctions are not at all clearcut. Degradation is dependent on climate, to begin with. In a warm humid climate, many solid metals corrode quickly and a lot of things become pollution which would have been rubbish elsewhere. And on the other hand, in a dry or a very cold climate, degradation is slowed down so that even scraps of food and carcasses may be permanented as rubbish. And among the types of pollution all relationships are complex. Many poisons can be said to act by nurturing uncontrolledly (hormones for example). And take calcium, which can be immediately toxic, acts as a fertiliser and may increase diversity and sustainability. (Then there are other classes of pollution with their own problematics which we can not go into the delicate problematics of here: such as genetically modified organisms and radioactive waste.)

My american dung trowel

Perhaps most people don't regularly dig in dung, but I am a dung beetle enthusiast and researcher (herbivore dung is more interesting to me than human shit, mind you). My normal tool is a gardening trowel. But last year I was given a remarkable artifact as a present by good friends, an american dung trowel. We sure don't have particular dung trowels in europe. And the package of this one expounded a generalised life strategy (a so-called philosophy): one should make as little impact as possible. So this was an ecotourist gadget: if you had to shit while camping, you should make sure to bury your crap so that no one could see you had been there!

Ok, a low-impact strategy is often strongly preferrable to the alternatives, on ecological as well as moral, political and aesthetical grounds. But it is also a generalisation of paranoid anal sadism. And it is sometimes used as an argument against radical change, or against all reform and historical dynamics. Furthermore, significantly in this particular case, it is a part of the common american environmentalist idea complex, one aspect of which is the idealisation of "nature" without human presence, historically connected with the specific denial of the indigenous population of North America and of the extent to which they had shaped the landscape. It can be taken as a bit cynical to see low impact supported at home while the United States forcefully apply their branding iron everywhere else in the world.

Specifically, there is not much point in burying your shit. At first glance, burying is a purely aesthetical gesture since it still feeds the environment with the nutrients. But this choice has ecological consequences, since the organisms degrading it subterraneanly will not be the same as the ones degrading it overground – overground there are for example many insects specialised on such resources, several of which are rare and threatened. Well, I don't suppose any local populations of threatened species will survive specifically on campers' crap, but there is not much point in denying the local assembly this resource either. Not even the argument of reducing fertilisation is a strong one, since the carbohydrates dominating dung are in fact far less powerful fertilising agents than for example urine, which has nitrogen in higher concentrations and indeed can be locally devastating. If you care about ecological low-impact living: go piss in water closets connected to sewage purification plants and not outdoors, but there's no big reason not to shit anywhere. (**) But no one seriously opposes public urinating, except the police and some overzealous feminists who take the metaphor of "territorial pissing" (which in the real form makes little sense in humans) litterally.

Leaving memoirs

So, at the individual level, the problem of rubbish is as I said a purely aesthetical problem. Different people are differently inclined here. Some are happy to just drop whatever waste they produce wherever they are, some are even more eager and work hard to leave a trace on the environments they visit, while some are careful to make as little impact as possible. Surrealists often cite Lautréamont saying "I shall leave no memoirs", but many surrealists do write memoirs and other anecdotal works anyway, and many are very eager to expose their names in journals, books, exhibitions, webpages, etc.

It is all anal in the sense that it relates to potty training, to the control of withholding and releasing. But when releasing becomes compulsory, it is usually related to a specific lack of concern about consequences, or in fact a mere strategy in manifesting power through not caring, or of a struggle for attention maybe conditioned by uninterested parents. Withholding compulsorily is the classic anal-sadistic disturbance euphemised as pedantery etc, and may be related to interested parents instead, when in late childhood and early adolescence this strategy becomes meaningful as the obsession not to leave much traces based on which the detective parents can deduce whatever one has been up to. The latter strategy comes to use in paranoia visavis the authorities, but may elsewhere make good impressions on friends of order and cleanliness. The subversion that is so secret that it leaves no traces also has very little occasion to actually subvert something.

Surrealists have little reason to partake in this era's grand competition over exposure of personal names as brand names. "I would like to see that those of us who are on their way of making a name for themselves, would erase it" as Nougé famously said. Here at Icecrawler these concerns have been discussed several times, with "Re: surrealist groups and publicity" perhaps as a centerpiece. We tend to believe more in messages in a bottle, in the capacity of the desire of the interested to find the relevant. Of course the noise, the advertised nonsense, the generalised rubbish, often makes this difficult. It might be useful to use personal names as scattered signs for the interested to follow, and for attachment points in building the bigger structure of collective experience. Because it is all about conveying experience. I think it makes sense to regard the accounts of our experiences as a very special kind of rubbish, a rather discrete one that does not yell for attention and disturb the general perception of the landscape, but should be in plain view for anyone who knows how to look for it.

Mattias Forshage

(*) For example, we have this problem with dead sea beds in the Baltic.

(**) I don't know if I need to make this reservation: openly or buried, it is not a good idea to dump large quantities of human excrement in the environment, because it may feed e-coli-bacteria to the groundwater and potentially cause health problems.

three eras of surrealism

2010-10-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

The history of surrealism remains a source of inspiration and a battleground. While the quality of much of academic surrealismology has certainly been rising the past decades, it is still very often the old traded misunderstandings and simple errors that reach wide circulation in exhibitions, newspaper criticism and popular books, and other areas of historiography; and in many cases even those who are attracted by surrealism and take part in it swallow much of their general knowledge of the movement's history through such popular sources – in the cases where they do not have a special interest in history, thus impatiently striving to put it into practice rather than caring for historical detail. It must be admitted at this point that the official internal traded version of the history of the movement may hold some flaws and some dangerous simplifications: a few decades ago, back in the days of reigning poor surrealismology, it was safe to say that generally surrealists were far better "experts" in surrealism than the experts in surrealism were (whatever it would actually mean to be an expert in surrealism, we're not going into this here), but this is sometimes not the case anymore. Not only are several of the academics now quite careful and well-read, it is also the case that very many surrealists see little meaning in taking up the competition over knowledge of historical detail with them who are getting payed for dealing with it but who will always miss an important dimension due to the lack of own experience and therefore integrated sense of a whole surrealist perspective. But then, it becomes quite crucial which sources the active surrealists utilise as their standard references for historical information.

So, in order to make the various small points of surrealist historiography and its consequences for surrealist strategy and organisation that is one of the more prominent themes on this blog, I find it necessary to lay down some basic terms here.

It seems to be of crucial importance for understanding the conditions of surrealist activity at different points in time to see that this is something which had clearly changed its objective character in history. (Many surrealists themselves will deny that for polemical reasons, instead emphasising the exemplary continuity, as if historical change would seriously threaten their legitimity.) Now for any particular historiographical project, one will have to assess periodisations depending on the factors relevant for these particular questions. Obviously the surrealist movement has gone through all kinds of changes depending on the failures and successes of organisational initiatives, on events in the world such as wars, crises, repression, radical upsurges, etc. What I'm suggesting here is just that the sense of being a movement has fundamentally changed twice.

Surrealism remains one and continuous, and in order to stay one and stay in history it has twice rejuvenated itself in fire. Thus three times (the inception and the two reinceptions), surrealism has been in a fluid state in the midst of a dramatic favorable wind, and come out with a different face, for some less recognisable, or actively denied. According to this there has been three different eras, three different basic historical modes. It is not very important for me to pinpoint any exact dates for change (especially since the overlaps are huge, and the objective characteristics of several periods are manifested simultaneously) nor to suggest fancy terms for the periods, what I am emphasising is the importance of recognising that such major shifts in historical focus have occurred. I don't think it will be that controversial, even though I do loan myself to some simplifications in matters that will surely prove more complex under careful thinking and careful historic study.

a) Classic surrealism from the inception of the group under the new term and in the new direction of experimentation in 1922, throughout historical changes of the 30s and the hardships of war (internationalisation was an early consequence of the inner dynamics, 1929 was not a major direction shift, the war outbreak was circumstances made more difficult). This might also be called 1st generation surrealism. Surrealism slowly gave itself its shape through its temporary historical decisions, and had no heritage to be concerned about (except that freely chosen), and kept developing and going forward through new discoveries, abandoned areas of experimentation, strategical decisions, etc.

b) Late-classic surrealism from the reorganisation of surrealism in the late 40s. This might also be called post-war surrealism or 2nd generation surrealism. Organised surrealism cared much about keeping the tradition alive to hand it over to the future. It made less inventions, and no overall changes as its concerns about itself emphasised continuity, inclusivity and integrity to the point of reintegrating abandoned or conflicting viewpoints and strategies and thereby creating a sense of timeless surrealism. While the more impatient, vanguardist or ultraradical currents typically budded off into new para-surrealist movements. Indeed most of the surrealist advances on the theoretical, artistical and political levels were made outside the surrealist movement in the most narrow sense, yet it was there that they were reintegrated. After the few years in the late 40s that was a great favorable wind, the quantitative summit of the surrealist movement, and a dramatic situation of fruitful uncertainty, the 50s and early 60s were an all-time low, when more or less all groups outside the Paris group stepped over into various varieties of para-surrealism or simply ceased activity.

c) Post-classic surrealism from the refounding of surrealism in a new paradigm of popular radicalism in the 60s. This might also be called post-breton surrealism or 3rd generation surrealism. Throughout the decade (and partly still!) a rather unresolved tension surfaced between new groups that were based in the new radicalism and old groups which had difficulties relating to the new radicalism even though they indeed had heralded and inspired it. In the french group, these difficulties were added to the difficulties naturally following Breton's death, expressed in the partial and ineffective participation in the '68 movement, and finally triumphed in the dissolution of the french group. In the new situation, the surrealist movement found itself being far more underground, without the mass media's or art world's attention, a more democratic network structure, and in all kinds of ways finding a new relevance based in the new paradigm for all of surrealism's traditional themes and methods.

(The only terminological issue that may be important is a minor one. "Postsurrealism" is a common and fitting term for an eclectic abandoning of surrealism, especially in the art world – let it remain that and don't ever accept any attempts to confusionally and derogatorily apply the term to active post-classic surrealism.)

Now I would say that for most historical questions, this division into three periods suggests something of the different framework for dealing with various questions and ideas throughout surrealist history. But from a historical viewpoint, what I consider very crucial to surrealism is to look closer at these periods of transition, to see what the options were and what were the factors that decided the routes to follow. This is of course of great strategical importance to the surrealist movement, and while I am not surprised that the academic historians have usually failed to see the crucial relevance of these transitionary periods (or merely seen them as chaotic accumulation of anecdotes of contradictions), I think it is important for us as surrealists to grapple with them.

Separate forthcoming posts will be devoted to each of these transition periods.

M Forshage

Everything not everything

2010-10-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

This is a response to one of the themes raised by NN:s "The canopy of z – objectivity and surrealism" below, but less than a passionate defense of a particular standpoints. I just want to explicate to what extent this attitude that "everything remains to be done" as well as its opposite remain compatible with surrealism. Surrealism strives to be that nexus where such contradictions are resolved, but in practice individuals still often feel a larger or smaller affinity for either way of reasoning, and it is often necessary in concrete action to make a choice, which for each particular situation is then primarily a strategical choice.

