Surrealism and philosophy V

When I expressed regrets that Georges Sebbag’s groundbreaking book about surrealism and philosophy had such a limited time scope, focusing on the 20s only, Sebbag replied that this was only the first part. He was himself working on the second part which would be more about the 30s and more deeply involve the relationships with Hegelian philosophy, while a possible third part, sorting out the strangely unexplored relationship with poststructuralism or at least some of its more interesting strains in the 60s, he resignedly stated that someone else will have to write.

But then, a few years later, Sebbag himself now publishes ”Foucault Deleuze - Nouvelles impressions du Surréalisme”, providing a case study of the attraction of these two popular philosophers to surrealism. I have not yet had the time to reach far into this book, and as usual am uncertain how far language will allow me; but isn’t this a kind of book that one could expect english-language publishers to be interested in?

Life as a polygone

(I was re-reading some of my books about isolated Swedish romanticist poet Stagnelius.)
One of the many theorists who've gone through a bit of a reevaluation through the history of surrealism is old Platon (for some reason known in English as Plato). If in the earliest days he was briefly hailed for his lack of realism, for most of the classic years Plato was considered to be on the idealist, confusionist, religious side. Since the 40s however (with a case made by Jean Brun, among others), many individuals within surrealism have found his writings inspiring and greeted him as a partial precursor.

The surrealists' main forerunners in the tireless effort to find forerunners are of course the romanticists, and they had a clearer stand on the philosopher. Or did they? In romanticism, the literature historians show us there is two very distinct ways of advocating "platonic love".

One view is the one clearly advocated by Platon (though I wouldn't want to go into polemics over this, since I am hardly a Platon scholar and have no wish to become one), where hailing the beauty in the physical world, including indulging in carnal love, is in perfect continuity with pure spiritual love, and there is a spontaneous progression towards the pure idea. For the romanticist activists, this idea often took the shape of a radical shortcut, the "immediate transcendentalism" that sees earthly love as directly holy and a part of the absolute and of heavenly order. This is of course close to various brands of radical mysticism, and when dislocated into an atheist framework, basically a surrealist attitude.

However, among romanticists, this platonism competed with the reinterpretations of late antiquity, where especially Plotinos (known in English as Plotinus, in French as Plotin) is famous as the main proponent of "neo-platonism". Plotinos saw a radical break between earthly beauty and ideal beauty, and not just a break but a contradiction, so that earthly love was a deadly trap keeping our soul from seeking its true destiny and pleasure in the ideal world. The radical denunciation of matter in the gnosticist movement is a clear parallel here, while the magic and ritual practices connected with classic hermeticism at least partly seems to redirect the attention to the material world once more.

Classic hermeticism was revived by Italian renaissance philosophers, who connected its classical texts with neoplatonism and studied Plotinos. Yet again, matter came sneaking up, and hermetic philosophy became an important tradition in Europe only in conjunction with the material work of alchemy imported from the Arab world. Classic alchemy of course is all built on a polarity between the high and the low, but more than anything on transformation, and specifically the transcendental potential thus present in whatever is low, and of patient and careful interaction with base matter. Again, a reinterpretation in terms that we may perhaps recognise as overlapping with surrealism.

In romanticism, we see a rather clear dividing line between more platonic and more plotinic temperaments. Organised revolters and visionaries like Novalis and Schlegel have a more sociable mind and a more "platonic" temparement which tends to ascribe a holiness to earthly love because there is no contradiction and earthly love is indeed everything but merely earthly. On the other hand there are the loners, the tormented, who see manifest beauty as a burden which needs to be overcome for higher goals to become visible, and who may for example visit prostitutes to handle their lowly drives in the hope of clearing their minds - Stagnelius is a prime example, going between a gnosticist and a plotinistic expression, with a powerful poetry emerging in the tormented contradictions over love, but without a hope for love (nor a place for women). Loners are typically good at abysses and bad at perspective.

Surrealism is basically romantic, but has an opportunity to be a lot clearer than romanticism on a number of issues. The basic surrealist attitude towards love, as expressed throughout the history of the movement as well as its poetry, got its classical formulation relatively late in Benjamin Péret's "Noyau de la Comète", the essay introducing his anthology of sublime love. Péret's insistence on refusing to separate the sensory and the ideal, the carnal and the spiritual, forms not just a pregnant formulation of the attitude that has been intuitive elsewhere, and thereby forms a sort of a demarcation criterion for love in the sense of historical surrealism. And famously, Breton (in Arcane 17) suggested that the major breaks in surrealism can be regarded in terms of attitudes towards love. Indeed Aragon's libertinism, Eluard's hypocrisy, Artaud's disgusted gnosticism (a radical 20th century cousin of Stagnelius), Dalí's aristocratic fetishism, all fall short of the hope connected with love; all failing to reconcile the carnal with the spiritual and failing to connect real practice with ideal notions, in one way or another plotinic rather than platonic, if you will...

