Meaninglessness of dreams

I read a currently popular pocketbook bestseller where an American journalist (David Randall, was his name) gives an overview of the subject of sleep. The first two chapters introduce some exciting basic facts about sleep that are not generally known, and I was beginning to wonder if this book was going to be one of those "popular revelations" like Krause's book on natural sounds, or Pretor-Pinney's book about clouds, or Johannesson's-Klingberg's book about Swedish extreme metal. But already chapters 3 and 4 are substantially weaker than 1 and 2, and in chapter 5 (only in chapter 5!) he comes to the subject of dreams, and reveals colours.
    First he gives a recollection of the Freudian way, a somewhat incomplete but far from unsympathetic and not very superficial account: he even examplifies with the famous analysis of the "Irma's injection" dream and gives the whole "broken kettle" argument!
    Then he comes with summaries and interviews of modern dream researchers, who all complain about being pariahs in science because everybody thinks dream research is necessarily about new age, but who have all stubbornly clinged to a cognitive program and thereby conclusively disproved Freud once and for all.
    One American professor disproved Freud by collecting 50 000 dreams and formalising their key elements, finding that dreams are not meaningful, symbolic, "surrealistic" or wish-fulfilling – because they are in fact meaningless, banal, standardised, boring, negative and anguish-filled! For example, if a stranger occurs in a dream, he will invariably start pursuing and attacking the dreamer. And when ex-partners, family members and dead friends pop up, it is only to trigger bad conscience.
    Another American research team proved that dreams are meaningless because they are totally random memory fragments, and just because of that, they contribute usefully to solving everyday problems because we can see things in a different constellation.
    The author of this popular book enthusiastically agrees with all this, and explains that dreams are so consistently negative and anguish-filled because they are fundamentally the playing out of worst-case-scenarios in our everyday worries, and the reason they are negative is not that they are meaningful in any way but they simply reflect that everyday life is mostly about worries.
    Any reader with a sense for irony will appreciate this elaborate parable. If dreams are meaningless because they are boring and anguish-filled, systematically negative and totally random, just a continuation of waking thought and entirely meaningless, does not this list provide a rather exhaustive set of self-contradictions that just once more illustrate the case with the broken kettle?
    So clearly, this is just a case of the classic philistine "hatred against the marvellous".
    Many aggressive common-sense views of the "cognitive" side of the spectrum typically postulate apriori that things are meaningless. They usually take sadistic pleasure in "debunking" the romantic views of the naively meaning-ascribing primitives around them; but as long as the lack of meaning is a postulate, it is also rather logically consistent and escapes counterarguments. You have to have faith in this meaninglessness, or it becomes just a hollow stance, a rhetorical trope.
    But then many of these haters turn to actively demonstrating the absence of meaning, a task that easily becomes self-contradictory, because formulating patterns and selecting examples are activities that in themselves produce meaning, and the absence of meaning can never ever be actually demonstrated. The closest thing to a meaninglessness demonstrated is perhaps an almost perfect mathematical randomness. But demonstrating this also requires the conceptualisation, circumscription, recognition, selection and naming of elements as well as the variables measured, and therefore involves meaning.
    Another aspect is this weird identification between the common and the negative, between everyday life and anxiety – clinically, I would say that anyone this eager to identify these two very different concepts with each other is simply a very depressed person.
    Again we are perhaps reminded of the broken kettle in this credo of miserabilism: the beautiful and the pleasureable are not something very attractive, and anyway they are very very uncommon, and when they do occur they are not real but only illusions.
    Yes, and by the way, the rest of the book is mostly bullshit, with a few scattered interesting facts about sleep biology, sleep psychology and sleep sociology. A popular science book is after all typically a compendium of small revelations and great prejudices side by side.

M Forshage

Anti-art and plain poor art

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.

MF

Everything not everything

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.

the strategical point of strategy

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.

towards the solidification and relativisation of atopos theory

Erik Bohman & Mattias Forshage

(from forthcoming international surrealist journal Hydrolith)



Surrealists as urbanists

Nothing could fool us to think that the city is a familiar place. Urbanity is a system of the dynamism of cramping things together, and its most interesting parts will remain that which grows in its interspaces, buds off from its inner limbs, remains its difficultly charted characteristics. There are, of course, all-too-familiar patterns and all-too-obvious conscious motives, of those who want to control the others and those who just want to be left alone. But the unknown always remains a distinct possibility in urbanity's collaging of people, physical and mental environments and thus of social relations in general. And where the unknown emerges, there is always the potentiality of poetry.

Early surrealist investigations into urban flow led to the development of concepts such as objective chance. But most of the arsenal of methods, games and perspectives was never systematised into a particular theory. It was to a large extent up to the surrealists' prodigal children the situationists to cast it in pseudo-academic terms with the theory of the dérive and the theory of psychogeography. These were later recuperated into surrealism, and the surrealists' own investigations of urban environments were refuelled. In this new wave of exploration, additional new perspectives and concepts emerged.

One concept which gained some distribution in the previous decade was that of worthless places (atopoi or atoposes, literally meaning non-places - atopoi being the greek plural which the Leeds surrealist group insisted on, atoposes the ridicule-anglification first utilised by the Stockholm group who introduced the term). It was used in print first in the "Geografi" issue of Stora Saltet (1995). A brief summary of the subject by MF from the "Upphittat" (found objects) Stora Saltet was subsequently published in english in Manticore (as "The poetry of worthlessness"), in spanish in Salamandra and in czech in Analogon. Recently another piece, putting the concept to concrete work, was printed as "Explorations of absence" by the Leeds surrealists in Phosphor #1 (2008). (In the meantime we had found some Plato quote including the term, and not too distantly Roland Barthes had called love an atopos; only recently however it was pointed out to us that in greek it is the common word for something absurd in the mathematical-logical sense. There has also been some internal debate whether the concept was closely related to Foucault's idea of heterotopia, but its affiliations on a purely theoretical level is not of particular importance for a concept we now address as an analytical tool.)

Other surrealist groups pursued their geographical investigations in other directions. The Paris group maintained focus on objective chance and analogical geography in the "Géographie passionelle" issue of S.U.RR., the Madrid group together with individuals elsewhere developed the concept of "exteriority" for epiphanic experiences of sensory presence at certain border locations. Some of these groups were never particularly interested in, or impressed with, the concept of worthless places. This is of course conditioned by differences in direction and local traditions, but a certain role could also be assigned to differences in conspicuousness and function of the locally available such sites.

In this text, we would like to sketch some of these differences in conditions while restating the basic background of organising urban space, and restating, perhaps even forwarding, some principles and perspectives for surrealist investigations into urban geography.