"Everything remains to be done"

First, the libertarian argument. As enthusiasts of freedom we like to open up, and to stand before and savor, fields of possibilities of maximal range. The feeling that "everything remains to be done" AND that "anything is possible" are fundamental to the phenomenology of freedom. We are always at the starting point. It is simply the locus of the feast.
Second, the anti-authoritarian argument. Poetry must be always reinvented at heart, and previous authorities and simple empirical conclusions are in a sense always irrelevant to the creative impulse. No one is to tell us which mistakes to make and which not. Back-to-basics. Intuition. Blank slate. Joy of rediscovery.
Third, the ludic argument. We must allow our priorities to be dictated by the dynamics of the game itself, to refuse utilistic concerns and control exerted by external agents such as preconceived rational planning.
Fourth, the revolutionary argument. All the things we crave are possible in a generalised way only in a society which is drastically more fair and free than the current. This will change the conditions for everything radically so that we really can't know for certain what will be possible and what not. Therefore our results and plans so far can be nothing but pleasurable and/or subversive exercises, that we don't know for sure if they'll have any relevance at all when things get around.
Fifth, the scientific argument. Whatever results we have shouldn't be extrapolated to generalisations, they do not necessarily tell the truth in any stronger sense than the scientific: it is what resulted from a particular investigation with particular methods. Methods, parameters and circumstances can be varied interminably and it is not easy to say which might cause significant differences, breakthroughs or transformations. The number of remaining experiments is endless.
Sixth, the modest argument. We may have good reasons for a certain disappointment in to what extent the surrealist movement so far has been capable of designing its experiments and formulating its conclusions in a systematic way. The immodest research program is technically really only in its early beginnings and the actual milestone results are few.

"Everything does not remain to be done" (a special case of which is the "we are almost there" suggested by NN)

First, the general historical argument. History is change, and most fundamentally it is change of the configuration of the field of possibilities. What's happened and what we've done so far has led us to a point where certain things have been made possible and certain others not.
Second, the collective historical agent argument. We are part of a movement, and this movement throughout its various incarnations in different activities in different countries in different times, has made a lot of experiences that are ours, and which we should utilise. We have a magnificent treasury of experiences. We can avoid repeating mistakes, we can evaluate historical experiences in order to suggest new strategies, we can continue threads prematurely dropped at precisely the point they were dropped.
Third, the pragmatic argument. Obviously, some paths are better than others. We may have an intuition telling us so, or we might have criteria, and the criteria may be based on assession of dynamism or effect or congeniality with selective affinities. Regardless of which, there are only some paths that are meaningful to embark on, and in some mysterious sense, we are right.
Fourth, the ideology criticism argument. We have learned the classical techniques of seeing through many types of lies, illusions and ideological constructs. From the fundamental Marx and Freud, as well as Darwin and Nietzsche, over feminism, to recent applications in situationism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, there is no shortage of ways to realise how many undertakings would merely serve others' purposes, or serve various regressive, conservative, banal, or counterproductive purposes that are part of oneself. We can see just how many things tried must be abandoned because they – in general or specifically under current circumstances – are filling an objective function opposite to our aims. If we take hardcore recuperation theory and apply it onedimensionally we will get a purely negative and sligtly too powerful criterion, and we might possibly come to the conclusion that there is very little that we are left to continue doing at all, and the only option is the ravaging refusal (because if we see through that too, then we would become mere cynics, which is clearly stillborn). If not, we might use the power of demasking to assess which strategies are viable in spite of criticisms, which options will reach out to countertendencies and make alliances of particular possible significance, which dead ends should be abandoned and which could be refurnished to become new side streams.
Fifth, the constructivist argument; the results we have so far has made unusual experiences and necessitated their conceptualisation and thereby opened up particular new areas of investigation. We have a lot of results that are mainly implemented as the width of questions, investigations and games we are capable of addressing.
Sixth, the immodest argument; those results are, from 1919 on, a radically succesful road of accessing psychic dynamics, poetry, new possibilities, imaginative truth, open rationalism, open realism and integrative power, which is capable of providing not just relevant suggestions but a certain vision of heterogenic wholeness in all meaningful areas of life. We are almost there.

Untimely

2010-10-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

I am intrigued by the exciting situations that surrealism faced in the 40s and then in the 60s, when surrealism seemed to be somehow – involuntarily – in line with the times, but it wasn't obvious at all in which direction to set off, large numbers of people were attracted by the movement, people in it had been doing very different experiences, the field of possibilities was wide open, paths needed to be chosen. This relates to what Michaël Löwy emphasises in "Morning star" (*) as the "untimely" character of surrealism, because it feels like at every point one of the latent main issues for surrealism is to find the point of non-contradiction between staying at history's edge and dismissing the contemporary in its entirety. I think that the sublation/solution of this is present in surrealism, but it is one of the several things present in surrealism which we often fail to rationalise, and very often get ourselves stuck in rather lame explanations and contradictions that don't quite live up to the synthetic potential inherent in surrealism. In the 40s, in the 60s, and to a lesser but quite visible sense in the present, some people emphasise the role of being "keepers of the flame", on embodying the tradition, and others emphasise the need of radical abandonments and explorations, as if either made any sense without the other...

I will keep talking about those particular dynamic historical situations elsewhere, so let's go back to the sense of dialectical edge. Of course, ignoring the contemporary and focus on that which – in an untimely way – is of inner necessity, is one way of expressing a latent content of the times, one which represent a potentiality and a possible future. But there are many untimely things which are just nostalgic or clueless too, and many which have a great potential without ever finding their connections. Only some possibilities find the paths of associating with other countercurrents, and communicating with people who are looking for change, for negation, for dynamics; suggesting frameworks and imagery for a latent desire for freedom. It is in this sense that I mean surrealism appears to have been timely in its untimeliness in the 40s and 60s.

I am also speculating that surrealism could very well have been similarly timely in its untimeliness in a similar way in the 80s and around 2000, but the movement was too small to make much impact in and through the movements of the times. In the 80s, it was obviously quite problematical, since what I am referring to as the timely current where surrealism could hang on is that period's transgressive aestheticism, the taste for incomprehensibility, hedonism, black humor and sadomasochism, the resurrections of Sade, Bataille, Artaud, Blanchot as fashionable points of reference, etc, which took place now mostly under the aegis of poststructuralism, cynicism and individualism and can be associated with some senses of postmodernism and neoliberalism. To partake in and be able to twist back the objective direction of such a twisted current would indeed have required not only an immense integrity but also a considerable strength! And then around 2000, it was perhaps a minor repetition of the 60s on its way in the sense that a new footing, a new framework for radicalism was being forged, in an even more heterodox way but still remaining a sharp anticapitalist focus – surrealism did take part in this, but never became one of its more visible currents, and then the movement faded.

(*) Great book which fairly recently came in an english translation, with a strangely twisted subtitle. The original's "surréalisme et marxisme" had been openmindedly changed by the editors into "surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia" - not only removing the relational preposition emphasising the unified theme of the book, now suggesting it to be a loose collection of essays about this and that not necessarily considering things in relation to each other, but also violating the broad and unorthodox sense of marxism the author employs by separately adding these various other brands of radicalism which the author makes a point of not separating from marxism in his notion of it.

/M Forshage

Platforms in the Canopy of Z – Surrealism and Objectivity (Internal resolution)

2010-09-28T16:31:00.000-07:00

There may be a lesson to learn from how we were once, and rightly so, snubbed for our enumeration of objective themes in the old text "Scream in the sack" which I would enunciate like this: at the next attempt we must try to better communicate the dynamics of elusiveness (which JE recently described as "something that generates a content but keeps moving beyond this content.") By better I think I mean – rather contrary to the vocabulary that in speculative hegelian terms talk about objectivity in an absolute sense – with clarity about the fact that surrealism is manifested in the individual case and is not present in the particular idealisation (and I'm not talking about its objective characteristics, because that I call sociology) which is being formulated ever so carefully and exhaustively as a support for our intentions and self-consciousness.

In that case, it is reasonable to speak about the essence of surrealism, namely, as immanent in the materialised poetic phenomenon, in the collective experience giving flesh and life to those intuitions which haven't yet been conceptualised and the concrete results of activity that, rather than living up to the contents, tend to establish new platforms in the unknown, or, like in the "Silent hand"-experiment, for a moment evokes that this is the case.

In the Stockholm group, a pronounced tendency can be perceived to recognise and suggest the possibilities of each trodden approach, and to imply that their logical or other contexts form the starting point for a specifically surrealist field of research where always "almost everything remains to be done". This scientific or pseudoscientific attitude also entails a mythopoetical or actually even literary exaltation of the intentions in a sublime self-consciousness concerning the modest proportions of the ego before the magnitude of the unknown, which admittedly makes an adequate representation of epistemological honesty, insider humor, and (by extension) hopeful despair.

So, what we are less good at is to demonstrate that we yet and always are "almost there", which is to say that surrealism hardly shares the existentialist gesture of an unattainable ideal or pretends to be an atomistic constellation of aspects holding merely an abstract configuration of wholeness, but instead that the unpredictable poetic phenomenon not just timelessly "heals the rift in the world" but also consummates the image of surrealism with a living reality that is all the more vivid and even more real because it is shared. And , as someone said, it seems to be the French who assumes the task, in their counterproductively totalitarian-poetic prose, to bear witness to and try to perpetuate this particular state and, at worst, to prove it. In the witnessing freedom of thought no difference between the marvellous and the sublime point is being reflected, but whenever one slyly wants to communicate in a more concise and directed form, there could be a point in showing that we count on two different moments, one of which is an external configuration, and which we want to learn to be attentive towards, and the other one shows itself as a mental state. And furthermore, that there are relations and methods to connect these two moments in a wider continuum, and that the rite of surrealism is aimed at freedom of movement in both directions. The pretentious implications of the discoveries, and confounding the one who benefits from the unusual states of mind, is a possible summary of the dynamics which should not be reduced to "we are interested in a, b, c..."; surrealism means "x + y but also z".

If we stick to the fact that this irrepresentable mystery makes surrealism something far more than a collection of themes, and something more than the academics' focus on the relationship between the statements of the surrealists and the representative examplifications of these statements, then you too realise where I am going when I am saying that the romantic idealization of the scientific methods may potentially play us a trick concerning the attempts to communicate or determine surrealism, especially if it concerns communicating with the tattered sphere of humanities, that sometimes succeeds to trap us in a position where we refer to our group experience as an "independent observer before a subject". It is this objectivity in a non-hegelian sense that reifies surrealism as a subject matter – and thereby also the typical questions of the decadence phase about legitimacy, succession, authencity, purity etc which make up the part of the sociological viewpoint that we could do very well without – that makes me think it could be time to sharpen the conflict between the humanities and surrealism (natural science still seems a less dangerous hearth to warm ourselves by, though).

