The Nightlight Market

–What is Neosurrealism?

”Neosurrealism” has been repeatedly launched as a catchphrase for minor directions within art and literature where people eclectically pick up some alleged lessons from surrealism and put them back in a more or less conformist framework within cultural production. It has been particularly big in the US, perhaps needless to say. Some time ago, it was mainly used for pop-influenced Dalí-ist painting, but today this current is mainly (and more properly) referred to as ”fantastic art”.

Instead, there has been in recent years several efforts to put the headlight on surrealist influences in American poetry, often but far from always referred to as ”neosurrealism”. This includes a number of different efforts, with academic theses (Tursi, Lampe), popular introductions (Joron, Caples) and online discussions. Usually it has been about promoting the legacy of Philip Lamantia, and usually it has been put in stark contrast against the organised surrealist movement on the whole and against Chicago surrealism and Franklin Rosemont specifically. In the last year, there has been attempts to tie such threads together, perhaps the most ambitious one being the upstate New York poet John Thomas Allen launching ”The New Surrealist Institute”, publishing a comprehensive anthology of neosurrealist poetry, and seeming to claim to spearhead a movement.

There are many confused domestications of surrealism and they hardly merit detailed study. For lack of something better to do during a short while this summer, when this particular one turned up a few times clustered I was pulled into checking it up. And then it took several weeks for some books to arrive, which I maybe ought not to attempt any detailed summary without having read. It’s not that I am so very interested in the situation of surrealism in the US, even though I would agree that surrealism’s trajectory in that particular country is a critical case for its entire post-classic history. In fact I should apologise for length, I just wanted to make this overview accessible once I laboriously obtained it, and couldn’t help restating a number of basic points about poetry in the connection.

Why neosurrealism?

Obviously, the word ”neosurrealist” is pointless, implying either an imagined historical rift breaking up surrealist continuity, or an ambiguous volontary departure without the imagination to find something positively given to characterise the new direction.

From the viewpoint of surrealism, a course correction relevant to surrealism typically makes sense to integrate into surrealism, rather than break off as a separate branch. And furthermore, to the extent that such developments have indeed needed to be organisationally separate, and have had something relevant to offer, in the past, they have often (relevantly) preferred to refer to their own direction by its own characteristics rather than its distance to - but still dependence on - surrealism (clear in the cases of Acephale and the Sociological College, of Lettrism and Situationism, somewhat less clear but still positively stated in ”Cobraism”, nuclearism, imaginism etc). Claiming to be a neo- is like not quite living up to the real thing while unable to come up with something original.

Also, in the literary discussion in the US, it seems like ”neosurrealism” has been used interchangeably with ”soft surrealism”: which is even clearer about what it concerns: a vague inspiration without any serious commitment.

Neosurrealism may be used as a descriptive term. Just like we might give the descriptive name ”postsurrealism” to any direction manifested by someone with the intention of leaving surrealism (regardless of whether it succeeds or not), we might call ”neosurrealism” any attempt to reinvent surrealism (volontarily or involontarily) without picking up the trail of historical continuity. Inventing the wheel over again. 

This might be the local enthusiasts who pick up some old book by Breton and wants to start it up again, unaware of the contemporary movement. Such neophytes are often quite happy to join forces and pool resources once they find the movement, and their ”neosurrealism” is just a temporary phase.

Though if they feel intimidated by the presence of peers, and by the distinctions made from historical experience, they might feel a need to defend their own individual version of ”neosurrealism” with its particular compromises, additions, subtractions and emphasises, and with themselves as the foremost theorists, and stubbornly maintain their alleged uniqueness. In some cases this would express mainly a nostalgia over the real dynamism of some youthful heroic years against the wind before finding accomplices. But empirically, it seems like most such cases instead involve a reluctancy to apply surrealism broadly, to see political and philosophical implications, and to grapple with it on the level of everyday life – and instead to reduce it again to either literature or pictorial art.

Not only is this remarkably similar to the common old boring academic approach, and tends to go hand in hand with common old careerist concerns, where the ”autonomy” is mainly an autonomy of pragmatism, where you should be free to make your own choices about all the concessions you are doing for the sake of attention by critics and publishers, and not be criticised for it.

It is a bit weird, isn’t it, that restricting poetry to the literary context, staying alone, and adapting to expectations in the literary market, is considered free, autonomous, mature and advanced –while integrating poetry with other necessities of life, joining up with each other, and working within a demanding tradition and utilising reciprocal questioning and criticism, is considered dogmatic, narrowminded and isolated.

Surrealism and literature

A lot of the discussion about neosurrealism is about categorisation, who is a neosurrealist and who is not. At the same time, some of these categorisers regret that those who talk about surrealism, especially those who defend it, always always tend to talk about dividing and demarcation lines. Well, it’s not like anyone can actually decide who’s a real surrealist and who’s not. Any demarcation line needs to be identified and negotiated based on the purpose with it. That’s why it might occasionally be interesting to discuss delineations, specifically in order to reveal one’s purposes. 

There are crucial and quite simple demarcation lines since surrealism does in fact rest on a break. That is for example (in this connection) the break with considering literature as the major battlefield, considering the poem a valuable goal in itself within the system of personal expression, formal elegance, stylistic innovativity, reflection of influences and current trends, and of the development of the history of literature.

In surrealism, the poem is an integrated part in an investigation and an invocation of poetry with the overall aim to transform life and change the world. Anyone who merely wants to write good surrealist poems is not a surrealist. The surrealist keeps writing such poems (or not!) with something else in mind.

And while there are various tropes and manouevres that are common in texts by surrealists, there is no such thing as defining characteristics of a surrealist text. A text recognisable as utilising the same elements as characteristic earlier surrealist texts does not by power of that become a surrealist text. A text based in a surrealist outlook and a surrealist aim is a surrealist text. Especially if written by a surrealist. While other texts relevant for that outlook and aim, and utilising particular poetic means in that spirit, can very well be surrealist texts (of the ”unconsciuously surrealist” genre if you will…) Any eagerness to define criteria for surrealism on the stylistic level seems to reveal an aim to reduce surrealism to a mere topic for academic study within a particular field and to miss completely what surrealism is about.