Recognition of worthless places

The emergence of worthless places in urban environments depends on several conditions. Their recognition typically focuses on either of three approaches.

a) that of poetic phenomenology - keeping up the vigilance towards spots conveying a distinct feeling of being out of control and having a distinct diffuse potential (if such a seeming contradiction is excused), of having a hidden history, a hidden usage or a hidden future in the realm of collectivisation and realisation of desires. This is straightforward to apply, but not in a strictly intersubjective way.

b) that focusing on usage (in terms of sociology, ethnology or behavioral ecology) - tracing spots which are generally used in a non-regulated way for activities not at all intended by owners, city planners, entrepreneurs, architects - which people individually or collectively snatch and exploit for various needs. This is obviously the most difficult criterion to apply, since we have no particular interest in acknowledging thousands of semi-secluded spots where males sometimes urinate... we want perhaps to be able to distinguish between using the same spot for a wellbehaved rendezvous or consumption of drinks and entertainments offered on one hand, and on the other hand a non-regulated nothing-buying hangout... and we would possibly like to be able to somehow define non-usage, abandoning to spontaneous decay, as a special category of unintended usage...

c) that of economic history, which allows for the most rigorous definitions - recognising spots of non-productivity in economic terms in the middle of a generally high-productive city-planned area. Being a formal and not a qualitative distinction, this criterion has the advantage of pointing out unexpected and inconspicuous places. On the other hand, it will also cover phenomena which don't interest us in themselves. Still, the determination will then sometimes require vast knowledge in local history and economy, and in practice, even with this criterion, the most obvious instances are diagnostically spotted via one or several of the following:

1. poetic suggestions in accordance with the first approach above,

2. artifacts giving a clear indication of popular usage: such as displaced chairs and sofas, toys, abandoned clothes, notes and drawings, porn magazines, condoms, bottles and beercans, abundance of cigarette butts or garbage in general, etc,

3. an abundant flora of fast-growing, easy-dispersing, more or less globalised, ruderal plants, indicating that no one manages or tidies the spot.

It should be remembered that within surrealism, such a concept with a rigorous definition, is a mere tool for poetic investigation and not something interesting in itself. The gap towards academic cultural geography is still wide. The point here is not refining the concepts, comparing it with other concepts, and debating its merits and failures, the real question is to what extent it actually sharpens our vigilance for the active contradictions and poetic possibilities in the urban environment.

There is a certain correlation between the explanatory power of a concept and how discriminately it is applied. Therefore we here stress certain objective characteristics of atopoi, insisting that the concept will not be obviously applicable to the same extent on a global scale, and that local factors will make it more or less interesting.


Value production in urban settings
- In the lapses of accumulation

The decisive regularities conditioning the distribution of sites of value in the capitalist city give us a methodological starting point from which we can approach the question of the spatial distribution of worthlessness. Here the object is not one of exploration, for which such a method would prove all too general and lacking in inspiration. Rather, it lets us avoid a couple of not-so-productive interpretations of atopoi and their relationship to the capitalist city, culture or whatever might strike the fancy of anyone prone to thinking in abstracts and unmediated totalities. We are prepared to posit the existence of a certain break between the patterns of distribution (or production by chance) sketched herein and the unlikely but constantly reoccurring product. This break is not to be understood along the lines of those pairs of opposites that pretend to say something very profound while hiding difference, particularity or reserving room for them squarely on one side of the opposition. The critique of civilization that proceeds from the a priori positioning of "culture" and "nature" teaches us nothing and substitutes experience with moralist still-lifes. Not in opposites but in living contradiction do we hope to find those sparks of wonder that illuminate the fragility of the present order of things.

The capitalist city is by and large determined by the processes of accumulation and the contradictions inherent in these processes. These imply a tendency towards general urbanisation while effecting local processes of de- and re-urbanisation and a (more or less) dynamic redistribution of people and sites of value according to the needs and limits of accumulation. The ability of capital to impose an urban dynamic governed by its voracious appetite for surplus value is checked by the continual struggle waged in a variety of forms between those who are its agents and those who suffer its consequences. The immense number of contradictions arising from the conditions of the modern city are breeding grounds of the marvellous.

The capitalist city is a structure made out of a number of heterogenous elements. Its development is not a one way street, neither does it develop in a smooth frictionless manner. The tendencies and countertendencies that give rise and direction to the deployment of urban spaces can only result in an uneven development. Just as the global economy simultaneously accumulate massive material wealth and an even more glaring (spiritual, material) poverty, so does the city.

The atopos might be defined negatively as a place that doesn't lend itself to a) production of commodities, b) circulation of commodities, c) reproduction of labour power or d) the reproduction of those apparatuses necessary to secure the conditions of accumulation on the level of society (police, state initiatives, etc). A purely negative definition this far - as a place devoid of value, a lapse in the circuits of accumulation. Such a definition stops short of the aims of surrealist investigation and leaves the place itself a blank, since the same concepts that lets us grasp the patterns of distribution have nothing or very little to say about it. We can go one step further: the definition will rather give us hints as to where and under what conditions one can expect the emergence of atopoi.

The creative destruction through which city development unfolds have an almost inevitable tendency to produce temporal lapses just at those places where economic growth is most apparent, such as in the process of gentrification.

Typically in a modern city there will be a dynamism of worthless places which can be decribed in foucauldian-autonomous terms: on the one hand gentrification and various urban development schemes; the infinite struggles to increase profit, utilising any old and new means of disciplining, exclusion and appropriation; on the other hand popular usage, countering and competing with gentrification by way of various non-regulated non-commercial useless usages. This should preferrably be studied empirically, but it can be assumed that there are always struggles occurring. Places will fall out of order and be reintegrated at a certain pace, which will be different in different cities and different parts of the cities at different times. Acknowledging worthless places a little too publicly will usually lead to their reintegration (if not for direct exploitation then for the ideological exploitation resulting from open recognition of their eventual picturesque qualities). Few largescale triumphs for the popular side are possible within the given socioeconomic order (and will probably often count as steps in a social revolution), but the struggle is perpetual and will produce a variety, at any given moment, of worthless places for leisure and play, indicating the impossibility of total control, inspiring surrealist usage of urbanity and the dreaming of yet unknown senses of urban life.

We recommend some of our enthusiastic friends of the ultraradical variety some caution: city planning cannot be monolithic and is usually not pursuing a hidden agenda. City planning is the chaotic outcome, suboptimal from all viewpoints, of compromises between various concerns and interests; fulfilling a function that is - among other things - disciplinary on the whole largely because this is the involuntary sum of the competetive commercial, political and popular interests. A lot will be about facilitating work and work transports, and offering occasions for entertainment and isolation, based on the joint interests of the capitalists of reproducing labor power and of the people of having at least some fun and getting left in peace to at least some extent. There are always conflicts of usage but also conflicts of planning, and thus small and large spots which fail to conform to intentions or where intentions fail to resolve themselves - the city is a dynamic arena and this has always been obvious to its surrealist users. There are not so few good intentions in some of the political planning, which is then always implemented in a coopted and coopting way but which may simultaneously allow for independent popular possibilities. In fact, various philanthropic and social-liberal ambitions are at least as historically important in city planning as the all-too-often cited examples of purely repressive concerns. Hausmann's avenues and the metaphor of Bentham's Panopticon should at least be accompanied by the various utopian-socialist, early-ecologist, radical-egalitarian, mystic-esoteric etc traces. Sometimes these could challenge the limitations of philanthropic liberalism when taken literally.