/NN

Venus tick

2010-08-26T04:13:00.000-07:00

(Some landforms on the planet Venus are famously tick-shaped)

Arch-arms of the Dead

2010-08-26T03:52:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about death. We sometimes denounce things as death-oriented, while still ravelling in spectacular death paraphernalia. Death is not a moral category. Death is a phantasm, a tiny void generating a blossoming thicket of stories and emotions. Death is a great mythology. With rather weak links to the biological facts of death (a totally different matter), and even weaker to individual death which we know squat about but make a big issue based on rumors, inductive logic and psychological projections. We are immortal in the sense that our individual death can't have a reality for us except as a chosen myth. Let's not talk about death. But what about the dead? Do we keep track of which ones of our friends are dead? Can we ever know? Does it matter for whether their experience is available to us?

Well, surrealists are often a bit grumpy here. "I shall leave no memoirs" goes an often quoted Lautréamont bon-mot. Why not? Because memoirs, and the biographical urge on the whole and all of personal image management (Public Relations), is directed towards death – trying to summarise life in a stable pattern as if finished and unchanging, as if useful for a particular instrumental purpose? (By the way, memoirs in that sense is very similar to novels in general, isn't it? simply death-orientation...) Yet that biographical act is also a sacrifice for the benefit of the living, for the sake of the savoir vivre of others. To actually die when the story is completed is just a vain gesture to get the last word.

There is little meaning in respecting the boundaries between individuals here. It's not just that we can claim other's experiences as a slightly vaguer sector of our own experience, it is also that we can see many of our ambitions and interventions as those of our forerunners continued, using us as vehicles! Experience is overindividual. This is rather obvious in a collective-constructive enterprise such as science, but even more so in a movement encompassing a larger sector of life (namely the attitudes of living in general) such as surrealism.

It did seem like many surrealists passed away last year. Actually, if comparing the numbers of deceased surrealists (and ex-surrealists), the number was not significantly larger than usual (23 as compared to an average annual 21.3 the past decade in my headcount), but nevertheless it was quite obvious that we were abandoned by a number of people who were still active, who were good friends of those most active, and/or who were relatively famous.

The number of surrealists (and ex-surrealists) dying is far more steady than the number of people leaving surrealism (which is dependent on general historical trends and the intensity of surrealist activity), but the latter figure is very difficult to calculate since in most cases it is not possible to distinguish (except often in hindsight) between those who merely cease to be active but remain surrealists at heart and those who abandon surrealism, or between those who do this definitely and those who take a temporary leave of absence. And we also cannot compare the figure with the numbers of surrealists being born (since that will be known only in a far longer perspective), nor with the numbers of people joining surrealist activities (which will become apparent to surrealists or surrealismologists elsewhere – if ever – only after a relatively long time lapse, because to begin with they are rarely apparent in public material, and it is not certain whether they are serious investigators by their own force or merely ephemeral curiosity-seekers or social friends).

Yet the number of surrealists dying is in itself a very concrete figure with a limited number of uncertainty factors. It is possible to model the number as a combination of mean lifespan and numbers of arrivals, and especially if we take into account the overall trends of surrealism (number of arrivals at different times in the past). The mean age of surrealists arriving does not seem to have changed very much over time and could be simplified into a timeless average. If we want a more complicated and possibly much sharper model we could try to account for the difference in trends in different countries and the overall contribution to the population of surrealists from each of these countries.

Ok, the humanistically minded will already have seen the (to them possibly blasphemous and cruel) trend of the methodological surrealist and the natural scientist here: treating human deaths as a phenomenon possible to consider matter-of-factly, to quantify, and even to predict (on a statistical level).

Because, on the individual level, every death is an exception and a reconfiguration of the field of possibilities. Well, most people passing away are like all these other people that we meet, possibly take a liking to, and never meet again; except in the sense that we for some reason have the uncanny certainty that it will not be possible to ever communicate with them again. All the things imaginable that we would like to try to do with this person, all the questions we would like to ever ask, are not possible anymore: it is a serious violation to the openness and uncertainty of the possibility field, both objectively and subjectively, and on the latter level very often feels unfair and bottomless in its definitiveness.

But many of us are bored or suspicious about conventional grief and long sentimental obituaries. In surrealism, paying too much attention to those departing by death can be seen as part of the pattern of belittling contemporary surrealist activity and regarding the days of glory past as "the real thing". Some do not consider this a big problem when it concerns real friends and/or active comrades, and there are some surrealist periodicals that occasionally devote most of their space to more or less conventional obituaries and reminiscences. Except for among personal friends, this always creates a definite feeling of not having enough living activity to write about.

Others perhaps correspond to the activist view that death is primarily a bourgeois mythology, and shout "let the dead bury the dead". In some cases this is pure self-defensive denial and rationalisation of one or other brand of shallow hedonism. In other cases it indicates a purely instrumental struggle where individuals are largely cannonfodder. From the latter perspective of course, some will be martyrs or possible to exploit for the cause in some other way. But neither shallowness nor instrumentalism are congenial to surrealism.

Death is always an occasion for attention to and reassessment of the works, ideas, deeds and historical function of an individual. It is a very often a pity that it comes just a little too late, because very often the person it concerns would have been able to clarify some things, and would have been able to benefit and learn from the comments... That is, of course, to the extent that the discussion is based on serious and honest concerns rather than conventional painting in bright colors, shallow mythologisation, denial and propagandisation, or finding a good angle at any price.

But specifically in a living movement like surrealism, the dead are not just dead but still around in a particular active sense since they are part of the collective experience. This is part of the specific reason for surrealists to be explicit surrealists. Most of surrealist activity could be carried out just as well or almost just as well without being referred to as surrealism. Applying that designation is to join in with a community of experiences, and extends this field of action and experience widely in time and space. In space, it is obvious that being surrealists facilitates establishing bonds and collaborating with surrealist groups and individuals in other parts of the world.

In time, it is just as obvious that we all can learn from the experiences of the surrealist groups, contributors and dissidents from the 20s onwards, from the paths taken, the adventures in spirit and everyday life, the daily life of all the groups as well as the individual works, thoughts and deeds of an André Breton or an Antonin Artaud just as well as by a Leonora Carrington or a Claude Cahun, or a Franklin Rosemont or a Sarane Alexandrian; or a René Alleau or a Gaston Bachelard, or an Annie LeBrun or a Matta, or, or, or any of us – it is a marvellously rich field of experiences which lies available to us all (and as an addition, some of these people are still alive and can communicate directly!).

Ok, we occasionally have to stop ourselves not to sound foolish, spiritistic or unnecessarily unreasonable when we want to refer to "oh, but Max Ernst told me this" "that was in our talks with Trotsky" "I remember it so well" "no, but we already tried that, it was in... 1929". But in general, of all the various parameters in mediating experience (language and translations, channels and technologies of direct and indirect communication, published and unpublished works, clarification and mystification, individual or collective accounts, etc) , just as whether one has met someone personally or not very often is not one of the decisive ones, currently dead or alive is clearly a less decisive parameter too. Our individual beings are in many ways merely approximative pragmatic fictions anyway, and in the activities we partake our experiences and ambitions are broadly mixed between those of us who are still alive in the biographical sense and those who aren't.

...

M Forshage

So far this year, we note the passing of: Jean Benoît, Wolfgang Frankenstein, Elizabeth Onslow-Ford, Alejandro Piva, Horus Schenouda, Ursula Trevelyan... Comrades or past fellow travellers, all with experiences worth our attention, which we may or may not integrate with our own ramblings-

A few possible tasks for a surrealist group in Wien (Vienna) if there will ever be one

2010-07-07T09:34:00.001-07:00

* The Donauinsel (Danube island) appears to be an obvious center of the city. An enormously long and mostly very narrow land tongue between two Donau (Danube) arms, apparently largely covered with a mosaique of parkland and worthless places. Try to get lost at the Donauinsel (really a challenge at such a narrow piece of land). Divide it into a random number of segments; investigate one by one in a series (or by different players); fuse the results cadavre exquise-wise; and then shuffle them, place them in random order and see what story is being told; then rearrange them in accordance with their inner logic. It's easy, just like repaginating a book where the course of events has been distorted to conform to linear rationalisations rather than to inner logic. Or pick a spot and gaze out the river, notice every larger object flowing with it and interpret each object as a dream.

* The Rote Wien (Red Vienna) part of the city's history is largely unexplored from a surrealist viewpoint. A furiously active workers movement struggling to organise every single aspect of life in an integrative radical whole (there appears to have been workers societies and collective solutions for everything), and simultaneously of course to integrate and mute the more impatiently radical wings of the movement (apparently in a less hostile manner than in other burgeoning social democratic power nexuses?), and all of this in the presence of the world headquarters of the blossoming psychoanalytical movement. There is a vast range of failed experiments to reexamine (and sometimes retry) here.

* The fin-de-siecle aesthesticism of Wien raises several critical questions about imaginational phenomenology and surrealist perspectives on art. As romanticism-getting-stale and decadent-classicism were venturing continuously further into the absurd and the poetic, which historic aesthetic contradictions played any role whatsoever? If the grand figure of Hans Makart obviously was the Salvador Dalí of his time, does that refer merely to his grandiose-excentric-commercial-megalomanic aspects and painting skills, or also to the part of real groundbreaking investigations into the imagination? If Gustav Klimt turned to the more decorative style for which he is best known by the critical rebuffal of his groundbreaking Fakultätsbilder, was that a major retreat also in terms of the advancement of the investigation of the imagination, or did he luckily hit new solid poetic ground when trying to be uncontroversial? Etc.

* The absence of organised surrealism in Wien is remarkable. The few organising efforts in the 40s need to be scrutinised, and also to clearly demarcate when these transformed into a school of painting, "der Wiener Schule des phantastischen Realismus" (fantastic realism) which at best covers a few detached individual aspects of surrealism. On the other hand, quite other aspects of a possible surrealist spectrum were addressed in a spectacular and often ignorant way in Wiener Aktionismus (actionism). It is important to snatch back the concepts of communal living and sex radicalism, especially in their combination with artistic creation, from their failed local applications. Correspondingly, it is important to emphasise how visions of "fantastic realism" will imply a confrontative radicalism, on the intellectual, spiritual and social levels rather than on the aesthetic. Simply, to demonstrate how surrealism provides a framework that puts the constructive achievements of fantastic realism and actionism both into perspective.

* try regular meetings at the Café Hegelhof

* have a surrealist exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum

* make the Sigmund Freud Park more ambiguous

* try furious dérives through tram-surfing

etc

a tale of a few cities

2010-07-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

Just having returned from Wien (Vienna) I am somewhat enchanted by the surrealist possibilities of that city. With surrealism's perspectives on urbanism (note for exemple one or another sketch previously posted here), "the surrealist possibilities of a city" is not just the case of differentiated personal sensibility towards the spirit of the place. It is that to some extent, but it is also concretely manifested in the degree of condensation and contrast, spatial and social heterogenity, signs of expectation, overlayering, dynamism of spatial phenomenology, and overall ambiance. Of course, pursuing a collective surrealist activity is fundamentally about revealing the surrealist qualities of your immidiate environment; any surrealist grouping will enhance and make explicit the process of disenveloping the surrealist sense of the city they are in. So this is not quite what I am talking about here. I am talking about which places will offer a temporary visitor the most distinct signs and ambiances suggesting this particular sense of possibilities. In this sense, my personal favorite candidates for surrealist cities in Europe are Wien, Berlin, Budapest and Helsinki. Of course they are cities that appeal to me personally, but I do think that they all have a specific objective sense of suggesting hidden possibilities that is central to surrealist urbanism.