But the major point with love is hardly to defend distinctions, but to dismiss its reduction to one or the other practical purpose, whether it is to find an outlet of supposed biological drives, to receive recognition in the eyes of others, to build up a modest defense against frightening loneliness, or to fulfill ones bestowed destiny and raise a family. Love should be expected to be always transformative and impractical. And that is why it is the sibling of poetry.


MF

Surrealism and Philosophy IV

Just a quote from the editor's discussion with Georges Sebbag, briefly alluded to in a comment to an earlier post, based on the latter's book Potence avec paratonnerre; restating the basic point from earlier posts while acknowledging the importance of the evidence held forth.

"As for the general question of the philosophical ambitions of surrealism, there are several undeniable facts and many different and partly conflicting reasonable ways to try to summarise them...
   Philosophy is difficult to exactly circumscribe. If I have written that surrealism has never had a philosophical ambition, this is clearly erroneous. What I want to emphasise is that surrealism is not a philosophical project – in much the same way as it is not a litterary project; not from the beginning and especially not if regarding surrealism as what it has become to its adherents through its particular historical trajectory. The original conception of surrealism is however something partly different, not in spirit but in circumscriptions, priorities and experiences. Undeniably, surrealists have had philosophical ambitions, also in the name of the surrealism, and written philosophical works, and your book shows how important this was in the earliest days of surrealism (to an extent that indeed has surprised me) – but, with the possible exception of the earliest years, this has never been one its major tasks/battlefronts. And if it actually was a central part in the very beginning, this would be specifically because in the general framework of the frenzied idealist nonconformism of the time, philosophy could be seen specifically as a way of changing the world!  But it has always been subordinated to the ambitions of understanding the human condition in the light of the poetic experience especially through that poetic experience and specifically aiming for transformation rather than philosophical formulation.
   In some later historical situations, such as in the tension with existentialism in the 40s and with poststructuralism in the 60s and 70s, I have a perception that at least in many countries around the world and possibly in France too, surrealism's integrity and superiority has been maintained partly by its very refusal to accept the philosophical level as a central battleground and as an important field in itself, as if saying to these philosophically versed hotshots "you guys may for all we know be right in your philosophical analyses, but for us, this can only be of secondary interest because we seek nothing but to illuminate the poetic phenomenon and ignite life with it".
   And meanwhile, as we know, surrealists have been inspired by philosophers, have been inspiring philosophers, and developed concepts and modes of thought of potential major philosophical implications." (MF)

Surrealism and Philosophy III

The recent appearance of Sebbag's Potence avec paratonnerre – Surréalisme et philosophie did not - unfortunately - make my own ideas of a serious scrutiny of the conjunction surrealism and philosophy redundant (it is still open for someone else to do the broad historical synthesis). A serious and solid work, Sebbag's book nevertheless focuses entirely on the philosophical background and possible philosophical project of French 20s surrealism. If coming from a less reliable author, this could be interpreted as an attempt to confine surrealism to France and the pre-war era. But Sebbag was an activist of the French surrealist group 1964-69 and never supported schusterian liquidationism but at numerous occasions has acted as a sympathiser of the international surrealist movement and as a knowledgable writer on surrealism. Indeed, this is the kind of thorough yet reasoning empirical study that we often miss in what is being written about surrealism, and if we accept that the subject of the book is limited, it is in fact very useful and appears in parts quite brilliant; demonstrating a remarkable effort in source research as well as in thinking, based in solid knowledge about what surrealism is, it appears not just recommendable but very instructive. 

So there is not much about Bachelard, about Bataille, about the 30s objectivity craze including objective chance, about the sublime point, about the trajectories of Freud and Hegel and Marx and hermeticism, about inspiration from and controversies over modern physics, about gestalt psychology, about phenomenology, about symbols and imagination, about opposition to existentialism, about non-oidipal reinvention of everything, about the Alquié controversy, about the 60s rejuvenation and the thinkers and topics it brought into the discussion, about complex contradictions with structuralism and poststructuralism, about conjunctions with philosophy pulled in by Czech, North American, South American, British surrealists, etc etc – everything from the 30s onwards, including many (but not all) of these topics are mentioned on a few pages, in the book's third section of smaller essays on "Concepts surréalistes" and in the very loosely coherent chapter of lists of philosophers called "L'homme est un flamme parlante", but they are not fully discussed and not integrated into a general discussion of the relationship between surrealism and philosophy.