Parameters of worthless places

Several types of conditions govern first the emergence and maintenance and second the recognition of worthless places in different parts of the world. Both are very dependent on 1) the general degree of urbanity, 2) the general level of order and orderliness, 3) current local land prices and other market particulars and exploitation conditions.

The general degree of urbanity conditions the availability of worthless places. The denser and more heterogenous the population, and the larger the overall accessability via sidewalks and public transport, the more opportunities for an atopos to emerge, and new social practices.

For example, many North American cities have such a lack of urban density that the concept often will appear to lack application there. Whenever a city is planned under no shortage of land, and driving a car is the normal way of moving in the city rather than walking or using public transport; there will be an abundance of interspaces between all things and no obvious contrast between useful and useless land. When such a concentration is lacking, the flow of messages and chance encounters central to surrealism's appreciation of urbanity, is often decreased to non-urban levels. That certain places are put to popular perverse/detourning usage when decaying under such circumstances too is obvious nevertheless, and proven for example by some of the places found and photographically documented by Eric Bragg in the northern California countryside, but they may perhaps not be best described with the term atopoi or best understood in the framework of urbanity.

Order and orderliness is a crucial factor, but primarily on the level of conditions for discovery of such places. In a city where city planning is partly chaotic, where land market is relatively anarchic, where a major segment of the population lives in poverty or outside conformist lifestyles, where cleaning, public order, construction and renovation tasks are slower or less ambitious, where general mentality is less orderly: worthless places will probably be more abundant but far less conspicuous. And as much of their surrealist function lies in their contrast action they will also often be less interesting.

Market particulars are also crucial for the abundance and the conspicuousness of worthless places. Growing populations of course promote higher land prices, but exploitation rate is also dependent on general income, living standards and the availability of resources for exploitation, and on particular characteristics of entrepeneurs and landlords (oligarchies, mafia, superstitions, political and transnational economical involvment etc). Where the economy and thus the physical shape of the city is more "dynamic"; the worthless places will be less stable, quicker to emerge (drop out of control) but also to disappear (become reintegrated).

This is even more important when it comes to cities in the southern hemisphere or where very large parts of the population is poor: the pressure on available space is great but the capacity to pay for it is low, putting market mechanisms out of use and accentuating social contradictions, and creating a situation where whole neighborhoods and sometimes even whole parts of countries can assume the characteristics of worthlessness. Or the contrast will be organised along other scales or parameters than that of surface area.

There is also the remarkable particulars of for example the great stalinist cities of East Europe, where a certain megalomanic totalitarian regime has been replaced by regimes with distinctly other primary mechanisms of disciplining and social control. These huge squares and avenues, which made ideologic sense and were practically used for propagandistic parades (and for good old hausmannian riot control), have now become senseless. And in the instances there is no capital available for new exploitation of them, they remain basically remain; vast, often ghostly, worthless.

The mapping of such differences will increase our understanding of the fundamental and local differences in possiblities connected with organising of space, (and might facilitate communication between surrealist activities in different places).


The surrealist perspective

Surrealist interventions both theoretical and practical in the area of urban investigations are parallelled by those of others. There are tendencies among academics (in cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, economic history, human ecology, etc etc), subacademics (postmodernists, the art world), activists (struggles for "new commons" and against commercial/policiary control, auto-reduction, squattings etc), subactivists (postsituationists, post-live-role-players) and common boyish adventurers ("urban exploring", parkour), which may be more or less identical in single approaches. The surrealist project might be characterised primarily by the concern for the poetic experience and its phenomenology AND the insistence that this poetry is not primarily subjective, "pure" or religious in nature but dynamic and immanent. On the other hand, surrealists insist on the significance of considering circumstances giving rise to poetic phenomena, to acknowledging several concerns (including the psychological, mythological, scientific, utopian, political, historical) and their mutual conditioning. In this case, if anyone need formulae easy to memorise, we could say we insist on the Empirical, Epistemological and Emancipatory concerns of surrealism.

It is necessary empirical in its focus on poetic experience, but also in letting this experience emerge more distinctly by giving the possibly relevant circumstances in a documentary or (as Breton liked to evoke from Freud) clinical way. This documentation and curiosity for paraphernalia will allow for many new connections and spontaneous criticisms as well as for letting anecdotes take part in larger patterns, unlike those accounts which immediately - spontaneously or laboriously - transforms concrete experience into intoxicated fairytales.

Surrealist perspective is fundamentally directed towards producing new knowledge, not seeking to merely confirm preconceived views. It adresses the unknown in a manner which trusts its productivity, and does not treat it religiously as if it was something fragile. Systematically, ludically and/or intuitively it raises new questions, devises new methods and introduces experimental alterations. It could not be satisfied by our own emotional responses themselves, savouring ambiances like the kick-seeking youth or the sensible dandy flaneur, or by quasitheoretical efforts making up names for phenomena without defining them by any other criteria than this emotional response, or the arbitrary applicability of abstract opposites (such as in the art sphere, the new age sphere, popular psychology, poor structuralism etc). It could also not be satisfied by the repetitive formulation of fundamental questions, as typical for postmodernism, conceptual art in general, and most of contemporary so-called political art, which claimes to critise things by merely thematising them, and repeating the very same questions over and over again. They stop short of ever devising a methodology for actually investigating the thing. This particular antimethodological stance of always formulating questions in an "eternal", unanswerable way is one of the many obvious strategies of pure obscurantism within those dominant sectors of art which are unable to adress the unknown in a more substantial, creative, actually exploratory way.

In fact, the atopos theory as naïvely conceived could be formulated in scientific terms as resting on the assumption that there is a negative correlation between the economic productivity and the poetic productivity of a place. And as this is empirically testable it is not just an assumption but a hypothesis, even if its rigorous testing is not among surrealism's first concerns. It does relate back to something fundamental within the concept of the poetic. However, we are not so sure that this hypothesis is very useful. Instead of that correlation we are inclined to suggest a tentative positive one: Poetic productivity will, on a statistical level, be postiively correlated with local steep gradients in economic productivity. Along these slopes come tumbling, and accumulating, not only various discarded objects (mostly all kinds of garbage but also antiquities and utilitarian objects detached from context) as well as perspecuted persons, plants and animals, and repressed behaviors, stories and contradictions. The friction in such movements will create sparks illuminating the atmosphere of possibilities concentrated at such sites.