And I have to contrast this against the perpetually cited surrealist aspects of Paris, Paris which many people consider as the Capital of Surrealism mainly because surrealism originated there and it has for long times been an important organisational center. Of course, if you live in Paris, and Paris is where you take your daily and nightly strolls, your drinks with friends, your intoxicated trajectories, your everyday conflicts and wonders, you will necessarily see and disclose surrealist aspects out of that psychophysical environment.

But it is another thing for visitors. Many people come to Paris to experience a surrealist city. Indeed, most neighborhoods in Paris do carry a load of anecdotes in surrealist historiography and mythology. There are memories of Breton's walks with Nadja, of the surrealist group's interventions and experiments for many decades, there are all kinds of souvenirs of things integrated into surrealist mythology such as the rich traditions of alchemy, of late 19th century occultism, of early 20th century popular culture, of dada, lettrism, situationism, pataphysics, etc; there are souvenirs of the french revolution, of the Paris commune, of May 68, etc. Not only did these things actually occur right there, but they have also been commemorated, giving names to streets and squares, cafés and statues, etc. The shops, galleries and museums are full of actual references to our chosen heroes. Placenames will be easy to associate with titles of well-known works, and the poetic aura of these names will be lying near at hand since, for us outsiders, so much of the french we know is primarily associated with this poetry and these works rather than with any everyday use. Anywhere you go, if you find a square with a remarkable ambiance, you will very often learn that André Breton already mentioned it in a poem, and if you see a strange gargoyle, you will very often learn that Man Ray or Brassaï already photographed it. The place is so abundantly colonised with anecdotes, with reified pieces of history, and then on top of that seasoned with an overflow of empty references, that it is far more a museum of surrealism than a surrealist city. It gives rise to a feeling that there is nothing to discover, it's all written out for you. It might be possibly to indulge in this, in some cases of recently arrived enthusiastic young surrealists who are happy to see traces of real surrealism recognised as real in the official world and the physical environment, and who will anyway just use them not as pillars in a lithified tradition but as glowing suggestions and hints that make stepping-stones in their own appropriation of surrealism as a shared and personal mythology – for those people, traditional surrealist Paris might still make sense. And of course anyone who is attentive could eventually make some original observations revising or adding to the already almost map-filling color-coding of surrealism-codified corners of Paris. But most of those who hail surrealist Paris are external surrealismophiles (academic, arty, or fellow travellers) who will find this abundance of references to surrealism o so blissful, and whose appreciation of such references might stand in exact proportion to their own inability to discover the surrealist aspects of things for themselves. Preferring the pre-labelled surrealist city before having to exercise any imagination and enterprise any investigation of ones own. Often a certain surrealismophilia of that tinge will prove to be nothing but culture-loving nostalgic francophilia in general, nicely arranging the facets of classic modernism into the big history of western society's art, with a certain predilection for the picturesquely radical and romantic - which is all clearly the opposite of the thorough radical departure and nonconformism central in surrealism itself. But worse for us, it will also be the form in which many of our most eager sympathisers will be happy to consider and consume surrealism as something titillating and even deeply felt – but only not dependent on ones own creative, demanding and risky participation and reinvention.

If we go back to my personal quartet of suggested surrealist cities, Wien, Berlin, Budapest and Helsinki, it is striking that neither of them has ever had a proper surrealist group in spite of a rich presence of avantgarde and radical movements in general. It is also, perhaps, notable that they all lie east of a line dividing Europe in halves. (And indeed, if we would extrapolate from this crude geographical division, we could try to count in Bucuresti, Praha, Brno, Bratislava, Beograd and Athina in this eastern axis, most of which have had a strong (brief or enduring) surrealist presence historically, and one of which (Praha) is indeed often cited as emblematic for surrealist urbanism along with Paris. I don't know. The only place of these that I've visited – so far – is Bucuresti, and I certainly don't mind recognising a particular surrealist potential of that city. And what would become of the western axis? it would also include London and Bruxelles, which are another two of surrealism's historical capitals, which most people would agree are largely boring cities, as well as Madrid, Barcelona and Lisboa, about which there are probably very conflicting views available. But no, I do not want to make a big issue out of these axises, it was just a simple thought experiment.)

I would just like to advocate discovering surrealist aspects of cities rather than consuming surrealist aspects of cities. (And I dream of eventually becoming a satellite member of surrealist groups of these four cities so as to be able to explore these surrealist aspects of the cities more substantially than a casual visitor may.)

M Forshage

Experience of the Stockholm surrealist group

2010-07-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

Trying to evaluate the actual experiences made rather than merely chronicling the partly picturesque partly boring trajectory of the now 25 years of activity of the surrealist group in Stockholm, we managed to agree on a brief text posted at the group webpage. We've forgotten to arrange an anniversary party though.

Direct perception

2010-05-14T04:19:00.000-07:00

One of these negative sleep epiphanies; this time connected with awakening and nausea.

On my way home in the evening I eat a sandwich with an old date (*). It tastes stale but not really bad.

In the middle of the night I awake and think of the sandwich in my stomach. I am not really feeling sick, but I feel the place of the sandwich in my stomach, and my nervous system is slightly stressed: I am potentially sick. But then it feels like the ground is being pulled from my feet when I think of how extremely strange it is that I was mentally focussing on the eaten sandwich in an immediate way! Isn't it the case that the details assume their meaning by their place in the geography, their place in the narrative and grammar of the text? Don't I have to read the whole landscape, the whole story? Is "direct perception" (direkte Anschauung) actually possible? My head keeps spinning, I am scared. I am convinced that epistemology under normal circumstances rests on a reading of geography as grammar, but that one can be capable of direct perception if for example one is going crazy, or extremely sick. And all the time that eaten sandwich is keeping me reminded of itself, without me having to imagine the entire gasterointestinal system – the absence of the entire 9 meters of it is so dramatically striking, a blank book, a blank map. Is it extremely sick or crazy that I am becoming? Then I fall asleep again.

The dream that followed was obviously geobiographical, and so can be read on the Cormorant council page.

(*) the ambiguity of this formulation became an element in the interpretation of the material. Originally it was just poor linguistic skills, I didn't know the best way to refer casually in english to a slightly old sandwich, the best-before-date of which had already passed.

surrealist research & investigations

2010-05-14T04:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, the results of the Hydrolith project finally became available. It is a big anthology (large size, 240 pages), English-language and international in scope, intended to display the width of investigations of the surrealist movement today.

The material covers many areas but three themes are focused: music/sound, place/geography, and myth, which might possibly be three key aspects among contemporary surrealist interventions. From the theoretical viewpoint superordinated on this blog we might particularly refer to certain contributors by regulars or occasional contributors here: Niklas Nenzén on mythopoesis, gnosticism and the ontology of the imagination; Mattias Forshage on methodological aspects of approaching the question of surrealism and music; Johannes Bergmark with other more or less general approaches to the same question; Merl Fluin on the poetic aspects of urban legends. The piece on urban geography by Forshage and Erik Bohman previously posted here is included, and from outside this narrower circle there is for example an important study by Eric Bragg on exteriority, contributing very much to the clarification of this concept.

The editorial group has consisted of the mentioned Bragg, Forshage and Fluin plus Shibek, Ribitch and Nikos Stabakis; apart from american, english, swedish and greek surrealists there are also substantial contributions from the surrealists of Paris, Quebec, Turkey and many other places.

The book can be ordered, or freely downloaded, via Lulu, here.

the strategical point of strategy

2010-05-14T04:15:00.000-07:00

A recent visit to the comrades in Leeds provided several interesting discussions, including on the subject of strategy - obviously one which it is possible for surrealists to have different opinions on, but perhaps not as different as it first may seem, once a number of demarcations and distinctions have been sorted out. I'd like to relate a couple of points from that discussion to the usual themes of the Icecrawler with methodology and epistemology.

First of all, it must be noted that surrealism embodies a fundamental "antipragmatism" or "antiinstrumentalism" that it shares with anarchism. There is no widely accepted term for this attitude (it might just as well be called antileninism or antiloyolism which both sound rather more specific, and I'll be grateful for suggestions of more general terms) but its application is clear: the aims do not justify the means, because means that are alien to the aims will effectively twist the aims and make the original aims unattainable, while on the other hand, if the means are congenial with the aims they will embody the aim so that they will become meaningful in themselves and not just instrumental. The classic political instance is of course the insistence that freedom will not be attained by authoritarian means, which has at different times been applied against political violence, conspiracy strategies in general, bureaucratic party-building, parlamentarist strategies, self-sacrificing duty ethics, etc etc. In recent decades, the latter application has been among the most popular, after the situationists' (and especially Vaneigem's) pregnant formulations against the activist ethos. (It must be noted however that situationist thought is clearly not unanimous on this point, and Debord's embracing of the hardcore "loyolist" Clausewitz is a case in point.) It is fundamental to the anarchist concept of "direct action", it partly coincides with what different leftist group call anti-authoritarianism and autonomy (or, for some, even libertarianism), it has to do with Fourier's concept of work, with Marx's so-called humanism, it certainly has a lot to do with the dreaming, the rage, and the emphasis on creativity in the tradition of romantical anticapitalism as continued in large parts of modernism and specifically in surrealism. While never being explicitly formulated as such, this was also the issue underlying the political conflicts in surrealism in the 20s and 30s, with the surrealists insisting that revolutionary politics didn't make specifically surrealist experimentation and dreaming obsolete but quite the opposite, and that the resurrection of bourgeois morality and lifestyle in the Soviet Union as well as the mad and bloody power tactics of Stalin meant betraying communism.

As a mere parenthesis, we can note that an inverted loyolism is often presented as the "democratic" spirit today - when the means justify the aims. Anyone who plays according to the rules, obeys laws, appears peaceful, wears a suit, votes, writes letters to the editor, and pleas to the politicians in office, instead of taking things in one's own hands, is then considered good, regardless of the implications of one's ideas. (Elsewhere I have considered this in the context of modern varieties of humanism, and called it "repressive coward humanism".)

This basic strategic concern is related to the purely philosophical distinction between intention ethics and effect ethics, but as a philosophical distinction the latter does not have any immediate applications. An intention ethics emphasises that good intentions are what counts in the end, regardless of the outcome, and an effect ethics emphasises the opposite. The instrumentalist approach is largely fitting with an effect ethics, but an anti-instrumentalist approach could be formulated as either, and very often real contradictions emerge along other lines.

Consider for example how the activist ethos of self-sacrificing for the cause very often serves as a rigid ethical principle independent of whether it achieves any effects whatsoever, often being remarkably untactical and unpragmatic, in the end amounting to "heroic" duty ethics, a principled effacing of individual oddities and "low desires", and a pure voluntarism - making the frenziedly manifested good will everything, and thus ending up in some kind of intention ethics.