The current US advocates of neosurrealism position themselves completely within the field of cultural production (especially literature). Someone described it is as that there is currently a vacuum and an open contest for the position as dominant paradigm of the time (after postmodernism), and then considering that surrealism is a suitable candidate for that competition. Of course, even if this was a correct analysis of the current situation in culture (which I’m sure it’s not), surrealism couldn’t care less about competing over that position…

A poet remains a poet and this is not dependent on designations.

However, the question of who is a great poet and who is not, this must be stressed, DOES NOT MEAN THE SAME THING from a literary and a surrealist perspective. From the literary viewpoint, a great poet is a writing person who writes powerful and impressive poems by mastering the tools of the trade, is aware of canon and utilises it for own purposes, is consistent and designs an oeuvre, a body of work that has a central direction and every now and then offers technical novelties and stylistic brilliance, and exerts a significant influence on other writers.

Most of this is just irrelevant from a surrealist perspective, where a great poet is a researcher without a safety net, if you will fearless psychonaut, with no credentials and no relevant possessions except curiosity and sensibility, mediating the poetic message and furthering it in a dynamic form that forces open some unusual sector of the realm of possibilities and changes the perspective on things, who explores poetry and tries in one way or another to stay true to it, in different areas and significantly including writing poetic texts. The genre of your texts matters little, innovation matters little, your civil position matters little, your ”impact” matters little. Of course, experienced careerists and clumsy beginners alike are capable of writing scattered inflammable poetic outbursts. Certainly, someone can be a great poet from a literary and a surrealist viewpoint alike, but the criteria are very different, and many more are great from only one of the perspectives and ridiculous from the other…

Surrealism is on the other side of a dividing line. Exploring the poetic is an extraliterary challenge. The quest will take very diverse routes, but seeing the point with and gaining some experience of anonymity, collectivity and automatism is probably a crucial corrective against many of the available domestications of poetry. Remember Tzara’s crucial distinction between poetry as a means of expression and poetry as an activity of the spirit. Surrealism’s break involves starting out from the latter side unequivocally. Surrealists are not writers of a particular style or standpoint, surrealists utilise writing as a vehicle, which is among other things a weapon against a given framework of exploitation, boredom, pragmatism, faith, stupidity, noise, productivity demands and miserabilism. For dismissing the dull seductions of the cultural world. For dismissing civilised thematics and self-administrative concerns. For preferring the unknown.

A sun at night?

A Lamantia disciple and recent ”Science Fiction Surrealist” Andrew Joron published the key text of modern American neosurrealism ten years ago, Neo-Surrealism; or, the Sun at Night: Transformations of Surrealism in American Poetry 1966-1999 (2004). His study is a sketchy overview of surrealist inspiration in American poets. As such it is very readable, and contains some interesting observations, suggestions and reading tips. (Apparently there is also a second edition from 2010 with minor updates, which I have not seen; it might make some of the following details irrelevant but hardly the general argument.)

Without actually defining neosurrealism, his pamphlet works hard to make a lot of contradictions and distinctions within poetry, internal and external. It is rhetorically built up around a central opposition between a successful, domestic literary surrealism led by Lamantia and a sterile, isolated organised surrealism represented by the Chicago group. The alleged good pole of the opposition is where the author is sketching a new canon, where inspiration from surrealism, combined with working within a national American poetry scene, publishing in American literary journals, positioning visavis American literary schools are crucial, and acquiring academic positions is a meriting proof of quality…  Indeed, it seems to be a criterion for his neo-surrealism that it is specifically American and not closely relating to its European models. (”It is not a question of nationalism but of opening a space for cultural selfdefinition” says Joron.)

Of course neither aspect works well to provide a neat separation. Obviously Lamantia, the rimbaldian hero and patron saint of the one pole, himself (as Joron admits) was involved with the organised movement too. Any other writers that Joron recognises as relevant are counted in the literary, non-Chicago camp, including Ted Joans, Rikki Ducornet, and especially Jayne Cortez, despite themselves. (While at the same time Joseph Jablonski is explicitly excluded from the discussion for being ”orthodox” even if his poetry is acknowledged. Joron’s disciple Caples extends the same backhanded recognition to Penelope Rosemont herself.) Joans and Ducornet are very well-known within surrealist collaborations and apparently well-known outside them. Lamantia covered both domestic concerns and international ones, as did Nanos Valaoritis. In fact, Valaoritis wrote an enthusiastic introduction to contemporary American poetry in an issue of the French ”orthodox” Surréalisme in 1977, claiming that the American poets, especially the Californian post-Beats, were all internationalist and non-chauvinistic and relevant to surrealism (he might have been wrong). And Pete Winslow was a hardcore surrealist but is for some reason posthumously considered a neosurrealist. While another serious Lamantian disciple, Laurence Weisberg, is much held forth nowadays by some of the surrealists and some of the neos alike. An Allan Graubard never denied his basic surrealist position yet still has been active on the domestic cultural scene. Ronnie Burk was active on the domestic scene while quite hardcore. In recent times, everybody hails Will Alexander, and both he and Sotere Torregian have repeatedly appeared in surrealist connections, and goddamn even Joron himself was in the recent Hydrolith #2. Such sheep and wolves don’t quite congregate in separate corners of the field. It is a kind of a borgesian, non-exclusive, taxonomy.

If I think an internationalist perspective fits better with the dynamics of poetry than the concern for a domestic literary scene does, and if I think academic positions are statistically likely to suffocate poetry rather than intensify it, I would still argue that the power in a poem is not so much dependent on where the author fits in a constructed classification scheme, and I’m not going to defend the merits of particular poets against a literary judge of taste (for example listing particularly good poets in the organised half). This is confused and obviously breeds confusion.

A lamp that throws no light

Lampe’s 2014 thesis about is basically saying the same as Joron’s pamphlet but in ten times more pages, even though the topic is not explicitly ”neosurrealism” but surrealism in American poets (again disregarding active surrealists). There is useful background information and interesting observations here too, but most of the effort is simply wasted because it is all about discussing whether this or that poem is actually a surrealist poem, in purely textual terms, thus expecting there to be trustworthy stylistic criteria for surrealism, and expecting surrealism to be something that has its full meaning in the literary sphere concerning poems – and thus the whole discussion is of course alien to surrealism.