Finally, the surrealist perspective is based within the demarcation line introduced in Marx's famous eleventh Feuerbach thesis, interpreting the world with the overall objective of transforming it. This is both in immediate terms, planting seeds of radicalising social exhange with such a place as a nexus, and communicating-challenging individual poetic experience with ludic means, and in the long term, as one area of investigation and intervention among many pointing towards future realisation of generalised poetry in radically changed and self-governed social circumstances.

To the question of surrealism and women

polemical

No doubt the question about surrealism and women is not one but several questions. A widespread academic view, which was very popular in the 80s and still is to be seen in many places, is that surrealism is unambiguously misogynist, which shows both in the works of surrealist artists and writers, in their temperaments, and in how women have "been treated" in the surrealist movement.

Others are capable of partly separating these different questions and imagining alternatives; in terms of ideology and ideas, are the aims of surrealism misogynist, passively sexist, naïvely wellmeaning or radically antisexist? what about the imagery, the fantasies, the mythology and the creative tools? what about the organisation and daytoday practice? and in terms of practical frameworks for real women; is it primarily disciplinary and isolating, or primarily revealing, inspiring and contact-knitting?

That old academic standpoint, the misogyny thesis, might perhaps not be that hot at many universities anymore, but remains a consensus in many places where it is mostly repeated by teachers and newspaper critics and others whose job it is to have opinions without investigating the matter. Several current academics have moved on to more fruitful lines of enquiry.

The tendency among many sympathetic academics and critics, as well as many surrealists themselves, to regard this standpoint as absurd and not confront it, is unfortunately indistinguishable from the outside from not regarding the question as interesting or legitimate, which indeed would be a case of ongoing sexism. While other sympathetic commentators have formulated different views, in general terms or in case studies of single historical surrealists, and the surrealists have usually dismissed the critique as reactionary and careeristic, and slightly more rarely, openly discussed the questions themselves. Our most important sources here, at least in the english language, are Nancy Joyce Peters's benchmark essay "Women and surrealism" in Arsenal #4, 1989, and Penelope Rosemont's bulging anthology Surrealist women of 1998 (also including the former; and indeed a necessary read for anyone who wants to approach the problematics, and who wouldn't?).

In these sources, the deeply-felt and well-argued defense of surrealism as a radically antisexist endeavour in its aims and methods is combined with a certain propagandistic eagerness for legitimation including a reluctancy to adress many complicated questions and admit any weaknesses or faults, at least regarding modern activities. The achievements, the consistency and vehemence, and the poetical and theoretical qualities of the works of women surrealists are very consistently praised in Rosemont's anthology. In this book, all women are intelligent, original, strong and sensitive (while it is attacked as totally irrelevant when Whitney Chadwick and other academics mentioned their beauty). All writings of women have remarkable poetic power. Every woman who ever wrote an article, regardless of the subject, is an important theorist. Every woman whom we don’t know anything else about than her name under a single isolated text is an important comet in the movement and a major mystery. Every woman who is repeatedly present in the source material is one of the movements' leading organisers and militants. This lack of objective assessment is obviously a conscious propagandistic choice, and certainly a minor weakness compared with the great merit of holding them forth and making them visible and available in the first place, but nevertheless something that might prove counterproductive in that it might make us refrain from posing certain critical questions.

Now some of the questions are in fact available for investigation with the crudest empirical methods. Rosemont has counted the women contributing to journals and exhibitions for each decade, but for some reason she does not seem to have counted the male contributors in the same way to be able to make a comparison. She has not studied any other comparable (whatever that should be) movement to establish that their share of women is actually smaller. And she has not taken the step to ask women who are not longer active in the movement why not.

While the academic standpoint is not just a rather poor standpoint, but very often this specific feminist-surrealismology is a rather poor strand of research, in most cases (with some notable exceptions) resting almost entirely on secondary sources and very little on original empirical research, the only effort involved being that of "critical reinterpretation" which all too often just means a comparison with another preconceived ideology and, even worse, imagining how historical women "must have felt" according to some standard popular psychology and an obvious lack of imagination and lack of understanding of the phenomenology of life in a radicalised context.

historical

So let's once again cast a glance down the decades of the history of surrealism. From the outset, it is no doubt that there was sexism in the surrealist environment and examples of it can easily be found. Even Rosemont admits this, but, as she argues too, one important question here is whether there was more or less sexism within this environment than within society in general (probably far less) or within other broadly vanguardist movements (probably less than in most, but perhaps more than in a few). In spite of this manifest sexism, there was obviously something attracting women in this environment since they in fact gathered there.

So what did 20s women look for in a vanguardist social circle such as surrealism? Some suggestions:
a) collaborations and mutual inspiration in their creative work
b) careeristic networking, from recognition/coaching to concrete publication and exhibiting opportunities
c) a general sense of adventure and play and intensified life as opposed to available lifestyle alternatives and capitalist society in general
d) friendship, entertainment and fun in an innovative and radical environment
e) particularly intelligent, creative and radical male partners.

The feminist-academic critics here usually believe that women came looking for a) and b) only, which were supposedly denied them, and so settled for e) as an alternative. On the contrary, I would guess that all these five alternatives have been important, for many integrated into a sense of general curiosity-affinity, for others clearly focusing on one or the other point, sometimes even explicitly (quite obviously, a) and c) are the motives which make more sense from a surrealist perspective and would be expected to be the dominant forces driving the most engaged women in surrealism). It cannot be denied that many women of the so-called "liberated" varieties; dropouts and weirdos, frustrated heiresses, widows and rich-man's-daughters, communist activists, artists of all kinds; in fact were attracted to surrealism.

During the 20s, their role in surrealist life was largely a significant but not significantly acknowledged one. Within the surrealist environment, everybody writes and draws more or less, at least as part of games and experiments. And texts, drawings and collaborations by women do appear in journals and exhibitions, but not regularly and their contributors are obviously not considered equally important as writers and artists as many of their male friends. Even more significant, the regular signing of tracts and collective declarations, one of the rituals keeping the surrealist community together, is not done by women at all during this decade; obviously they are simply not officially recognised as members of the group.