There are also other options, of course. There is a broad concept of a "whole human" activist, which was not uncommon in many parts of the early workers movement and went on in parts of anarchism and recently had a brief blossoming in the globalist movements of the 00s. This is about affirming an offensive political content in collective self-organising of everyday life and of demanding a full life in general, coinciding with revolutionary implimentations of humanism (there a numbers of contradictive implimentations of the notoriously ambiguous concept humanism...) and of the classic refusal to make a sharp distinction between personal and political.

But then, the antipragmatism of the anarchists is very often presented as ethics, that is, an abstracted principled doctrine of how to implement good life and fair order. The obvious points inherent in anarchism, remarkably often very effective, are easily available for any thinking person, they even border to the simplistic. In fact, very often their actual subversive effects are due to the unexpected complications and the character of pure obstruction of the application of these simple principles in a rigid way regardless of circumstances and without strategical concerns. An anarchist is always right. Because the anarchist will emphasise these eternal abstract principles rather than take risks and make assessments of circumstances. There is no risk of failure for eternal principles because there are no circumstances that actually put them to test. An anarchist is always right, and will very often be completely uninterested in drawing empirical conclusions, and very often let all opportunities pass through their openmindedly spread fingers like golden sand. This is the very strength and impotence of anarchism all in one.

I think a solution to a great many of the contradictions and shortcomings of this perspective will come via the concept of methodology. Methodology is choosing the right method for each task, and specifically through its central position in science, it concerns formulating your questions and designing your methods in congruence, so that the outcome of your undertaking will give you an answer to your specific question whatever happens. Of course it would be very difficult and probably boring to designate life as rigidly as that, but I think a more general application of methodological concern is to make sure to take risks, to try to spark off dynamics, that will have something to teach us regardless of what the specific outcome will be. And if we disregard the obvious psychological fear of failure in many anarchists, I think this does lie in the anarchist concept of "direct action" too; no meaningful actions are strictly instrumental, in that they are depending on attaining a particular distant goal; all meaningful actions do attain something in themselves. The concept of "direct action" usually envisions this as by manifesting and fulfilling our wishes and desires, and concretely changing circumstances for the better. For the experimentally and methodologically minded it might just as well be about just releasing dynamics, in order to widen the field of possibilities, open for the unexpected, which might change things dramatically, perhaps in a particular direction that will coincide with particular desires, perhaps not, and in either case will be an interesting experience to analyse and build upon. In science, there is no such thing as failure, because negative results are just as informative as positive results are. This is the particular scientific dynamic of experiment and failure. Instrumentalist minds opposed to open-ended experimentation will often regard this as "irresponsible", perhaps especially those who are prone to authoritarian politics. If we disregard the aspect of mere psychological control need in such an attitude, it nevertheless remains quite irrelevant: any serious activity that seriously wants to change things will definitely take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, by learning from them and acting further upon them, and responsibility is in no way necessarily connected with being able to predict consequences, In social relationships, in history just as well as science and in poetry, this is certainly true: the predictable is far less interesting than the unpredictable.

So, the political application of this, I consider strategy. It is merely a methodological formulation, based in theory, in individual desire, in collective dynamics, and the analytical response integrating these factors, of an interventional implementation of experiment and failure. Strategy is for causing dynamic effects that will move beyond ones control in an interesting direction and, while doing that, allow for conclusions. That is politics, that is theory, that is the so-called "art of creating situations". In that sense, surrealism in its concrete manifestations will have to be strategic, regardless of whether it will be consciously directed on the political level or not.

Now, considering strategy does not necessarily imply a lot of things that anti-strategic minds consider it to. First of all, there is of course a simple distinction between strategy and tactics, which can be formulated in very different ways, but for most people, strategy is long-term and tactics is short-term, strategy is choosing methods and tactics is choosing rhetorics and presentation in particular situations, negotiations. General antipragmatism may motivate a despise of tactics (it may be debasing, psychologically destructive, and obstructive to real communication to nervously-servilely or authoritarianly adapt one's message to one's prejudices about the recepients), but not of strategy (which is more about how to actually implement ones ideas and possibly change things at all). And of course, strategical thinking does not imply any one particular strategy. For example, surrealism is not a proselytising movement, it does not seek to maximise the number of adherents and does not try to persuade people. This is however not an antistrategical move but exactly a strategical one: surrealist activity is dependent on each participant's individual passion, original perspective and individual path of approaching surrealism, therefore it has little use for proselytes. But then, admitting this necessarily minoritary character of surrealism and affirming the chance moment in its adhesions, does not in any way contradict the fact that there might be good to increase the contact surfaces with other people, to communicate and invite to communication via internet and public events, simply to increase the probability of the rare chance hits! It does also not favor such extroversion regardless of circumstances, it makes it a strategical question for consideration.

Surrealism's political implications, and the immediate social relevance of its organisation, are I think twofold. It is about manifesting a glimpse of a possible other society and about encouraging uncontrolled dynamics that open up new possibilities. Of course surrealism wants to be effective in that. But it is not willing to go to instrumentalism (loyolism), to do all kinds of boring and bad stuff, including imposing on itself a demand to formulate it in some other language than its own, in order to achieve those effects, because that would be detrimental to its passion, its spirit, its health. It is not necessarily the case that wide attention, especially mass medial attention, will actually increase that efficiency, in fact it is obviously very often the opposite, the public sphere has a dynamic of its own which has a tendency to swallow up creative input for its own means. Surrealism wants to involve all those that are seriously interested and capable of making serious contributions, but it does not want to proselytise and collect souls. For me, it seems like an inevitable conclusion, that the interventions and the organisation are best served by conscious concerns about how to relate to the contemporary situation and how to communicate with people outside the group (primarily with the seriously curious and with friends, in the second place with the general public): this is what I call strategy. These will have to be, as I see it, methodological and experimental rather than either "irresponsibly" instrumental or legitimacy-obsessed ethical, in order to be truly congruent with surrealism.

Arp's Atlas

2010-03-20T04:58:00.000-07:00

merdarius is not calling attention to every update of the surrealist linklist, but we must make an exception since we were so happy to find again that classic of general morphology (or "formation of structure in the universe" as it is called there) which is Arp's Atlas of peculiar galaxies, surrealist geography on one of the largest scales.

2010-03-03T10:16:00.000-08:00

feminism and fence posts

2010-02-26T03:57:00.000-08:00

There has been a certain amount of discussion around the recent Manchester exhibition of surrealist artists "Angels of anarchy". Kenneth Cox of the Leeds Surrealist Group has written a good and interesting piece of criticism posted here. I must note that most of Kenneth's observations and several of the points he makes are ones that I'd have liked to make myself; the old mill of internal discussion went slowly as it often does and it seemed somehow reasonable that I'd fail to write a huge criticism of an exhibition I had not been able to go and see myself. But there are also some points I'd like to raise in the context, which are not criticisms of things expressed in or necessarily implied by Kenneth's text, but clarifications and modified emphasises I'd like to make to the surrounding, implicit and issuing discussion of these issues.

Kenneth takes this as a pretext to restate surrealism's case against those academics that live off it. This is not new and not very exciting but it is perfectly legitimate and potentially informative to pull it when getting access to a particular new forum, as it seems to be in this case (and sure, uninspired polemics, even on this site, often takes the shape of repeating long available metacritique that remains valid against all kinds of new attacks as long as they are unimaginative and predictable). But the superordination of that particular aspect seems to imply an assessment which I'd like to point out could turn out differently. I mean, what actual power does the academic or artlife frame has to actually disarm and neutralise the subversive content of surrealist painting? Can't the remarkable artworks just as well falsify the ideological framing in the presentation rather than the opposite? Here, Kenneth remains open to this possibility but still emphasises the negative view.

But connected with this, what power does the actual discourse of curators and academics have to neutralise the actual questions they're adressing by presenting ideological answers? Don't they continue to itch, spur and challenge people's own thoughts and potentially provoke individual radical conclusions, regardless of how ingeniously they are raised in the service of an irrelevant, domesticating or parasitizing rhetoric?

I also cannot let go this occasion to readdress the relationship between surrealism and feminism. In this, I am not specifically addressing standpoints made in the text: Kenneth does not put the two in any necessary opposition nor denounces the latter as such. But as this is an old discussion between ourselves and the Leeds group, as well as between others in the surrealist movement, I will repeat some arguments. I certainly agree with the actual specific critical points Kenneth makes, but I'd like to emphasise that this critique of particular strategies among feminists does not imply a dismissal of feminism but could be equally valid from within a feminist framework. There is also the possibility that misunderstandings arise due to semantic questions not just as products of different political experiences but of actual historical differences between the women's movements, and the labels its different branches utilise, in different countries. I am here employing a very broad sense of feminism (further explicated in the following).

If we immediately consider a real opposition to the struggles and aims of the women's movement as obviously absurd and antisurrealist ("there is no such thing as partiarchal subordination or injustice between the sexes anymore" or "there is nothing wrong with a little patriarchal subordination or injustice between the sexes"), there are still a few not uncommon ways of expressing strong reservations against feminism among some surrealists.

One is the ultrasituationism of considering "feminism" as necessarily an ideology and as such necessary diametrically opposed to the struggle of women and to any emancipatory struggle. Such paranoid apriori-assessments is not what we need in surrealism. If we consider what feminism is, it is a very broad international cluster of different groups struggling in different arenas, with different methods and with different political perspectives but largely united against structural injustices, against wage differences for men and women, against violence towards women, against confinement to family-raising and household chores, against everyday depreciation of women's desires, opinions and interests, against sexual coercion and manipulation, against patriarchal ideology, against prostitution and pornography industries, etc etc. Some of these questions are even more straightforward than others, and they will all be given different emphasis in different foci of struggle depending on the historical particulars, the class base of the activists, the local experiences, the general level of democracy, the social structure, and the intensity of other specific confontations and general class struggle. Indeed some people will toss up an ideology based on it, and indeed some people will make a career out of it. But does that make the actual questions, and the actual confrontations brought about by addressing them, less meaningful? Does that mean that the entire field is contaminated and must be abandoned and never spoken about again? I do not think so. For example, we didn't abandon surrealism in the face of an overwhelming international opinion knowing it to be an inconsequential direction in art, as it has repeatedly been transformed into by individuals making ideology and carreer out of it...