Instead, it is mostly about the concepts of the pre-surrealist and earliest-surrealist project of determining the "modern spirit" and the nonconformist postsymbolistic poetical idealism that fuelled that notion. It is about what is being illuminated when posing the introduction's pseudoquestion whether the poetic idealism of the early surrealists was novalisian, schellingian or berkeleyan... (why not hegelian or hermetic or gnostic? but primarily: why would there necessarily be a contradiction?) It is about exactly how much those authors or Kant or Nietzsche meant, and to what extent Bergson and others actually played a role for the surrealists in spite of their denial, and the ambiguous but enthusiastic use of French moralists and rationalists. It is about the philosophical implications of Lautréamont's Poesies, about the discussions with the "Philosophies" group, about Janets versus Freuds concept of automatism, about the notion of surreality, about the concept of the spirit and the defense of it. It is about the metaphysical and epistemological projects sketched in the earliest surrealist manifestoes.

So, if there just would have been a subtitle saying something about "the philosophical outlook in the origin of surrealism" or similar, rather than the somewhat misleading "surrealism and philosophy". And if we all do remember that surrealism is in fact an objective entity, international, historical, ongoing, which we contribute and relate to, which was successively revealed by the first surrealists in the 20s and later and which we are responsible together for the current meaning of – rather than a contingent doctrine constructed by those first surrealists which we can just sympathise with and perhaps try to apply as closely to the original form as possible...

It will be a standard reference, but with 650 pages in French (even though it is mostly clear academic French rather than obscurantist rhetorical French) it will hardly be one of these remarkable interventions that will, locally or globally, change our selfimage or educate the general public what surrealism is about. And my own knowledge of French is clearly insufficient to go into any detail and interpret, highlight or debate any of the conclusions (so please regard all my comments as very preliminary).

Surrealism and philosophy

Surrealism and philosophy is a productive conjunction.

If we acknowledge that surrealism is not a philosophy (thus it has only secondary appliations in philosophy, it has never made an effort to relate specifically to – or express itself in the terminology of – contemporary professional philosophy – in stark contrast to popular-philosophical existentialism and academic poststructuralism!).

(It has not been interested in formulating its theoretical approach as a "system" and it has not struggled to "resolve" on a theoretical level its heterogenous sources of inspiration. It has been inclined to acknowledge different approaches as useful for different questions or practical purposes (Breton's reliance on the toolbox image in the 3rd manifesto) and it has insisted that they share something which is revealed in their confluence in the poetic practice of surrealism, that they thus bear an inner coherence in terms of potentialites, which is opposed to eclecticism, the haphazard and incoherent mishmash of preferences of for example individuals...)

Nevertheless it does make use of philosophical ideas and its theories and methods are easily interpreted as having philosophical consequences. To explicate and elaborate on such philosophical consequences is a major task for those so inclined. Here will follow just a brief recollection of those more or less basic concepts of surrealism particularly useful or obviously relevant in this context.

OPEN RATIONALISM is probably an encompassing formula rather than a specific theoretical project.

On the one hand, it is Bachelard's "surrationalism"; the idea of a new modality of thought after the surpassing of hitherto reigning narrow rationalism, analogous with the leaps within the development of the science of physics.

On the other hand, it is specifically in the combination of scientific thought, poetry, hegelian dialectics, and analogical thinking from the hermetical tradition that the surrealists have considered this breakthrough to be obviously promised, at the same time as Bachelard proposed his theories. Because at heart on a certain level there is simply the combination of hegelianism and hermetics: OF DIALECTICAL AND ANALOGICAL THOUGHT; of historical and ahistorical, which is the fusion which makes the fundament of surrealism on the intellectual level. There are many typical and rich motives here: the sublime point of the spirit where contraries cease to be perceived as contraries, the interminate ascension of continuous negations/revelations, absolute divergence, utopianism, the refusal to dismiss ambiguity: figures of thought that relate just as much to political and artistic applications as epistemological. Whoever enjoys models may see surrealism exactly as the crossroads where dialectics, analogy, empiricism and imagination meet.

It is also possible to see open realism itself, over-realism, as an aspect of open rationalism, and that is a way to come onto the rest of the basic questions.