But as the journals show, and as Rosemont and many others argue, their contributions are significant and in no way confined to being muses and lovers, which the feminist-academics claim are the only roles assigned to women in surrealism. In the pictures of the 20s surrealist group, Simone Breton (Kahn) has a central position. She was one of the main activists of the group and, with a talent for typing, also a sort of secretary. (This voluntarily adopted role seems like an early resignation to a traditionally feminine role, but I am not sure how much of a standard role the female secretary actually was at the time, and it definitely ascertained her place at the very center of the group.) Her cousin, Denise Levy (Kahn), did not live in Paris and so wasn't a part of everyday life in the group, but a very important correspondent as she spoke fluent german and so was the mediator of a lot of german litterature. Of other women in and around the group at the time, Nancy Cunard was an organiser type, Lise Deharme an independent type, Fanny Beznos and (from the south) Valentine Penrose had an ongoing poetic production internally fuelled, while in many others their participation in games and contribution of texts and artworks seems perhaps a little more passive and more a product of their being around for adventurous, social and romantic reasons (but often no less serious and sometimes even important contributions still); Renée Gauthier, Suzanne Muzard, Gala, Nadja, Jeanette Ducrocq and many others. With these, the feminist-academics are entirely right that they were not recognised and encouraged as artists by their fellow male surrealists, but the reason is simpler than misogyny: they were not recognised as artists because they were none in any other sense than their participation in the shared creativity.

And the situation changed. In the 30s with an intensified politicisation and with in some senses a modernisation of society in general, women became officially members of the group as shown by their signing tracts and declarations, and their contributions to exhibitions and journals was more in proportion with their presence. If we confine the discussion to french surrealism to start with, a few later more or less well-known female writers and quite a number of artists made their first or major public appearances within the surrealist community (such as Gisèle Prassinos, Valentine Hugo, Meret Oppenheim, Leonora Carrington, Remedios, Kay Sage, Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, etc, of those who became famous; in surrealism but less in the outside world, many others are regarded as equally important such as Alice Rahon, Jacqueline Lamba, Mary Low, Isabelle Waldberg etc). Only as theorists are the female participants in the movement almost nowhere to be seen: the only significant female theorist in surrealism in france during the 30s is Claude Cahun (the mere writing articles on political and litterary subjects does not necessarily make for example Nancy Cunard and Mary Low surrealist theorists). Cahun is in many ways an exceptional character, and one which is usually not spoken very much about by the standard feminist-academics since she does not conform to any pattern, being one of the leading political activists and theorists of the group, and a homosexual and therefore not having affairs with male participants, she is simply one of these very complicated and unique truly surrealist characters who are difficult to use as a mere examplification of a polemic point.

The feminist-academics cultivate a version where the male surrealists always tried to suppress the creativity of their female comrades. Judging from catalogues and journals this does not make much sense. But then, there are circumstances which do not readily show in such sources. Obviously, in some ways circumstances were not all that easy for female artists-writers-activists-adventurers seeking collaborations on equal terms. Particularly not since their presence in the community very often also included, as an essential part among others, amorous-sexual ties, which sometimes gave the women themselves, and even more the men, opportunity to end up in dilemmas dictated by double moral standards, remaining bourgeois prejudices, jealousy and egoism. There are some nowadays rather well-known cases where the famous husband/lover expected the wife/lover not to spend that much time with the group or with their creative work since she should care for the household/children etc (Jacqueline Lamba (Breton) being the most famous one). There are probably far more cases where the same result was acquired by a more spontaneous division of labor which wasn't conceived as problematic by either part.

And then there are a couple of well-known cases where an ambitious female participant dragged her male lover out of collectivity into both a more close family life and a more intensely pursued individual career (primarily the two mythic russian femmes fatales Elsa Triolet and Gala encouraging their husbands Aragon and Dalí that surrealism was to small for them). Obviously, the collectivity which is fundamental in surrealism is something which provides some obstacles to both the traditional confined family life and to spectacular marketing of individuals in careerist terms. Probably this is one of the fundamental things that the feminist-academics fail to understand about surrealism. For them, the way female artists may be expected to remain parts of the collective just like everybody else, appears merely as a will to deny them their rightful artistic careers and/or their rightful urge to set up conventional families. In this respect, it is clearly the academics and not the surrealists who are forefighters of conventional sexist bourgeois morality.

During the 30s, the surrealist movement became truly international, and in the various different countries where surrealist activity implanted itself there is of course a large range of variation in terms of females' conditions. We can easily list many important names (Toyen, Iréne Hamoir, Frida Kahlo, Grace Pailthorpe, Ithell Colquhoun, Franciska Clausen, Rita Kernn-Larsen, Elsa Thoresen, Sonia Ferlov, Eileen Agar, Edith Rimmington, Maruja Mallo, Ida Kar is a selection) but what about their situation? In famously liberal England and Denmark, half of the groups' activists and artists were women (but still none of the principal organisers and only one of the theorists, the psychoanalyst Grace Pailthorpe), and the fashionable idea of surrealism as being misogynist has perhaps never been applied to those local histories. On the other hand, in all of surrealism's extraeuropean distribution, in the Canaries, in Egypt, in Japan, and - to begin with - in the whole of Latin America, there was only a very small number of female participants, not given much exposure at all (the significant exception being the complex case of Frida Kahlo), and apparently without much significance to the activities (though mostly we don't have information enough to assess the real situation).

historiographical

One point of controversy is to what extent female surrealists have been properly acknowledged. The thesis pursued by the feminist-academics was that while there is a conspiracy of silence against female artists in general, this was even worse within surrealism because of its misogyny. Nevertheless, the artists they pick as examples are all rather well-known, both within surrealism and within art history. The responding surrealists (such as Rosemont) claim that female surrealists are all well-known within surrealism and it is only in the outside world the conspiracy of silence reigns, and the tendency of the feminist-academics to stick to the already famous can be regarded as a part of that conspiracy. This question is available for empirical enquiry. And I have to say (perhaps a bit boring, yes) that the real situation seems a little bit more complex than to be sufficiently explained by one or two monumental conspiracies.

No doubt women artists in general have had to work much harder to be recognised than their male counterparts. This has probably been far less the case in surrealism, both because of its esteem of somehow "feminine" viewpoints and even more because of its insistence on collective activity, collective exhibitions and collective publications which always makes men and women, famous and non-famous appear side by side. For many female surrealist artists, fame has arrived late, more in spite of their local recognition within surrealism than due to their internal reputation.

For some, recognition has been larger in official art history than in surrealism, typically in those cases were the artists' association with the surrealist movement was brief and ambiguous, like Frida Kahlo and Leonor Fini. For many, recognition outside surrealism has not yet been widespread in spite of their being agreed on within surrealism as central figures, such as with Toyen. While for even more, enquiry into their works and lives comes only slowly in both camps. Claude Cahun was for a long time just a name of a participant among others until her extremely powerful works and personal example became famous in recent decades, among surrealists and among some queer-minded academics but not among the standard feminist-academics. Penelope Rosemont seems to imply that the vast collection of female surrealists in her own book are unknown only to the official art and litterature history while surrealists themselves would know them all. This is not the case. Within the movement, I would guess there was only a handful of active feminists, biography freaks, or both, who could say they knew the majority of the names in the anthology. With these rhetorics, it seems Rosemont is in fact diminishing her own great achievement of discovering, finding biographical data, finding and translating valuable and often great texts of this impressive number of non-famous, rumor-famous, sub-famous and sometimes really famous women surrealists.