The second line of reasoning that would make it meaningful to dismiss feminism is the generalising argument; since we are in favor of the emancipation of all humanity it does not make sense to support the emancipation of a partial set of humanity. This is indeed principled ultraradicalism to the point where it becomes entirely abstract and apolitical. First of all, excuse me a simple analogy; because we are in favor of the emancipation of all humanity, we couldn't give a damn about the struggles of immigrants, of blacks, of children against their families, of the sentenced, mad and troubled against the institutions confining them, of the insistently imaginative against forces censoring and disciplining them, and we would have no interest whatsoever in the action of the working class? That does not seem to go well along with surrealism as hitherto manifested. Any political reasoning will want to identify questions and fronts of struggles which have a potential of organising people and help them to take action against the current order in any way which seems temporarily or generally effective to radicalise people and deepen conflicts and eventually claim actual progresses and victories. Even if we refrain from the sectarian left's beloved game of betting on for example various states and national liberation struggles as potential strongholds against imperialism, it seems obviously meaningful to somehow support (rather than speak against) the most obvious broad currents of resistance, reevaluation and challenge of the current order in our immediate environment, based on an spontaneous solidarity as well as an assessment of their general direction and particular potential rather than necessarily on a complete agreement with their temporary forms of organisation and positions.

It just doesn't seem to make much sense to us for a surrealist not to be a feminist. As we pointed out in a recent addressal of the question of surrealism politics issuing from Leeds, we do consider feminism one of the most immediately relevant fields of current political application of surrealism.

And, a flawed, poorly informed and ideologically pointed presentation of female surrealist artists' works, and a flawed, poorly informed and ideologically pointed addressal of questions of the conditions and conflicts surrounding women's voices, creativity and participation in emancipatory movements, have a great potential of sparking fruitful real experiences and real thoughts and is therefore not just better than silence but actually very welcome from a strategical perspective too.

M Forshage

Another window of virtual cartography

2010-02-02T11:31:00.000-08:00

The links in the right column of this blog is not and has never been a list of close contacts or recommendeds but only a more or less narrow directory of various real or virtual contributors to the icecrawler blog and occasionally the merdarius persona. merdarius linklist is instead here.

At that site, links will be found to the known surrealist groups of the world with web-presence, plus a ridiculously long completist-veined list of individual surrealists' pages (including doubtful or exotic undertakings of some previously active surrealists and anecdotically involved weirdoes).

merdarius's interest in considering what constitutes surrealist strategies in the fields of comics and music is reflected in inclusive but not systematical lists of suggestions worth considering when approaching the two subjects.

The various epistemological, poetical and political ambitions are each partly shared with a strange menagery of groups and projects, whose webpages are mostly lumped as "vicinities" for the time being - more structure will be added - and only the obvious particular interest GEOGRAPHY have yet received a more ambitious cover.

"The flora and fauna of surrealism are inadmissable"

2010-02-02T11:29:00.000-08:00

When someone else has carried out ones ideas in advance, they reveal just how mad they are. I have referred here (the surrealist bestiary) to a concordance of animals mentioned in surrealism that I once began. Pursuing that idea in an unsystematic fashion, I stumbled upon a french PhD thesis doing the same (Claude Maillard-Chary: Le Bestiaire surréaliste, Paris 1994). Of course it was not exactly my idea, delimitations were different (the thesis dealt with occurences in text, in french language, in surrealist poets up to the second world war, only), and the academic context made that author focus more on quantitative details and less on critical and empathic evaluation of the function of different animals within surrealism, but still, many of the observations and most obvious conclusions were neatly parallelled.

Of course this duplication makes me more satisfied that I will never finish this project, and that I never pursued it in a very completist or quantitative way. In fact, being a zoologist very soon determined how I was pursuing it, and I focused on two questions which were less accesible to the non-zoologist and non-surrealist:

1) considering the width of the animal kingdom to suggest large amounts of animals with a great surrealist potential according to both inner criteria and the totemic-imaginal-fetishist-poetic patterns established by surrealist use of animals so far,

2) detailing the relationships between what is conceived as "kinds" of animals in surrealism (and in poetic imagination in general) on the one hand, and zoological concepts on the other hand; which is a case study in terms of comparison between classification philosophies and methodologies of scientific classification and folk classification.

These two aspects will be pursued in one way or another, and at least in the latter aspect, it remains possible that I will find a way of presenting my results.

Surrealist and situationist superheroes

2010-02-02T11:26:00.000-08:00

Superhero groups are rather similar to surrealist groups. Both are egregoric-dynamic collectivities that embody something completely different than the sum of the individuals, both live in worlds where everything is possible and personal problems are intertwined with matters of life and death and the future of the universe, both are organised based on the unusual powers of individuals. I have once written a comprehensive essay comparing surrealist groups and Marvel superhero groups, and will not go further into it here. But I recently had reason to ponder upon the work in this area by Grant Morrison, who famously designed both a surrealist superhero group and a situationist superhero group within the confines of ordinary commercial superhero comics.

Grant Morrison is a typical comicbook writer of the type that became popular in the late 80s and early 90s; an academic bum with a fetishist thing for popular culture, thus preferring to scatter the fruits of his reading as if it was his own ideas in new commercial forums before writing essays and theses. That part of the comic-reading audience that is made up of similar intellectual bums will be enthusiastic about catching all the allusions and references, that part which is uneducated teenagers will think its unitelligable but very original and perhaps great. Morrison is skilled and knows how to develop a captivating storyline.

Grant Morrison wrote DC's Doom Patrol 1989-92. This group is already of the arguably more surrealist variety of weird super hero groups (consisting of monsters, madmen, robots, mythological beings, animals etc; held together by ad-hoc forces while their asociality, depressivity, misanthropy or unruliness makes the centrifugal forces far overtrump the centripetal forces; not consciously striving to save the world but ending up by chance fighting with an extremely weird rogue gallery - just like Marvels 70s Defenders, and, to be sure, the original Doom Patrol which started already 1963). But then Morrison adds to his already blazing ambition to be as weird as possible his whole baggage of 20th century art history, popular occultism and conspiracy theory, Illuminati, jungian psychology, postsituationist psychogeography, etc etc. A wealth of references to the more well-known aspects of surrealist art and poetry, to dreams and automatism, to alchemy and hidden traditions, etc. And strangely enough, it works. It works by creating an interesting dynamic with a life of its own between the weird characters, and between them and the weird plots they make up och end up within; just like superhero comics do when they work; experimental mythology. The rather shallow play with general textuality, psychopathology, fiction structure, metadiscourse, deleuzian machines, hidden truths and altered states, are put to work in a nice way in the confrontations between these pathetic cosmic schemes and the weird normality. Even the laborously construed simulations of surrealism, in automatic speech and dalinian landscapes, are actually quite effective.

Somewhat later, he drew more heavily on the conspiracy themes and created a postsituationist superhero team put into a pandemonium of references, with DC/Vertigo's Invisibles 1994-2000. Here the dynamics of the story were more hampered by the wealth of references, and it turned out largely uninteresting except as a symptom and possible test case of the situationist notions of recuperation; when a major company were willing to sell a new title mainly on its hyperradical image, this was obviously a negation of these very ideas, but perhaps they could also turn the boards again with providing a platform for genuinely radical misunderstandings of these radical signs turned commercial signs? I can't say if The Invisibles ever worked that way, and I find it in general disappointing, and of course it turned out that the systematic oppression that this insurrectional group was fighting was a machination of an extremely powerful evil conspiracy and not the product of a certain economic system called capitalism...

Doom Patrol works better since even simulated surrealism sometimes has a tendency to orchestrate surrealist mechanisms. Parodies of surrealism are sometimes excellent surrealism. For many, if intending to produce a line of supposedly automatic writing, it might be easier to just write something quickly and in the absence of rational control and aesthetic and moral concerns than to elaborately make something up... And even in the latter case, as methods employing overdetermination show, images resulting from the most elaborate systems of disorientation and self-challenge have a tendency to end up similar to products of the automatic overdetermination of dreaming and poetic creation...

Tools, animals or islands

2010-02-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

So, here I am sitting, struggling to follow my thoughts hoping them to carry me away somewhere, while stile hoping to get something useful out of it all in the end. Thinking must be an adventure. And as all games it has its techniques, its tools and its criteria. Recently I stood before the oneway alley of considering "the concept of the concept" and it actually seemed to open somewhere. Laboring to complete this text, I realised this was an illusion, but some of the minor points still made me want to display this somewhere rather than throw it in the dustbin immediately.

Why, yes, I am totally bored with semantic discussions and definitions, and it seems inexplicable that I have often during the past few years ended up in them, particularly in the process of trying to apply some rigor to talking about surralism (as seen on Icecrawler) but also in more or less fruitless and sometimes painful quarrels with friends over the mere concepts of for example anarchism, utopianism, aesthetics, metaphysics, religion, male/female, metaphor/metonymy etc.

But to begin with, I accept an instrumentalist view of concepts as a bottomline; I consider them basically tools. It is POSSIBLE that they represent a potential underlying pattern of the world contributing to making it meaningful in employing them while talking about it, but that is not necessary in any strong sense, and it is certainly not the case that concepts are there to reveal a logical order of the universe and provide a universal classification of what there is. It is also POSSIBLE that they are some sort of immaterial beings, units of thinking and communication (perhaps like memes?), but that is not necessary in any strong sense and it is thinking and communication in themselves that are vehicles of passion, curiosity, refusal, desire and poetry and therefore weapons of surrealism.

(Some people may laugh when I talk against universal classification since I am professionally and passionately a biological systematist and I am enthusiastic over analytical procedures. Ok, let's get this straight. The reason biological organisms can be meaningfully and universally classified is that they are all historical products springing from the same unique lineage, which makes it possible to approach their diversity with particular and very distinct techniques and criteria, and it clearly delimits the sphere within which such an approach is meaningful. While conceptual analyses are just exercises of thought, experiments to see if something is substantially clarified or not, and can be fun.)

I repeat, I stick to an instrumentalist view and am happy to revive Breton's image from the 1942 Prolegomena of the surrealist toolbench. There is no need to feel obliged to reconcile on an analytical level those different conceptual framework which are operative in different particular spheres, separated by arbitrary historical divisions as much as the distinct diversity of the phenomena themselves - when choice of method and choice of theoretical vocabulary are connected to the sense of coherence of our task as brought about in the explicit historical tradition we're placing ourselves in as well as in the concrete totality of the project from the viewpoint of the spirit, this is still the opposite of eclecticism. (Eclecticism I consider as hotchpotch assemblages of viewpoints unconnected by historical or deep subjective necessity, patched together arbitrarily to fit the superficial whims and compromises of an individual personality, or a coreless organisation, or any project striving desperately to be contemporarily relevant rather than have an inner coherence.)

Of course some alternatives are better than others. And it is not a mere pragmatical question of doing the job; it must be possible to pin down criteria. And from the viewpoint of surrealism, it is not necessarily the logical criteria which are the important ones, such as complete consistency, explicability, non-contradiction, exhaustiveness...

First criterion: operativity - we need a concept only for something that we want to talk about, something interesting enough, and in this sense our population of concepts are determined by our collective and individual desires. The concepts are there as means for our bewonderment, thought, imagination, communication and action visavis the desirable, and therefore subordinate to our purposes in a wide sense. Concepts which do not interact dynamically with our real curiosity towards the unknown, or our moral and political needs, are poor concepts.