This restrictive circumscription is conscious and explicit; it is after all an academic work which rests on restricting its question and making this explicit. Its just that in this case such a restriction also removes the ground for saying anything interesting about poetry in the light of surrealism, which otherwise might have been considered to be the topic.

I mean, all the way back from classic structuralism and throughout a more poetically-minded sense of close reading, there are certainly interesting observations to be made about surrealist texts as texts too, even in an academic context, if the question is what they bring, convey and invoke, what they open up towards, not if the question is whether they are to be judged as surrealist or not, according to the narrow criteria one has just put up for oneself (and not even explicitly): this becomes simply a juridical question of no consequence.

An invisible trail in the dark: constructing a canon

The autohistoriography of neosurrealism is more or less this: the American poets reacted against a perceived arrogance of the visiting European exile surrealists during the war, with their lack of understanding of something specifically American, so surrealist inspiration got foothold only through the significantly different and local New York School poetry and then Beat poetry. Then came ”Deep Image poetry” as an antithesis drawing some renewed inspiration from surrealism but staying separate from it, and even more so with its successor ”Language poetry”, and then there were various mini-schools of descendants of these four major domestic trends. The most significant surrealist forum has been, according to the Americans, the little poetry magazine Kayak (and its successor Caliban). This since the surrealist movement, which has itself again been present now in an autochthonous guise since the 60s, has been ”orthodox” and ”isolated” in being active in the international movement rather than focusing on the domestic cultural scene, and therefore lacks significance.

That great neon sign

Apparently, the obsession with expressing something particularly ”American” is shared between a Neosurrealist and most of US culture including Hollywood, Hiphop, Walt Disney and George Bush; this is indeed not necessarily nationalistic but only displays an excessive focus on cultural identity: what we call identity politics, ambiguous when it comes to minority identities, hardly priding when it comes to identities with hegemonic qualities.

(And wasn’t, at least for those who aren’t openly reactionary among those who keep obsessing with what is American, one of the crucial things about it that it would be very including and syncretistic concerning all the various elements brought in by immigrants from all directions (the old ”melting pot” metaphor)? One prospective neosurrealist anthology editor, Mark Tursi, raised the question whether certain named immigrants should be discarded for not being American, and couldn’t understand when this ”innocent” question made some of his correspondents upset.)

Poetry to express your nationality? Hey, even if those old universalist fantasies of poets are obviously vain in parts (which doesn’t make them quite irrelevant by the way), then still isn’t a crucial element in poetry, and a very important reason for people to pick it up, the urgent need to refuse and abandon given cultural identifications and explore metamorphosis and alternative identifications, exotic if necessary?

While the obsession with involvement with the domestic literary scene is probably more instrumental. Teleologically this might be explained as ”in order to be able to influence the direction of national culture”, but practically it is probably just good old careerism. To make a career you need to expose your name in the local context, you need to get personally acquainted with your superiors and your more successful peers who might help you attain positions, connect you with other influential people, etc. Coming into the light within a ”small magazine” gives the required dose of collectivity: you need a certain amount of mutual help in everybody’s parallell goal of exposure, and being associated with the network around a magazine is of course a conveniently non-committal way of doing so, without the risks and efforts and naïvity of an actual collective activity of exploring poetry and its consequences together…

A flash of hipness

It might be good to remember that back in the Beat days, both Philip Lamantia and Ted Joans provided links between surrealism and beat. But while Lamantia at this time was only retrospectively referring to his youth surrealist experience, Joans was actively involved in surrealism. Lamantia became pulled back into surrealism later, but being a Beat legend with a legendary surrealist connection became much more of his heritage than being active in surrealism (and famously acknowledged no particular contradiction between surrealism and neither his Beat stardom nor his catholic faith, or at least no contradiction which wasn’t smoothly appropriated as the psychonaut’s love of contradiction itself…). In contrast with Joans, who remained a surrealist militant his entire life. Nanos Valaoritis too has been spanning both over time, but in his work in North America probably far more as a Beat with a surrealist connection, just like Lamantia. But then, in neosurrealist historiography it is suddenly Corso and Kaufman who are the crucial surrealists in Beat more than Joans and Valaoritis.

Since surrealism is not a style, it is not impossible to write surrealist texts in the Beat language. Personally, I have no love for the Beat idiome, and I do tend to associate Beat looseness of form with lack of concentration, and male-chauvinistic selfsufficience, providing an instructive lesson showing the clear dividing line between lazy stream-of-consciousness spontanism and the seriousness of an automatic enquiry. However I will readily admit that Joans and Lamantia (and Winslow and others, especially if you count Jayne Cortez in this track) reach further than this and provide a starting point for an enquiry into the relationship between B & S that may lead to more interesting conclusions than personal statements of taste and suspicion. Who’s there to do such an enquiry without feeling a need to defend the honour of ordinary American poetry, nor to stop at merely stylistic criteria for purely literary distinctions?

A flicker down the well

Already ”deep image poetry” is essentially neosurrealism, in the early 60s: a pure-blooded homegrown American variety of some kind of surrealism stripped of its morals, its spiritual discipline, its historical experience, its sense of movement, its critical thinking, its politics, its collectivity, its weirdness, its humour, and instead merged with pure literary concerns, good-old eclecticist-seductive Jungian psychology, academic english-language modernism and an overall pretentious modernist syncretism. Significant for this strain is that it considers bombastic romantic stalinist Neruda an even better surrealist than the surrealists, and that the most persistent proponent Robert Bly founded the ”men's movement”.

Already many of the direct followers of this deep image school, and even more so current neosurrealists, were repelled by its pretentiousness, and some by its international outlook and europhilia (but few by its eclecticism and regressive politics). So many lapsed back into a certain playfulness, into Beat-style loose compositional form, ”street” elements and popular culture references, a lot of elements from Science Fiction - and/or into a more experimental approach to language.