And of course a very important point is the width in time and space; academic students of surrealism usually are entirely uncapable of seeing surrealism as a living international thing with groups and individuals active in several different countries all the way back from the classical days to the present; sometimes they explicitly circumscribe their study to one or two particular decades in France or possibly some other country, but more often they do it out of mere ignorance that there is a lot more or of one or the other type of blunt denial. This is actually changing now in many places, where academic surrealism studies are starting to cover even recent times and peripheral countries. (For good and bad.) While for Rosemont, the internationalism and the actuality are part of the starting point. I would say this is a book of monumental importance, not only for being a fantastic anthology which could be opened at random for a strong poetic reminder, and reread over and over, but also for being a dictionary of biographical and historical information, and finally for implicitly posing a large number of questions on how to deal with gender issues within the current movement, questions that she on the explicit level denies need to be posed...

mythological

The fact that the position of women changed for the better in the 30s does not mean however that women since then have been on equal terms with men within surrealism and sexism was left behind in its entirety long ago (as it seems Rosemont is arguing in her book, but I know she is not actually thinking). Of course the sexism of society does not simply end at surrealism's door, and of course the traditional surrealist mythologies concerning desire, love, sexual identities, sexual practices etc are ambiguous. Nevertheless, the idea that surrealism is primarily misogynistic is a strangely misconceived one. Usually it rests on a simplified interpretation that the only place for real women in surrealism is as muses and lovers, as inspiring incarnations of the two mythical characters of the femme fatale and the femme-enfant.

First of all, the active participation of women as co-players, co-adventurers, co-activists, writers and artists everywhere quite simply falsifies that they would be tolerated as mere muses and lovers. Secondly, while surrealism indeed has been cultivating a mythology involving woman and the feminine, there are several things to keep in mind about such a mythology. A myth, in a creative connection, is a vehicle of thought confirming a system of associations and correspondences in order to reveal and create anew epistemological and sensory possibilities and opening up avenues for new enquiry. Myth is thus a tool and has primarily a conditional function depending on its productivity. This is indeed different from the sense of myth which we have in ideological myths of society, where myth is a good-enough non-rational justification of certain social conditions, and thus functioning by halting enquiry and independent thought insteading of forwarding them. The whole function of myth in the creative connection is then to facilitate the invention of new modes of thought and new possibilities of behavior and new senses of life, and not to explain or expect anyone to conform to the already known patterns.

Partly as a result of this and partly as a very simple logical fact, as a very important disclaimer, which seems rather obvious but which the academic-feminists don't trust the surrealists to be aware of, there is a difference between woman in myth and women in reality. Within surrealism, men and women alike, are supposed to be inventing new ways of life together, not conforming to standards or myths.

And then, the surrealist mythology concerning woman and the feminine cannot be satisfactorily reduced to the two tropes of the femme fatale and the femme-enfant. Indeed the classical source which is most explicit on this topic, Breton's Arcane 17, dwells on the mythological character of Melusine and on the role of woman as universal mediator-peacemaker-glue-secretskeeper-magician-naturekeeper-loveinspirer. This is in parts close to the essentialist feminism of most of his contemporary feminist movement (particularly the stresses on the bonds to nature and love and the demand that women's greater influence in society is by all means necessary among other things to end warfare). This idea complex may seem very politically outdated today, but for one thing it can not be satisfactorily accounted for as the choice between femme fatale and femme-enfant.

A lot of the imagery in surrealist art and literature by women and men alike focuses on women as independent erotic agents harboring magic secrets as well as strange bonds with animals and plants, sometimes tender and sometimes cruel - perhaps this is what art historians stuff into the category of femme fatales, but it is obviously something strong and independent, an attractive trope for poetic investigations for many women and many men alike. Then a lot of the imagery in surrealist art and literature by women and men alike focuses on women as beautiful dreamers, slightly elevated from petty worldly concerns while having developed the epistemological organ of intuition into something hypersensitive making them balance on the edge of madness, scatter their whims around them as oracle words, experiencing and arousing adventure wherever they go - perhaps this is what is considered the femme-enfant but it is obviously something very dynamic as well, an attractive trope for poetic investigations for many women and many men alike.

Obviously this mythology in terms of the feminine makes it necessary not to confine such a feminity to individuals of feminine gender. In mythological terms, the image of the poet or the artist is itself a feminine type of character; oversensitive, creative, harboring secrets, empathising, feeling other humans and animals and plants and landscapes etc etc. So obviously, the female mythic images are not someting which solely women may take part in, it is obviously equally possible, and to the same extent desirable, for men. In that sense, all images of magi, of diabolical lovers, of dark strangers, also when males, could be sorted as femmes fatales; and all of the borderline sensitives, instruments of chance, automatists, edge bohemes, lucid savages, psychonauts and psychedelics, could be sorted as femme-enfants. Most of the attractive tropes of mythology for surrealism are obviously on the traditionally female side of the spectrum. But, the determination of such images in terms of feminine or masculine is not the interesting part about them, and from a poetic viewpoint is at best a traditional background to better discern the transgressive qualities of poetic thought as such while leaving such a polarity as a mere temporary aspect distinction immediately giving rise to mediation and sublation and new oppositions and new constellations. If there is in one sense something which might be called "eternally feminine" in surrealism, this is something that one should be careful to draw simplified sexual-politic conclusions from since a) there is nothing eternally masculine, and b) there is nothing interesting with the eternally feminine except as an eternal starting point, the whole point with it being not what it is, but all that which it not yet is and may be on its way of becoming, and c) it is in no way distributed in an exclusive way in terms of sexes. Again, mythologies are not correctives but projections, points of experimental identifications, startingpoints of adventure, so there is clearly nothing which makes the obvious differences problematic between myths and psychological and social truths; the possible autonomy, independence, power, needs, demands, dynamism, refusal, unreasonableness, fallibility, undecidedness, unfinishedness etc of real female human beings are not constrained by cultivating poetic myths but by concrete power relations between people. If certain female participants often feel inclined (pushed or not) to make themselves all too well at home in one or other role, then this is a problem of communication, comfort and inspiration impairing the general dynamism of behavior within that group, and not primarily a problem with the myths they are conforming to.