Second criterion: explanatory power, predictiveness. In order to apply a concept meaningfully to real phenomena those phenomena must actually have something in common, something which it interesting for us to note, and something which makes it possible for us to assume (predict) with some (statistical) precision other properties of the same phenomena. Strictly ostensive concepts, referring only to the particular aspect we define them to refer to, make up formal languages (mathematics, logics, computer languages) and will usually not have something to say about the world. Some people will defend such a view from a philosophically realist standpoint, but such metaphysical commitments are not necessary; a better rationale for it is purely methodological: if properties are unevenly distributed in the world and not showing a complete finemeshed chaos, then it will be interesting to group phenomena in this way. It is because of this that when concepts are fitted into an effective theory they will be able to reveal hidden or latent properties; they will be symptomatic - not due to an apriori valid theory but due to the testable predictions based on empirical observations about the covariation of properties integrated into such a theory. The best concepts are actually themselves theories, broadly applicable and usually (but not always!) revelatory, such as many of the psychoanalytical concepts, or one of the all-time favourites, the marxian concept of "ideology", suggesting that anyone rigorously defending a rigid system of personal opinions will have invested a lot of their hopes and disappointments in the system to the extent that it will replace and oppose the actual struggle for emancipation...

Third criterion: precision. To be useful (and indeed to be accurately predictive) a concept must have a defined range, it must have criteria or diagnostic characteristics which allows us to choose when not to apply it. This is to avoid arbitrariness as well as to keep at bay any possible urges to universal classification that will squeeze all available phenomena into a limited set of categories, that will be either rigid and thus inadequate to cope with all the heterogenous phenomena, or extremely flexible and thus loose their meaning. Sure, schematic designations can sometimes be revealing and sometimes open up imaginative possibilities, but then as temporary tools to provoke contrast, exception and flight.

Fourth criterion: historical sense. Even though the preceding three criteria could be fulfilled by temporary or individual constructions that bear little resemblance to what others might use the same concept for, such a conceptual arbitrariness will be confusionist and serve only to circumscribe an eventually dogmatic circle of "enlightened" or else to make communication and historical continuity difficult on the whole. In order to be a part of a broader project of increasing knowledge, concepts must be used in a sense which is in continuity with its historical use, considering the various distinctions and developments made over it during the time leading up the present. Of course concepts can be refined and developed, and of course various deviations can be pointed out by acknowledging contradictions with the sense of the concepts themselves, but it must not be denied that the usage made in history is a part of the operative sense of the concept (the "experience" of the concept is founded in the experiences of its defenders) and therefore of the concept itself, and cannot be disregarded without approaching one or other sense of idealist ahistoricism.

Diary from a journey in my chamber

2010-01-07T05:44:00.000-08:00

(soluble locus 2)

There has been some travelling going on in my apartment lately. A remarkable apparent chance chain of distinct little forest glades, hills, parks and squares. When writing this, I just noticed that Breton referred to surrealism as a new way of travelling in "Lettre aux voyantes" 1925. The story is, I've been digitizing a few longer texts (more or less mindless keyboard work) and so had an occasion to notice not just how but where my thoughts are straying when in an extended absentminded state. In such work, focusing on some actual lines of explicit thoughts would make the smooth execution of the work difficult; following the text mass that should be copied is in fact rather close to hypnotic suggestion; one is supposed to let the present text flow through oneself and out in one's fingerwork without reflection. I suppose a lot of what people are getting paid for doing is such systematised mindlessness and it is one of the standard modes of wage labor... There is a certain interval of intensity of associations where work goes smooth and chain of associations is entertaining – whenever it becomes more subjectively involving than just entertaining (practical worries and neuroses just as much as exciting stories or sexual fantasies or new solutions or poetic momentum) it slows work; and the opposite, the actual focusing on the task at hand or the actual extinguishing of thought seem just too boring, seem like voluntary death. To me, at least this time, basically three lines of "neutral" enough imagery presented themselves, images of some past periods in life, images from comic books (actually read or similar to those actually read), and more interestingly, images of places.

I have been travelling some, at least in recent years. Thus, there is a selection of views and ambiances from at least some hundreds of cities and towns that has been fed into my memory. Even more importantly, as I have been systematically checking out biological habitats as well as wandering environments within public transport distance of wherever I have been staying, as well as in many places where educational and explorative interests have taken me, producing is a plethora of several thousands of forest views, thickets and glades, ponds and beaches, etc etc. All fed into the system of memory and there left to associate with each other according to whatever internal associations might be established while being preconsciously "treated".

An obvious trivial application is the associative cascade every new place triggers: - Oh, I've never been here before. It reminds me of this, and this, and this, like a twisted version of this, has a similar ambiance to this, has identical vegetation to this, the light is similar to this... etc. However, an even more common application (every night) is the synthesis of dream geography. All dreams take place somewhere. Often in a significant sequence of different places, spatially distributed according to the narrative of the dream, ordered and in fact often overlayered in significant patterns that merit analytical response, both in the poetically realist (surrealist) way of mapping this landscape, and in the psychoanalytical study of the origin of the images.

I have been having, through the years, a recurring, paranoid, very interesting compulsory thought. Just because there are so overwhelmingly many similar "natural sites" that I am acquainted with and feel just as home in as the city streets I'm walking down – but significantly differing in the sense that they have no street signs, no other people, and almost no other obvious artifacts whatsoever that could provide quick information of location; I keep imagining what would happen if I suddenly lost short-term memory. I'd know all the places I know, all the techniques of reading the landscape I know, I'd only not know where the hell I was and how the hell I got there. Would I be able to deduce the location or are there just too many places that are too similar? Would I want to deduce the location and return to my life or would I grab this handy opportunity to "disappear from the world" and keep hiding under spruces from the searching helicopters?

I have been trained in available methods for reading landscapes: geomorphology, soil, vegetation types, species assemblies, small-scale climate, agricultural history etc, so that landscapes are objectively classifiable. Not that I do keep consciously sorting geographical images. It just helps me orient when I'm there, and to interpret the image when it resurfaces. In fact, it seems impossible to make a comprehensive and user-friendly classification of places, because so many of them are objectively and subjectively equivalent, differing only in that part of the "spirit of the place" which is the surrounding associations, the musings over the name of the place, its purely geographical relationships to other places, the particularities of the way there and the way back, previous experiences and expectancies. In fact, such associations that involve all previous knowledge can easily be argued to be a major part of the "spirit of the place". I'm not denying that there are places which are objectively depressing, exciting, enthusing, calming etc, (remember the beach episode in Breton's "L'amour fou" , I had a similar experience on the island in Budapest) but this is a very crude spectrum of basic emotional responses and all the subtleties of geography are dependent on the interaction between the totalities of associations and observations and thus dependent on conscious knowledge of location.

Of course I didn't write down the actual chain of places; I was busy. I could pick a few examples and start interpreting them, but for now I'm happy with having written this introduction.

Mattias Forshage

Hypnagogic organisational suggestion

2009-12-31T07:19:00.001-08:00

We are three persons; we'll have to split up. Three persons go into the kitchen, and three persons go into the imaginary room.

/MF

Film criticism

2009-12-31T07:17:00.000-08:00

There was at some point I was giving a presentation of the major surrealist interest in film in the 50s:

"In this decade, not so much film was produced by surrealism. Far more was being done with developing the surrealist interest in cinema-going, with many surrealists specialising in film criticism, applying more or less surrealist principles. In fact, film criticism based on the bretonian formula that "criticism must be a form of love" is a very distinct genre. To begin with, it brings the viewers subjectivity into the stew by way of desire, through emphasising the romantic, fetishistic and atmospheric. Through this it also sheds light on cinema-going as a poetic ritual and as an analogue to dreaming. It assumes a certain love of lowbrow popular genres, especially horror but also all kinds of boyish adventure and including science fiction, eroticism and sometimes pornography, absurd slapstick comedy, etc. It keeps looking out for the, in fact rather common, elements of mad love and everyday revolt. Then in the process, it also assumes a sharply polemical edge against its contemporary pretentious auteur cinema and formal avantgardism (and the criticism hailing such cinema and technical mastery of the craft) - while also in advance disarming the future tendencies of preferring high-budget hollywood commercial cinema for the sake of its technical skilfullness, as well as the "turkey" nerdism favoring obscure lowbrow genres for being obscure and technically poor rather than for their actual content."

This made me eager to state my own thoughts about a surrealist attitude in the area in a letter to a friend:

Film has to show something interesting. It simply has to have a counterpart in, intervene with, act reciprocally with, a visual-imaginative desire. Film is there for visualising fantasies. From a certain viewpoint, a lot of Hollywood film thereby is founded on conditions which can be fully shared from a surrealist viewpoint. In order to be worth showing on film it has to be somehow "unheard of". It has to show something unusual, preferrably even never seen before, it has to be attractive, terrifying, beautiful in an unusual way.

Therefore there is nothing to object against the overflow in cinema of grand effects, strange landscapes and constructions, odd monsters, wish fulfillments, ingenious mutilations, attractive women and men. I cannot understand how some people can deny that horror film (at least from german expressionism to contemporary ghost drama and uppdated monsters) and super hero film (at least from Fantômas and Douglas Fairbanks to contemporary Marvel heroes etc) would be surrealist genres due their own internal dynamics, since they are there for showing unseen fantasies. (One argument against myself there is using fantasy and science fiction as counter-examples – they are exactly as promising from a theoretical viewpoint, but in practice more often than not just bore me...) The problem is of course that these elements are often used in a purely conventional way, as signs for a conventional content, rather than for something unusual that they could become left to their own power.

This is particularly acute regarding the attractive women and men, the stars, which from a surrealist viewpoint do have a strong fetishist interest, and in certain films are allowed to live out the concrete ambiances that their looks may give rise to, but in a larger number of films are mere clichés, either as naive sandwich signs or as smart self-referring signs. Surrealist interest in film has traditionally not had reason to avoid wallowing in the fetishisation of actors with different types of interesting emanation, stars that really have been able to become mythological creatures, but whether this is a still useful route today is certainly worth a critical discussion (we've had some inconclusive rounds of discussion about this in the Stockholm group).

Another aspect where reserves are necessary is action. Yes, strange courses of events and exaggerations are interesting, but usually speed is used merely as a tool to catch attention, and in that function usually does not therewith correlate with a corresponding dynamism (in the sense of importunate richness in possibilities). And dynamism are often entirely lacking also in the musical meaning, as meaning-generating variations in tempo and volume.

On the other hand there is no need for us to dwell too much on the issue of ideology. Everybody knows that the film industry is a immense industry and a key aspect of american ideology export, this is self-evident but also so general that it can be disregarded. It is simply rather uninteresting that it is possible to decode a reactionary message from more or less every single movie on the repertoire. Messages on that particular level are everywhere around us, and have no immediate importance for that which is the main points of the appropriation of such products. For what is interesting is whether it realises and challenges real desire constellations, or if you will "popular needs", in a dynamic way, whether it generates unusual ambiances and emancipatory fantasies, in the process. (Possibly with an exception for the most idiotic genres of all, like military- , college- and family movies that very eagerly serve to concretely legitimise, sentimentalise and humanise unbearable human conditions, and could be dismissed in their entirety. Or else there might actually be concretely dynamic moments even in them to find for those who were able to withstand it.)