Do you like to see my solitary vessel

A cornerpost in the neosurrealist historiographies is the poetry magazine Kayak, edited by George Hitchcock in California 1964-1984, where a lot of the surrealist-influenced American poets published. This is a typical semi-underground magazine with a surrealist tendency, what is usually called ”surrealisant” in French (surrealising). A notable amount of contributions and even the overall presentation is influenced by surrealism, but in very different ways (including the leading ”deep image” poets), and alongside material which is clearly not, and most importantly without any explicit defense of surrealism as such - nor any other explicit platform - for the contributors. A bunch of contributors have also been associated with the historical surrealist movement, a fact which is not mentioned by the neosurrealist historiographers: some of these are claimed for neosurrealism: Valaoritis, Pete Winslow, H R Hays, several not (the national criterion?) like Ken Smith, Michael Bullock, Ludwig Zeller, especially remarkable is the silence concerning John Digby, a persistent contributor whose collages had a significant impact on the magazine’s looks, and who might have started the collaboration back in England but then moved over to the US and was actively involved. Anyway, the journal is deemed way too "eurocentric" for the neosurrealist stick.

I have seen only small fragments of Kayak, but personally I do enjoy such little magazines when they are playful and serious - but its very provinciality, modesty and selfimposed restriction of scope, is not necessarily something good in poetic terms compared with the simultaneous hellraising approaches throughout the diversity of its contemporary US surrealist periodicals, like Arsenal, Antinarcissus, Octopus-Typewriter, Glass Veal, Beef Sphinx, and others… 

The New Candle of John Thomas

There is a very entertaining discussion posted online a few years ago when one of these academics (Mark Tursi) wanted to make a big anthology based on Joron’s concepts.

But apparently that came to nothing and the anthology that eventually did surface was by an enthusiastic newcomer named John Thomas Allen, who also founded the ”New Surrealist Institute” and apparently has been quite active in social media. There is a blog including scattered more or less interesting interviews, reflections and poems. What is weird about it that this NSI is held forth as a new avantgarde movement, separate from other groupings. And at the same time it doesn’t publish collective games or collective statements, everything is presented by the leader personally. The others might not even be aware that they are in a ”group”.

What is explicitly presented as the manifesto of this movement is the anthology, presumably in its entirety, ”Nouveau’s Midnight Sun: Transcriptions from Golgonooza and beyond” (2014). It is a rather thin collection of poems with a personal and enthusiastic but not very thorough introduction by the editor. Of the crowd included in the book, there seems to be a few neosurrealists in the sense of clueless re-inventors, paired with several post-new-york-school-veterans and few post-californian-beat veterans, and their diverse followers, providing a lot of manifest surrealist influence fluctuating between the several-times-watered-down and the faithful-halfdigested and a lot of scattered namedropping of surrealist works and quotes (and a token experienced surrealist in Bogartte). Contributors are introduced not so much with a background sketch nor an attempt to characterise their poetic quest, but with anecdotes as to what they each contributed in the editor’s spiritual quest (or networking trajectory) along with a bit of the usual citing of selected academic degrees and teaching posts, prizes and awards received (seriously! can you Americans stop this? can’t you see that even if being a poet was about credentials - which it certainly isn’t - then simple official acceptance is not one that merits…)

Of sources for his variety of surrealism, Allen in all his texts keeps referring mainly to academic art historian Celia Rabinovitch and the later, ex-surrealist, religious existentialist, David Gascoyne. It follows the ”spiritual” strain in surrealism attributed to Lamantia. There might be such a strain and it might be worth following, but it would be more interesting to found it more in own experience than in renegades and academics. And while we all are happy with the notion of ”profane illumination” and a metaphysical dimension of surrealism, while some of us have dived into thorough studies of alchemy, gnosticism, occultism and whatnot while others have not, any attempts to reconcile surrealism with theology and with churches, also in the vaguest sense, have been either missing the point by reducing surrealism to some kind of profound humanism, or have sensed and somehow lived the obvious contradiction. Citing an academic for legitimity and then admitting one is at a quest of ”combining Surrealism and God” (!) does not sound like a particularly dramatic spiritual departure…

However, and this is important, while Allen speaks of ”a new surrealism” and his title clearly links with Joron’s, he does not in his texts invoke Neosurrealism as opposed to orthodox surrealism, and he does not bring up the national criterion, nor seem enthusiastic about what is American, nor raise the domestic cultural market criterion, and he does not attack Franklin Rosemont. He is simply an energetic enthusiast intent on leading a supposedly sleeping movement to new glory (last time, there was some Internet artists who suggested that Photoshop and the Internet had finally revived the sleeping movement and set it back upon its path to due fame). Maybe it isn’t really sleeping, and maybe it isn’t looking for new glory, and maybe it doesn’t need new self-advertising leaders?

(If indeed this is inteded as surrealism rather than neosurrealism, it may be regarded as a parallell intervention to the recent neophyte surrealist online journal Peculiar Mormyrid. Even looser in its circumscriptions, combining various allegedly surrealist submissions from all around including those of many an organised or experienced surrealist of more exhibitions leanings, it also has a quite different tone. With very unusual (unamerican?) modesty emphasising itself being a ”fledgling” surrealist journal, trying out collective games (though only on the blog part of the webpage and not in the journal, only online and not in the flesh…), mixing texts of different genres and all kinds of images rather than focusing on the poem, it does not make these bold or controversial statements (nor any theoretical-level statements at all), which may perhaps make it look hopelessly timid and vague. But more importantly, at least a small number of participants give the impression that they actually want to play the game, surprise themselves and step into the doorway of the unknown, rather than make a name for themselves.)

Conclusion

In this post, I have made an attempt to understand what people are trying to put into the concept Neosurrealism by way of some significant texts around it. I am not dealing with the poems that are considered to constitute the core of the thing, not even if more programmatic by its advocates. Simply because some of it is ok, some even very good, and quite a bit of it is really poor, and it is not very interesting to sit and judge over poems, especially not to reprimand people for writing poor poems. What I am interested in here is what the concept might mean, if it may constitute a movement, and what relationship it might have to surrealism.