OVER-REALISM is the closest approach to an ontological statement that surrealism ever reaches; the refusal to deny any forms of reality their reality, the demand for reintegration in an over-reality; the surreal. Yet it must be acknowledged that this is not an ontological ultraliberalism where anything goes, but it specifically claims that widespread rationalisations and simplifications are particularly misleading, and in practice that nothing is what it seems to be. In the process of breaking through the layers of trivialising mystification, surrealism will join company along the route with the major distrusting-revealing systems like psychoanalysis, historical materialism, natural science, but also actual paranoia and esoterics... This over-realism is probably more or less the same concept as the absolute among the romantics, while eagerly insisting on the the immanent aspect thereof. Just like in the romantics it expresses itself in a mobility between forms of consciousness, a reappraisal of the apparently meaningless, and not the least a vigilance towards paranoid mechanisms of ascribing meaning (paranoic-critical method) and towards chance (objective chance) in the generation of meaning frameworks and adventures by means of a generalised overdetermination, realism of associations, and automatism; and by all means also orthodox psychoanalysis and ideology criticism, and generate reenchantment. There are other more specialised questions relating here: that of the ontology of the imaginary, which gains a central role from an over-realistic perspectives. As does some of the basic themes of occultism and mysticism, and the entire world of mythology, which surrealism likes to engage while insisting on abstaining from "metaphysical commitment", i e all forms of belief.

But, as we need to keep in mind, surrealism is not a philosophical project. A crucial aspect of most of its most central undertakings and questions concern POETIC PHENOMENOLOGY. What is that makes certain things feel immediately meaningful, like portals to the unknown, and small fireworks in the reenchantment of the world? There is a tendency to advocate that the poetical phenomenon, in order to remain in focus, must be studied with poetical means, which is largely the means of over-realism, or specifically for example reverie or material imagination, as Bachelard concretised into a method and "thematic criticism" exploited; but at the same time conditionally accept all kinds of other enquiries throwing light on the poetic, not the least the psychoanalytical, and the structuralist both in its Czech and French varieties. An important point of departure here would remain the concept of the spirit as an integrative poetic epistemological organ, and poetry as an integrative form of knowledge, as immediately taken over from symbolism.

But while some questions of that kind apparently can be dealt with in a detached way, like in an allegedly valuefree professionality of the academic disciplins, or a calm-seeking belle-esprit of the art sphere, then for surrealism it remains of primary importance, in the classic modernist manner, to refuse to separate art and life; all of these questions for surrealism call for their practical application in CHANGING EVERYDAY LIFE, in acknowledging the immanence of the unknown, and organising life so as to meet its challenges rather than codifying practical chores. Everything in surrealism is about life as such, the daily VIGILANCE, and not the least the implimentation of PLAYING, EXPERIMENTING and artistic CREATION in everyday practice, in order to generate dynamising disturbances, seeds of revolt and insights, and those dynamic situations that the situationists call situations.

Furthermore, in practice, surrealism unconditionally valorises the UNTIMELY and USELESS, since narrow goal rationality and pragmatic shortsightedness primarily is about reducing away the unknown and all ambiguity and isolating us within the wooden coats of narrow rationalism and narrow realism. Over-realism in its entirety, open rationalism, and the dynamising of everyday life, all express this, as does specifically the salutation of PLAY. In practice this "uselessness" has two controversial applications; how surrealists tend to dismiss all shortsighted instrumentalism specifically in revolutionary politics, and concerning personal careers. Concerning careers, the surrealists remain nonconformists in contrast with most of their artist and writer colleagues who give in to the practical need of making a sellable brand out of their name and sell whatever creative skills they might have to the any bidder presenting themselves (surrealists will often appear secretive or obscure in commonly refusing "chances" of publicity on moral and political grounds since publicity has a dynamism which is often contrary to poetry, to communication of necessity, to serious reflection (due to its inner mechanisms as well as the open ambitions of those who control it and are controlled by it). Concerning politics, the surrealists insist on irreductive, maximalist, life-encompassing political themes, unlike most of their revolutionary colleagues refusing to put up unto an indefinite future the questions of freedom; in the way it became popular in the 60s to refuse to consider less than the entirety of life and of the spirit in the mobilisation of revolt; and thus, surrealism will always have an important affinity with naive anarchism as well as creative and vain UTOPIANISM, as well as with various more or less science-approaching forms of METHODOLOGY. (Disclaimer: the affinity with naive anarchism and vain utopianism does not necessarily mean that surrealists will favour either as a political alternative, but will always keep addressing the necessities that feed them.)

Surrealism and Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mattias Forshage