I also don't believe in fantastic realism. Or, hell, why not, just pour it on. Whatever is it anyway? Is it simply Kusturica? Fellini? Hasse & Tage? Anything with colorful characters and much noise? Isn't this just to pick up Buñuel at his most predictable and remove any conventional or unconventional controversial ingredients? Isn't this the particular moment when the desire for the unusual is tamed, is hitched to the cart of reconciliation, when it all becomes "goodtime"? (This is another part where I disagree with myself; in most cases nothing makes me so furious as "goodtime" does, but sometimes I'm enthusiastically pulled along too.)

But the everyday fantastic, or perhaps situational poetic, that is much of the point with film on the whole. Finding visual expressions of the unusual moments in life. The abysses. The fields of possibilities. The trembling atmospheres. Quite a lot of this is found in romantic films and conventional "drama", but just as much or more in east european film and in many famous west european directors works from the 60s and 70s, displacing genuine old romanticism in modern and at first sight trivial environments, with a wide awake eye, the compulsory creativity of errant desire always hinting at the immanence of the marvellous. (One of the points here is to get to my fascination with early Wenders, which I was surprised to find controversial in my circles.)

Unusual characters, unusual environments, unusual courses of events, unusual atmospheres. Strange constellations of objects. Suspension, emphasising the formlessness and tangiability of desire.

I would also like to emphasise that the surrealist perspective does not have any preferences regarding such genre designations as documentary, feature film and art film; is obviously interested in them all and often finds it very difficult to distinguish between them at all. If from a schematic representation of the general consensus view documentaries are supposed to aim at being pedagogical, feature film to be entertaining and art film to be aesthetical; surrealism entirely lacks respect for these ambitions and will expect from all of them to be just as much poetical rather than aesthetical, wondrous rather than entertaining, and investigative rather than pedagogical.

The surrealist film critic perhaps simply acts as a hedonist; is bored by brilliance, is impressed by unusual atmospheres and unusual fantasies, is unhamperedly fetishist in the appropriation of the situations, objects and human beings that are exposed, as if they were mere elements in one's one dream. Which they, methodologically speaking, in fact are.

/MF

November

2009-11-05T07:15:00.000-08:00

Our friend Eugenio Castro of the surrealist group in Madrid noticed that the post "the surrealist bestiary" here had several points of convergence with a very interesting old text of the Madrid group, which we here present in a slightly revised english translation. The original text was published in Salamandra 1993 (reprinted in the anthology Los días en rojo 2005), while an english translation was circulated among surrealist groups.

Another new post deals with perspectives on statues and history.

Note also that certain items of theoretical significance are being posted in english on Kormorantrådet/ the Cormorant Council rather than here as long as they concern imaginative geography and spatiality in dreams.

THE FABULOUS CONTINENT

2009-11-05T07:12:00.000-08:00

A PROPOSAL FOR THE CREATION OF A SURREALIST BESTIARY

Simultaneously with the contemporary approach to the animal from an ecological perspective, a perspective that proclaims the animal’s excellence as a living being (this necessarily implies the protection of animals from one of the worst human diseases: slavery), another attitude imposes itself as it seeks to exalt and perpetuate the animal, once again, as a real space of emanation and intervention of the marvellous.

The animal is a great unknown, and this transforms it into a geography of the unexplored. In the relationship with the elements and its analogues, through its rituals and games, in all its ways of behaviour, the animal contains an act of inspiration as well as being inspiring.

We condemn the paralysing and despicable inclination due to which the animal is presented with human attributes. The recognition of the animal goes inexcusable through a recognition of the beauty that the animal projects: the song of the whale, the love declaration of the penguin, the headlong flight of a kingfisher, the 180-degrees head turn of the eagle owl, the ‘innocent’ ardor of a nocturnal moth and the luminous trail left behind by the firefly during its courting dance. The animal generates a magnificient succession of alternative currents, ‘true emblems of all its splendour.’ (1) On the one hand, these currents constitute an example of generosity towards itself, an authentic demonstration of ‘passional attitude’, but on the other hand, they challenge every human logical system of relation, including that which complacently passes for human sensitivity. In any case, the animal denotes the notion of the particular and the concrete, which in the universe of the perceptible by the senses – and in its relations with every operation of recognition – configures a paradigm of the revealing.

In this sense everything indicates that the operations of extinction and appropriation performed on the animal, cause, simultaneously with the animal’s eradication, a kind of taming of our emotions, or in more brutal terms, a kind of castration of the human emotional capacity and disposition towards the ‘inspiring’. The criminal activity directed against the Amazonian rain forest and countless other actions perpetrated on a national, regional or local level, monstrously and hypocritically by all States of the world, without exception, leads to the gradual disintegration of an infinitely sensitive space of reality, where the intervention of the marvellous could be found in an unadulterated state. Therefore such operations implacable tends to deprive us of that which, inseparable from every activity of our spirits, corresponds to a horizontal and vertical dynamic of knowledge. Because the animal is wisdom! Its forms of existence include an authentic expression of an intuitive, emotional and passional life, which, as we enter into contact with the poetic thought, opens the true path of sailing towards that island which some beings agreed to call, after resting on its shores, the island of wisdom.

This attitude is not, in any way, that which appears in the Article 2, Section B of the Declaration of the Universal Animal Rights: ‘Man is obliged to put his knowledge into the service of the animal (sic).’ Such an appreciation – the ‘good will’ of which does not suffice – characterises the pathetic nature of general approach of man towards the animal being, exposing openly and unashamedly his determination rooted in a system of rationalist thought that places the faculties of the animal onto a lower existential plane. Far from resuscitating a new sensitiveness that would reactualize and reorientate our relationship towards the animal onto a plane of reciprocity, it continues to express the same obscure presumptions by which man strives to establish, now through declarations, the human capacities as superior to that of the animal. And nothing seems to indicate that in order to aspire to this reciprocity it is necessary to be in the field, or that its recognition would pass for such reciprocity. The contemporary difficulty is obvious of a recovery, under the present form of contact, of a relationship that existed as a result of an everyday contact with the animal in tribal, ‘primitive’ or entirely rural societies, and brought a form of knowledge of the animal being. It will have to reconcile the scientific information (which presupposes – principally objective – the absence of such a contact) with an attitude of longing and passion towards the animal, an attitude that responds to an incipient and fundamental recognition, transcending and overriding, at the same time, the limits installed by a restrictive and socially dissociating form of life (inseparably on the mental and the physical level). Moreover, the absence of practical conditions for the concrete recognition of the animal ‘is not incompatible with theoretical recognition, nor would it be incompatible with feelings.’ (2) What is proposed is a necessary change of disposition as a first step towards the breaking of the equivocal: a recognition of the animal? yes, by our recognition of the wisdom of the animal. Only by giving the latter a paramount significance we can place our knowledge at its service and thus establish the coordinates of a reciprocal relationship. As Mariano Auladén affirms, ‘this would require the placement of the operations of relationship between humans and the animal on the same level as the relationships which humans attempt to establish among themselves. Only a human effort departing from such a premise, independently from the result which we can obtain with our present strength, would enable us to leave the trite path of routine and mental lethargy towards the animal.’ (3)

In all its categories, the animal awakens an intricate web of correspondences in their highest degree of transparency. The poet will make them his own; surrendered to a state of metamorphosis the poet will establish with the animal, ‘in contrast with the scientist and his methods of enquiry based on plain descriptions of the animal’s physiology and his habits’ (4) a relationship animated by a dialectic between the unknown-marvellous-revealing that leads him to a new magic recreation. The poet will employ means of analogy and poetic imagination as a vehicle for translating his knowledge of the animal, from a perspective which would exalt, once again, the animal’s totemic and symbolic role. The animal has not lost its fabulous essence seen by travellers in past times, an essence confirmed by the tradition of the imaginary. Similarly, the image of the animal as an instructor and inductor of his wisdom has not disappeared. This role surfaces in indigenous cultures (‘…we have been here for thousands of years and long time ago the animals instructed us.’) (5) It is the modern and the contemporary man who has rid his spirit of the awareness of these phenomena that were traditionally consubstancial to him. The reestablishment of relationships based on the principle of the marvellous entails an attitude by which the faculties of the animal are to be recognized.

As an eagle over the forest, as a sheldrake on a female shelduck, the animal accelerates a reunion with the lost mythogenic consciousness of life. This will become the foundation stone in a construction of a bridge, the determination of which implies that the desire of Joseph Jablonski that one day man should know, again, how to identify the animal world as his totem, will begin to be fulfilled. In any case, such a provision does not cease to incite a form of reconduction towards that being (it remains to us to place and contemplate that day in our time). In this way, the end of the false fascination expressed in the condescending vision of the animal, a vision that predominates at the present time, would begin; the end of a vision that turns against him ‘the double stigma with which the modern man tries to defend his enslaved reason: the useful-the harmful.’ (6)

Neither a perverted action (appropriation, murder) nor an obscene one (the animal as entertainment for the masses, i.e. circuses, zoos, art exhibitions…) can lead, in spite of man, to a decimation of the animal. At the same time, no such actions can prevent us from seeing in the spiral of its forms of life a space of enchantment from which to reenchant what we vaguely take as the Human Condition.

As Mariano Auladén asserts, ‘…the animal is not property, it is a REVELATION. It is not a cultural object, but a CREATOR OF ACTS.’ Such manifestations will open for us the source of a true recovery of sensibility regarding the animal world. In their critical consideration, these manifestations proclaim the absence of awareness that the modern and contemporary man holds of the animal world. The repercussions of such an absence are omnipresent: man projects his base condition on the animal and extends it over the animate and inanimate continent of new references. To this attitude we, surrealists, would like to respond with a formula to convert the historical time that restricts it to a mythogenic time that would transcend it.

The creation of a Surrealist Bestiary corresponds to these ideas. As long as the surrealist thought will demand a mythogenic perspective of life, it will communicate an attitude of exaltation and recognition of the animal’s behaviour (way of life) and its own morphology from the view point of a dialectic of imagination that would transmutate it onto a totemic level.

The animal, a being whose existence is inseparable linked with a total sense of the marvellous, and whose majestic presence fabulously completes and presides the universe of the imaginary, contributes here to the realization of the immanent attraction that exists between the desire for a myth and its satisfaction. It offers to our sensitivity and knowledge an invitation in a way of challenge:

Let the flight of thousands hummingbirds create through the agitation
of their wings an equal number of air currents which will surround man
and erase him, return to him his absolute presence that would irreversible
identify him - this was for Marianne Van Hirtum already a practical condition -
with the perennial image of the Enchanter.

The Surrealist Group in Madrid
Madrid, 1993

Notes:

1. The Anteater’s Umbrella. A Contribution to the critique of the Ideology of Zoos, The Surrealist Group in Chicago, 1971.
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage
3. Mariano Auladén, “Quiyi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi”, Luz Negra, Comunicación surrealista nº 2, Gijón, 1981, p 5.
4. Mariano Auladén, ibid.
5. Claude Levi-Strauss, ibid.
6. Mariano Auladén, ibid.