Many people are clearly easy-going eclecticists with a ”fear of touch” who think that actively associating with an actual movement (rather than just a ”school of writing”) is a compromise of integrity. That’s one of the explanations for neosurrealism.

But then this issue of the domestic scene seems crucial. Anyone who is not specifically directed towards the US domestic literary situation, not actively relating to local developments, bickerings, and local minor traditions of using, misusing or refusing foreign influences, and not publishing in domestic journals for the betterment of the national literature, are obviously disregarded as aloof elitists or madmen.

And finally, it seems to still be about the Rosemont factor; the traumatic impact on the peaceful domestic scene by an ultraradical verbal onslaught claiming tradition and principles, like that of the Chicago group. Any living surrealism will question your raison d’être if you are an aspiring writer and academic, and the Chicago group raised this point of view in a version which was rather healthily devoid of shyness, civil concerns and compromise (some of their polemics might not have been quite on target over the years, but the basic argument here is clear as a bell). The massive complaints of how ”isolated” and ”sterile” this do come out as something of a self-contradiction; apparently it did have a rather wide impact in teaching people that surrealism wasn’t something that you could freely adapt to your own fuzzy within-literary concerns, local eclecticism and career dreams without raising some objections…

For a moment there, I had a paranoid thought that these facets of Neosurrealism (whose presence in surrealist networks is symptomatic) would join forces with some of the more bitter old US surrealists in an unholy alliance where open-minded ”lack of orthodoxy”, resentment against old bully Franklin Rosemont, and giving up the hopes of group activity, internationalism and desire for immediate change would form the common ground. But on the other hand, why?

It may be regrettable that the recent resurgence of discussion about surrealist organisation in the US, while having merits in bringing unknown anecdotes and long-circulated rumours into the open (Note: this current discussion may have as its headlight the massive Invisible Heads anthology; but it must be noted that as anthology and long-term documentation its value goes far beyond any such rhetorical function), still retains its bedrock in who did something bad to whom 40 years ago. But it is not confined to that. Not all contacts and alliances being made are based on politeness, shared resentment, or hope of reciprocation. There are still hopes beyond that. Whoever is a surrealist will remain a surrealist for reasons other than making a name and reforming literature. Whoever is a poet will be a poet regardless of labels. Whoever is a careerist will do their careerist thing, and keep aiming for recognition by superiors while eventually turning against their less successful peers or followers, once they have no free additional cred to give. Surrealism has no legitimity to offer.

Neo-surrealism is of course pointless in itself as a label, but possibly pragmatically useful as a warning sign since it is usually applied wherever the major concerns are to claim ”inspiration” from surrealism for reforming literature and promoting careers within the borders of the United States. Even though I would be much more interested in not cementing such a border and instead seeing poets keep on wriggling with the tempting challenges of extraliterary concerns and poetry itself and possibly even become surrealists rather than literary figures one day…  Whoever is badmouthing or misrepresenting surrealism is not a big deal. The main point is that poetry is so much more an adventure, so much more impractical, and even so much more fun, than neosurrealism or any other literary endeavour. Surrealism is about changing life and transforming the world, it does not wish to reform literature and promote careers; this is a simple and useful criterion.

MF

Not only a game of solitaire

Alain Joubert’s text from What will Be? which suggested the need for a reevaluation of the traditional guise of surrealism, including considering abandoning group organisation, and which was criticised on the latter point by MF and MF, seemed so interesting to the Californian surrealists that they requested its translation, and is now available as "Cards on the table" in booklet form, either print-on-demand or free download.

A slippery mirror in a rainforest - the framework of the integrity of surrealism

An adventure plunging into a luscious thicket, appearing to some as a spaceship, others an old locomotive, others a party of explorers on foot, yet others an incredible caterpillar with hares' legs kicking in all directions amidst an echinoderm's spines and gently waving tubules, is the vehicle called surrealism. A vehicle for adventure, exploration, drifting, getting lost, and at the same time a hull creating a favoured space which is an inducer of an atmosphere of poetic dynamism and a creativity beyond control, as well as a glittering skeleton serving as attachment points for the defence of spiritual security.

It is a manner of a devil's contract. We tap into a strange power source by pooling our own resources with those already there. A remarkable sense of communion occurs, in which we turn out to have access to the experiences of all the others struggling in similar yet differently shaped causes in a substantially same vein; all those that do it, individually or collectively, in other places in the world at this moment – and, even more remarkably, all those that have done it through history. And in fact not only since the inception of explicit surrealism in the early 20th century, but also in a chain of selective affinities of the pre-surrealist tradition which becomes visible only a posteriori through the conquering of the vantage point of explicit surrealism, a historical reality which becomes real retrospectively, adding the experiences of hundreds of poetic adventurers, radical romanticists, investigative hermeticists, visionaries and revolt movements to our own.

This is the core of the sense in which surrealism is, and needs to be, a movement, and in which the surrealist tradition and the pre-surrealist tradition are crucial for it. The trajectory of organised surrealism becomes a nexus connecting threads of various colours into a monstrous and marvellous body of surrealist experience that goes far beyond the organised movement, in time, place and designation. This is the objective entity that some authors have misunderstood (Jean Schuster and subsequent eclecticists and academics that have benefitted from the interpretation) as an "eternal surrealism", as if it wasn't only the revelation of these surrealist aspects within explicit surrealism that realised them as an integrated objective fact in the first place. And then surrealism keeps changing through the historical choices made by those who contribute to it, making certain turns, retreats from blind alleys and progress into uncharted terrains, reassessments of emphases, new absorptions, in accordance with what the collected experience seems to demand to retain its integrity in new settings and situations.

Thus, the care for the poetic phenomenon, the stubborn trust in the unknown, and therefore a recognition of the inexhaustibility and irreducibility of creativity, of desire, of imagination and of play, as well as the refusal to limit one's quest to rational terms and to ideologically separated forums, the dismissal of conventional solutions, seem to be a constant core throughout ever new guises. Or, as we are mid-journey, any formulation of the core remains preliminary; both because formulae hardly catch the essentials, and because we are still in the process of investigating what parts can be renegotiated still within a solidly surrealist framework.