Nevertheless, there is an obvious danger in myth thought to analogise all kinds of possible dual polarities with the two sexes and expect sexes to be eternally opposite and complementary. One aspect of this, that of the possible erotisation of the world and all kinds of categories, can often (not always) be very obviously dynamic and poetically fruitful, while other connected aspects are far less dynamical; particularly in those cases where its lazy application breeds an expectancy of the sexual behavior (and social behavior) of the two sexes to conform to those preconceived standards, to remain true to their categorisation, to not transgress. This is obviously something alien to the liberatory, transgressional and metamorphic spirit of surrealism; but it is always a cliché which remains seductive and easily fallen into by individual lazy, non-fervent, or aging practictioners, especially when combined with returning repressed taste for pornography and banal fetishism and with the often connected taste for occultist traditionalism and cultural pessimism. I would say this is a problem in surrealism, but not a problem with surrealism, as such prejudices are simply conservative and thus in effect antisurrealist.

pictorial

Perhaps something also needs to be said about the recurring presence of the female body in surrealist imagery. On one hand, this is something shared with the mainstream of art throughout history and especially every kind of art thematising love and eroticism (except perhaps strictly male-homosexual local applications). But it should also be admitted that it is something particularly significant in parts of surrealism.

While in pornography and advertising, female bodies are everpresent as commodities offered or as commodities advertising other commodities, in art the point of their exposure is to start addressing our basic concepts of beauty in their simplest form and push them to some sense of transcending experience. Of course, and especially nowadays, these categories are not well-defined and mutually exclusive, art may work perfectly well as advertising and pornography, while sometimes pornography can be disturbingly aesthetical. The different functions do remain distinct however, and when situationist- or postmodernist-minded intellectuals will say they are entirely merged, this is just a symptom of the lack of empiricism in said intellectuals.

Particularly in surrealism, bodies and particularly female bodies do have an important place simply because they do indeed seem to have that important place in imagination (so far based on manifestations predominantly by males in a patriarchal society but seemingly widely spread across groups there regardless of the real reasons for that quasi-universal apparent order of things), heavily invested with simple desire and utterly complex desire, with resistances, idealisations, fetishisations and tons of associations, reaching back to infantile concepts and forward to utopian wishfulfillments and sideways to our own most moving anecdotal experiences and to the ambiguity of the whole of pornographic imagery. It all seems dynamic for the imagination and that it the sole bottomline criterion.

But it should also be clear that surrealists are not interested in the nowadays common way of legitimising controversial representations (the strategy of so-called political art since pop) by pronouncing them to be "problematisations" of widespread concepts, neither "social documentary" nor "ironic" - regardless of whether this alleged problematisation intention is a post-factum-rationalisation or an honest admittal of lack of any real inspiration-dynamism in the original production, it does not help clichés from being clichés.

In opposition to this, surrealists tend to mean everything they say in a naïve way, because they are seriously investigating it themselves, everything presented in surrealist creation is research notes into the ambiances, dynamisms, fortunes and misfortunes of real experienced poetic phenomenology. In that sense, its fetishism concerning the female body is naïve, symptomatic, careless, libertarian and obsessed, but nowhere cynical, smug, calculated.

It is also noteworthy how similar this fetishisms of the female body in works of male surrealists is to that in works of most of those female surrealists who adress explicitly erotic themes; in the works of say Joyce Mansour, Nelly Kaplan, Rikki Ducornet, Marianne Van Hirtum, Mimi Parent, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Jayne Cortez, Olga Orozco, Meret Oppenheim and Toyen, to still talk only about the famous. Here the perspective fluctuations also more often, naturally, encompasses the first-person perspective, and fetishism of the male body.

(The male body is obviously less a theme, and significantly less so for most male surrealists, in whom any fetishism directed that way will be interpreted as an indication of homosexuality. Of course there are many examples to be found of transgressive fantasies in these areas too. And of course a number of famous surrealists have been homosexual. While on the other hand parts of the movement have retained one or other type of homophobia (homophobia regarding males that is) based on a moral critique of "effeminisation" (such as Breton's much-cited 20s attitudes from the "investigations of sexuality"), on moral conclusions extrapolated from a bipolarising mythology, or on a certain misdirected sense of feminism (according to which male homosexuality denies women their rightful role as universal mediators of love). This indeed constitutes another challenge for the movement only rarely adressed.)

Let us in fact look at a few of those artists whose works are sometimes cited as prime evidence of surrealism's misogyny: Man Ray, Paul Delvaux, Max Walter Svanberg and Hans Bellmer.

Some idiots just can't grasp the notion of metamorphosis; so distorsion is then simply equal to violence; any representation of the female body diverging from realism corresponds to physical assault - such a refusal to think need perhaps not be seriously argued against. Much of Ray's work and perhaps most of Bellmer's are simply investigations of the metamorphic potential of the matter, and special way of being matter, of the heavily desire-infested female body; thus of erotic and imaginational phenomenology and not about social expectancies on behavior of women. The references to sexual violence in Bellmer are secondary to that fantasizing; obviously so in gory drawings or bondage photographs where uninhibited morphological curiosity simply doesn't recognise realistic restrictions, but in another way in some of the doll photographs, which integrate external associations to the forbiddenness of the particular type of fetishism and makes them part of the fantasy itself. "Irresponsible" and sometimes perhaps disgusting, sure, but still on the conditions of imagination and without implications for the real position of real women on the whole.

Delvaux is all about the capacity of the female nude to create or emphasise an ambiance of the unusual, his landscapes are neither erotic scenes projecting desire nor modern pornographic scenes where female nakedness has become a matter of course and something to pay for or get comforted or comfortably aroused by. (An isolated and significant artifact is the shortstory by Alain Joubert about the firsthand experience of being such a surrealising female nude as in a Delvaux painting.) It has indeed been claimed that the widespread exposition of female nudes in pornography and advertising has made Delvaux's art redundant, but those genres are usually neither striving nor capable of creating something unusual, dreamlike, dissettling rather than the opposite: recognisable, disarmed and exploitable.

Then Svanberg has a clearly more "primitivist" take on the subject as he adresses the female body as a sun in a religion, the eternally embellishable monstrous centerpoint to worship in a new sacred cosmology. The poetic attraction in such a recharged universe is obvious, but in Svanberg's world there is also more of an obvious risk of letting this vision stand as a substitute and an obstacle for seeing real women with their needs, dynamism, fallibility and unfinishedness.

But let us also note that the fetishisms of surrealism are fetishisms which may adress all kinds of sexual fantasies and perversions, all in accordance with their sense of truth and dynamism to the imagination, and neither of their moral aspects, practical recommendability nor simple effectivity. Some of it is indeed highly unrealistic in terms of possibilities of practical enacting, some of it is indeed cruelly or carelessly sadistic or masochistic, some of it is twisted enough not to be erotic at all for the casual audience, much of it is highstrung romantical; if some of this works sexually arousing under certain circumstances, that may be an interesting part of the reception or not, but its primary purpose remains a totally different focus: to be an investigation of the imagination on behalf of poetry. Some more or less pornographical works by surrealists indeed work on the level of scatological jokes or attempts at scandal and has not much bearing on the specific surrealist sense of the erotic (though I shouldn't deny that blasphemy and scandal probably was much more interesting several decades ago when it was not a very common marketing strategy). The significantly surrealist pornographical works are usually rather some of those which serves as beautiful documents of uninhibited fantasies, or those which reveal erotic possibilities in everyday life by hypersensitively suggesting fetishist focuses (adressing the immanence of the marvellous).