This is also a kind of real imaginary collectivity, which makes surrealism a collective adventure even for those who pursue their own projects alone. But then it is a matter of fact that any such struggles will usually find it natural to attempt to pool resources with other human beings physically present, in order to ascertain its manifestation in everyday life rather than separate from it, to ascertain a playful dynamic beyond any single person's control, to set aside particular individual fixed thoughts and arbitrary circumscriptions, and at the same time provide intimate criticism as well as creative challenges. Of course, communication technologies today allow us to collaborate remarkably close with physically absent people, but since this is restricted to the hours when we in a sense withdraw from everyday life to tune in with our communication devices, and since it entails meeting specifically as free-floating yet verbal subject positions rather than as whole open-ended animals and physical spirits, it will never make actual encounters obsolete. Groups today can have an active very wide geographical periphery, but they still need a geographical center.

In order to proceed however, this vehicle that we were talking about must also make sure not to get caught in the vines or melt into the background. In order to stay focused on an uncompromised sense of the unknown, in order to stay aware of the limitless claims of desire and creativity, it remains necessary to refuse all faith in given options and good behavior, to refuse to abandon the right to denounce the current order on the whole. We can live as nonconformists and manifest and support any deviations from given normality, from the recommended comfortable ways of organising life, that we may see or invent and recognise as instances of sparks of freedom, even if only in the preliminary form of deeply felt refusal. As surrealists, it seems particularly crucial to not give in to any compromises on behalf of surrealism, facilitating its reduction to merely a thing within art, literature, individual life philosophies, or politics. Whichever pragmatical choices each individual makes in order to survive, surrealism itself will remain a source of connection and inspiration only inasmuch as there is dismissal of petty careers in its name and of pragmatical restrictions of its scope. It requires to be put into practice ridden of utilistic concerns, in the manner of play.

Thus, this adventure remains at heart an international, collective, traditional, historically changing, experimental, non-conformist, useless, playful and moral endeavour. But the notions of collectivity, of nonconformism, of tradition, and even more so of wasteful expenditure – efforts that don't pay in terms of prestige and money, are intensely outdated in these times. (Tradition and morals may be popular in conservative views where they are seen as monolithic and imposed by fate, which is quite the opposite from their application here as radical instances of selective affinities and nonconformism.) All this contributes to our remaining marginalised, as well as remaining a beacon of attraction.

But it is not a modest undertaking. It is not one of those Hollywood devil's contracts where you sell your soul for fame, money and mating opportunities. It is rather of the faustian type where you do it by inner necessity, for the knowledge (in one sense or another), for the massiveness of the desire. And at one point or another there is a particular strait of Scylla and Charybdis to face, navigating between the rather arbitrary but apparently strongly attractive poles that we can most easily describe as revisionism and orthodoxy.

Revisionism, as if an old idea have an inherent programmed senescence, or if the world would indeed have changed enough for the basic aims that surrealism was founded to manifest, investigate, fight for, to have become obsolete in some fundamental sense. Yes, often surrealism have strikingly missed interesting things in the past, or been sticking to prejudices, or trying out strategies that failed. But it is only through the continued application of surrealist vigilance and the continued devotion to the dynamics of the poetic quest that these can be identified and evaluated. The surrealist project needs to be continuously revised for the purpose of its own aims; if those aims themselves are revised or forgotten there is nothing to provide coherence and one can only end up with a superficial eclecticism based on petty personal preferences or shaky pragmatism.

Orthodoxy, as if things wouldn't have changed at all, or if the original project launched was not a living thing picking up experiences and new choices and curiosities along the way. Yes, very often a consistent surrealist rigor is sufficient to assess contemporary phenomena presented in a frenzied queue. But, consistent surrealist rigor itself is dependent on relying on the experiences of the movement as such and of oneself, empiricism, experiment and especially the curiosity and sensibility to be able to detect the truly poetic and emancipatory aims in phenomena where they have not been demonstrated before or where they have not been manifested before.

Revisionist choices very often motivate a lack of rigor and coherence, eagerness to shady deals and major compromises, and ultimately lack of commitment and honesty altogether. While orthodox choices very often motivate an unnecessary self-isolation and paradoxically loudmouthed shyness about entering into dialogue, and a wilful inability to identify dynamic potentiality in the present situation and contemporary expressions. For both cases, it can be argued that the very nature of surrealism as a historical movement embodying a focal point of very long-lasting aims and desires falsifies those self-chosen limitations. The cause of poetry demands rigor and vigilance, demands to stay true to both the ruptures historically made and to finding novel paths in the present, needs to recognise new phenomena as instances in a magic mirror of its own immutable core.

Maybe it is just all about the contagiousness of this particular atmosphere, the inexhaustible transformations projected onto the interface from who knows where, the mutual recognition and the productivity of the encounter between the vastness of the unknown and the integrity of the probe. The forest around it keeps changing and there are no set coordinates to say certainly in which direction we are actually moving, but we keep breaking through layers of illusions, we keep making the company of ever new flocks of never-before-seen birds, who recognise their reflection in the gleaming skin of the vehicle just as much as the vehicle recognises itself in the diabolic fire of these birds' eyes.

(Mattias Forshage, published in What will be 2013)

Lost and found

In surrealism there has typically been quite a lot of "found photography", but perhaps not enough in quantitative terms for it to be noted as a "stylistic" element for surrealism by the art historians. It has made more sense for those who give surrealism an immediate meaning in terms of methods and attitudes of appropriating the world; chance findings, sub-surface meaning, poetic atmosphere, strange juxtaposition, paranoic-critical method, vigilance towards the unusual, are an important part of popular imagination and therefore commonly found in anonymous creation. While "funny" websites are typically filled with "found photography" from the world of contemporary advertising and shrill colours, there is perhaps also a bit of a peak of interest in art books of found photography from older times, with black-and-white and certainly more inviting pictures. Odd street scenes, group portraits in weird settings and forming larger shapes, portraits with masks, various kinds of portraits and interactions involving animals and small children and juxtaposing roles, unusual nature phenomena, things that look like something else, involontary double exposures, still-lifes with weird constellations, etc. Often very enjoyable, and stimulating for the imagination. Especially when without ironic comments.
 
And suprisingly enough, a cheap one among them ("Found Photography" in the Thames & Hudson Photophile series) had an introduction where some French writer (named Anne-Marie Garat) discussed in completely reasonable terms the surrealist significance of found photographs! ("beneath the surface of ordinary appearances and the banality of everyday life, the world is full of ambivalence and uncertainty. Within the predictable order of things lies the potential for all kinds of adventures /.../ the bizarre photograph, which seems to go against all reason, uncovering unknown enigmas or perhaps giving us a sense of déjà vu, a mysterious, intuitive awareness of a world beneath the one we know, with all its menacing duplicity /.../ the unusual combination of elements creates a disturbing effect – what is seen is more than what is seen /.../ this quest for bizarre images may derive from a game we play as children: we see a face in a tree, a giant in a cloud, a landscape in the veins of a block of marble." She sounds like an outsider yet knowing what she is talking about, but it is indicated that she is perhaps not entirely innocent in this sense by the inclusion in the book of a portrait of Raymond Roussel and his mother?

Perpetual wonders in the periphery?

Unusual events

What is unusual? In the surrealist context we rarely look for the merely statistically unusual. If we do, it is loaded with potential of logical paradoxes and showy rhetorical paradoxalness. If we apply probabilistic statistics, then all combinations of events have a low probability just because there are so many logically possible options. And in fact, what is maybe truly unusual is that there is such an uneven distribution of possibilities, so strong patterns, so much apparent regularities, in reality... While older science often considered the regularities to be given by god and exceptions were things that needed explanations, modern efforts (modern physics, psychoanalysis, evolutionary biology etc) are more the other way around: how the hell does it come to pass that regularities occur and one option among many becomes common?

Often we think that the regular, characteristically boring, aspect of everyday life is an ideological construct, based on behind-the-scenes censorship and denial of the width of possibilities and specifically those possibilities that could be interpreted in any way as subversive or disruptive. It follows from this, that whenever one walks out to meet the world with an unprejudiced mind and vigilant senses: there will be a beautiful jungle to discover with amazing things in it. Maybe. However, this is of course determined by the process of generating meaning. All these possibilities don't mean a thing as long as they don't mean anything.

In fact, we're not specifically looking for the scenic view of the uninterrupted field of possibilities. Ok, it might have a particular sense of euphoria to it. It feels nice. And then?

Many of us are looking more for the little instructive examples of dynamics in these respects: where do the rifts occur, where do the enticing detours open up? Where are things building up to an unusual atmosphere and it would demand an effort to put them back into the normal categories – an effort which can be delayed or even avoided?

Many of events thus may look unusual just because they are absurd in the sense of conventional meaning. But then a lot of the conventional meaning is strictly speaking absurd in itself, and it does not provide us with a criterion.

Objective chance
The traditional surrealist concept of "objective chance" is about the unexpected agreement of "inner and outer necessities", where the interior and the exterior join hands in striking coincidences, often sequences of coincidences, which convey a strong perception of meaning, one which has an aspect of being obvious yet still resonates with the weight of the unknown.

Many surrealists also focus on a more pedestrian sense of objective chance as a regular guiding light of life in the surrealist sense. It is those everyday chains of coincidences and associations, where there is a regular interplay between the interior and exterior, where ongoing psychic processes find their exterior correlates in a more or less striking manner (a certain vigilance picks up those elements of reality that incarnate certain obsessive thoughts, hauntings, just ongoing lines of assocation and research, recent remembered dreams, recent forgotten dreams, automatic monologuing, unconscious or strictly speaking preconscious thoughts...) and it seems like the fabric of reality is part of our ongoing psychic life and vice versa (which it of course is).

The stronger sense of objective chance is where life itself seems organised according to a structure of the unknown, life is poetry and poetry is life; and is usually connected with certain types of crises: being in love, of course, or various other near-madness-states of temporary intoxication, durable insomnia, euphoria, despair...

The weaker sense of objective chance is immediately accessible with voluntary means, experimentally; as a surrealist game or as a chosen "surrealist lifestyle" which is little other than a permanent surrealist game. Just being vigilant. Especially when combined with making choices about time allocations and directions based on the logic of the spontaneous encounter, of options presenting themselves rather than rigidly decided in advance.

It is very much a question of to what extent these observed details convey meaning and particularly converging meaning, and very little a question of how statistically rare or common they might be.


Organisation of life
A major practical question is to what extent it can be combined with other ongoing demands in life, those that typically are seen as belonging to the other camp of regular boring everyday life. (But of course they are often far from boring, otherwise they wouldn't be that compelling...) Examples are well-known. Having a job is bad enough, but for many still flexible and with plenty of space for own thinking. Having a more permanently attention-demanding job, exhausting, with a rigid time schedule, and often very stressful ongoing disturbances is worse. Keeping times in general, thus having to interrupt whatever went on before, and often using public transport at their busiest and noisiest hours, is bad too. Having permanent company (a partner, a family, colleagues, close friends, guests) usually is quite disruptive to thought, and favors avoiding unusual tracks, but can be orchestrated to the contrary by willful playfulness. Loneliness on the other hand, leads to a situation where more determination is required to stay attentive and not get distracted by repetitive thoughts or need for entertainment. Flexibility is good of course, but there are also some crucial moments that can be organised to squeeze into a rather demanding schedule. Public transport is full of random or weird ongoings, as is the world at large as seen when walking, but going by car prevents most impressions except quick visual ones. Staying at home, and intense entertainment such as perpetual chattering on the phone, watching tv, extended videogame-playing or filmviewing, is of course a strategy to avoid anything unexpected.

First of all, some time to remember dreams just after awakening, or during breakfast, or on the walk to the station – it is crucial to get an opportunity to do so before assuming one's waking social persona, before starting chattering away with people – or to make telling dreams the first part of one's social interactions... Focus on memorising or writing down some keywords, they will usually make it possible to reconstruct more or less the whole dream afterwards, and elements from the dream will often turn up within one's attention span during the day as reminders as long as there is some initial memory for them to cling on to.