But let's not deny that a lot of (lesser) surrealist artists and writers have put forward a sad amount of boring psychological documents about banal fantasies of sexual aggression, a bouquet of banal sexual puns and dirty jokes of doubtful value, some outbreaks of not very exciting coprolaly, as well as many faltering compositions where introductions of naked women or just nude torsos are expected to do more or less the whole job of creating a sensation of the unknown and tickling where the unknown is very obviously lacking...


statistical

In the early 20s, women were less than 10% of the surrealists. This soon rose slightly over 10%, but it was only in the second half of the 30s it rose above 15%. And then it actually kept fluctuating around 15% (12-18%) all the way up to the 80s, when the 20% limit was broken. After 1981, the fluctuation has gone between 20 and 25%. Obviously, the proportions are very different in different countries.

In the early days, it was almost only in Europe there were any women at all in surrealism. This changed in the 40s, when women were becoming active in south and north america (but still to this day not in Japan!). In the present situation, there is on the whole a higher proportion of women in those countries with an active movement present (surrealist groups rather than associated individuals), but even among those with a wide span of variation. To just mention a few examples, calculations summarising individuals present in surrealist collaborations and publications after 2000 shows that women in France, England and the Czech Republic are somewhere near the overall means of 25.0% (like Sweden and Greece); while Argentina, Canada and USA are above a third, and on the other hand Chile, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and the Netherlands are around 15%. Of course my data are very incomplete, to some extent supposedly in a manner reflecting the very phenomenon under study, so that it would not be a major problem, but unfortunately this incompleteness is unevenly distributed and may cause artificial differences.

The recruitment of women has varied more in relative numbers than in absolute numbers, meaning that the flow of women into surrealism has been a lot more constant than the flow of men. Men are obviously more trend-sensitive. In certain old times, when surrealism has been a major center of attraction, such as in the mid-30s and in the late 40s, the proportion of women among the newcomers has dropped to 8-9% of the newcomers, but in hard times it was often around 20%. In recent times the rate seems to have gone up, after 1981 fluctuating wildly between 20 and 35%. That these figures are usually larger than the total figures for the same period, means that women stay a shorter time than men in the movement.

(These calculations are based on a population of 2633 sexed persons appearing in surrealist journals, exhibitions, games, declarations, organising and campaigns from the 20s to the present.)


contemporary

So, in the history of surrealism from the second world war on, there is a continued slow improvement of women's conditions - from "not bad" to "even less bad, but in some ways still not very good". In a movement with such a great interest in eroticism, both the possibilities and some of the problems of the so-called "sexual revolution" were addressed within surrealism already in the 50s, and even more so in the 60s when they were parallelled with some direct sexual-political questions arising from the resurrected-radicalised feminist movement of the day. Such questions have been regularly awoken since, in some surrealist groups more than others, but usually in one way or another emphasising the need to keep the discussion alive and to try to invent ways of making participation possible on equal terms and in a truly empancipatory vein.

Currently, the situation is different in different groups; female participation in current groups varies between less than a sixth and more than half. Many groups have a leading female character at its center. Some groups are explicitly feminist, some groups are eager to avoid that designation. Some groups regularly or occasionally face critical questions of sexism in their own organisation and activities, some hope to avoid them and to remain a relative freezone from gender-role impositions.

Many of the forefront theorists and organisers in surrealism today are females: Penelope Rosemont herself, Merl, Marie-Dominique Massoni, Lurdes Martinez, probably others. There is an abundancy of important surrealist creators who are women, important both in terms of the works in themselves and of their explicit placement within a collective radical endeavour; I certainly do not have the necessary overview here but will list only some of my own favorites, be they personal friends of mine or not, (and leaving out those already mentioned elsewhere in the text): of poets Emma Lundenmark, Eva Kristina Olsson, Beatriz Hausner, Mariela Arzadun, Josie Malinowski, of sculptors Virginia Tentindo, of painters Kathleen Fox, Sara Avila, Katerina Pinosova, Katerina Kubikova, Marie Wilson, Anasor ed Searom, and then in dance, in film, etc, while the most important still remains the field of surrealist everyday life, where it would be difficult to single out any specific guiding stars-

But on the whole, it is undoubtedly plainly wrong to see in surrealism an active reduction by men of women to their roles as mere lovers, muses, objects. There is instead a continuous thematisation/adressal of women as comrades/coplayers/coexperimentators/costrugglers, as artists/magicians/wise/truthsayers, as lovers/desire-objects/co-eroticists, as inspirators/mediators/muses, by men and women alike. If it is, in spite of this, not too difficult to gather a number of anecdotes where single female surrealists have been reduced to mere lovers or muses by single male surrealists or by their own lack of selfconfidence, there is nothing that seems to justify explaining this as an expression of something central and specific to surrealism, rather than of remnants of common sexist bourgeois morality.

While some of the basic practical social problems remain even in their original form. As the responsibility for household and childcare are still everywhere women's to a larger extent than men's, so whenever heterosexual pairs are organised as surrealists together (either because they join surrealism together or because they meet in surrealist activities), the males will typically have better opportunities than the females to participate as much as they like. And whenever such pairs are broken up, the male typically remains in the group while the female feels a pressure (or a need) to leave. This is quite obvious, and on the whole there is a significant difference between the average duration of the surrealist involvment between females and males. This quite obviously has to do with the fact that women are traditionally encouraged to prioritise commitments to relationships while men are encouraged to prioritise commitments to tasks and interests. This is a problem that still demands solutions, not necessarily in order to try to increase the sex rate in surrealism to even figures at any price, but rather to create possibilities for all those attracted by surrealism to be able to participate with their desires, innovations and sensibilities on equal terms, and particularly not to let passive acceptance of ideological division of labor and ideological hierarchies in society obstruct the participation in the great adventure for some.

So, in spite of the propagandistic view that everything is fine, but even more in contrast with the 80s academic view that surrealism is essentially misogynic, there are a number of specific problems to face, which there are in some ways particularly good circumstances for...

And let's not be overprotective and rebuff all this critique before listening to it, there might be specific points in it which are very interesting for us and useful to get pointed out. But in order to make use of it, we will of course have to remove it from its academic context and put it into an active framework.



(Several people have contributed to this text, but as some opinions in the first person are kept in the final editing we could choose to attribute it, too, to its drafter/editor:)

Mattias Forshage