Second, some time during the first half of the day, to write down the dream, or to write down the anecdote or unusual element of what happened during the public transport ride or during the walk there. There is usually one. Such anecdotes are often inconsequential, but they are often used as social entertainment, and sometimes accounting for them will reveal them as symbolical or truly unusual, and within a game framework, it will turn out that some of them find attachment points to other friends ongoing chains of associations, memories and phenomenological investigations; there will be minor coincidences.

Third, not to work oneself into complete exhaustion, or jump straight into the demands and pleasures of socialising for the entire rest of the evening, but leave a space for a bit of solitude and noting the anecdote of one's ride back home, or of one's social encounter, or of how one's dream found its correlates. There is always something to note, and for me it has been pedagogical with those occasions when this has been done in the shape of the old "dominant image of the day" game. One does not even need to be alone, willful playfulness can engage the whole company in discussing the dominant image of the day, just like sharing dreams over the breakfast table.

For me, this works very well whenever work demands are not particularly pressing, and in fact often when work demands are pressing too but I am in a good mood and do not need to seek social company merely for the sake of staying above the surface... It works bad during combinations of pressing work demands and relatively bad moods, and it works bad with heavy work demands from different angles so that one goes home from one task just to work a bit on another before exhaustion or before having to hurry to bed because one has to get up early; there is just no time to write things down, and even if memorising them works for a short timespan they eventually get lost in the turmoil.


What to expect from reality
Apart from things that stand out as major unusual events (which may be interesting or not, cf world news, astronomical events, social drama, deaths, encounters with madmen, encounters with crime etc) there are more continuously ongoing categories of everyday weird anecdotes on the one hand and exterior correlates to one's ongoing thematics on the other hand, and they occasionally melt together. When the material is quantitatively increased, by a particular game context, or just by a lot of time for interpretation and reflection there might occur a shift to the qualitative: things associate more intensely with each other, patterns of deep meaning knock on the window, themes become obsessive (and of course, vice versa, if exaltation occurs for subjective reasons, the material increases). The opposite dynamic is obvious, without the time to remember dreams or to take notes of whatever has demanded attention, less things seem meaningladen, and fewer things seems worthy of attention, and life seems more boring.

Surrealist expectancies on reality is not about what is unusual. It is about organising life so as to be able to notice, and wherever desired to follow, the unusual implications; to realise and acknowledge the presence of the unknown, and to explore it at will individually and collectively. Not to be in control, to be in a certain tension-filled agreement with ongoing dynamics, and not remain manipulated by conformist concerns, so-called repressive structures, exploitative relationships and single people.

Though the unusual is quite useful in a game context. Unusual events can be collected for systematical data mining, for experimental interpretative approaches. For building up stories, for simulating dreams, and also for systematical phenomenological studies of what constitutes single experiences that have some sense of autonomy visavis other experiences and visavis a background of life itself if there is such a background and how such event atoms relate to images and symbols.

MF

Atmosphere in Art revisited

Thomas Cole: Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

There are some discussions that I am always trying to avoid, but sometimes fail. One is about the psychology of pictures. A lot of people know a lot about this and it bores me to reconstruct it all on my own for merely polemical purposes. Another one is arguments for and against different strains in surrealist art. It's just not the point. One suggests: Matta? Another says: Magritte. The former says: Matta! The latter insists: Magritte. The former claims: Matta. The latter endures: Magritte. So what?

But I can make one more attempt to avoid those question by addressing the actual interesting questions connected under the heading of atm

How does atmosphere in art work? You can't just draw an atmosphere. Whoever wants to bring in atmosphere into art has to find a way, and at first glance there seems to be two very different ways of bringing that about (later it will turn out that there wasn't just two).

 The most traditionally obvious is to construct an atmosphere, by depicting an imaginary scene where an atmosphere is likely to emerge (or may seem to have already emerged if originally imagined in a visionary manner). By well-known conventions of representation one recreates a three-dimensional scene, which is filled by this tangible absence of rational calming order, an absence that gives rise to this electrical invisible poison gas of the enigmatic, the taste of the unknown. We all know this as the Chirico method, which has been exploited in surrealism for longer than surrealism itself, and has proven strangely inexhaustible. Well, not strangely, since the scene created by the painter is not the major point, but the sense of the unknown that it manages to conjure up within it. But then of course, there is also a whole lot of bad fakes in the genre, all those "standard" surrealist painters that repeat certain supposedly fetishistic objects in different constellations, or paint completely uninteresting scenes where certain objects are out of scale or there is a female breast exposed, or orchestrate some simple puns of sexual or not even sexual character by juxtaposition or transformation, creating scenes that merely reveal recipe or appeal to key stimuli rather than invoke something (but of course also the opposite, all these inadvertently created atmospheres...)

The twodimensional surface with a picture of an atmospheric scene in accordance with this is obviously analogous with a "window" towards this scene (a "window towards the unknown"), and we "read" the picture with the spontaneous skills acquired of translating homogenously coloured areas as distinct surfaces, brightness and order of overlap as distance, lines as delineations of objects, of presupposing a certain perspective, a certain order, as long as anything suggests it. The more it conforms to traditional representation with ordinary clues the easier it becomes for us to trust this flat visual image as an unproblematic representation of a section of a visual field of the rest of the world, with the "solid middle-sized objects" available (and not covered by other objects) within a certain distance within that sector of vision. We go to certain lengths to make up for inadequacies, missing things, or even to fill out that which is merely sketched. No, I didn't want to go into all this standard babble of looking at images, I have to switch track...

Ok, the most logically obvious way to get atmosphere into art, on the other hand, is to address this atmosphere directly, and try to translate it into something visual. In this case you don't need specifically the traditional skills to depict a scene, but you need to seduce the spectator into seeing. If the picture is a window, it is a window not miniaturising the surfaces of middle-size objects to form an image, but something else. We have to somehow suspend the everyday reading of an image and wait for some other reading to emerge. Something subatomical, fourthdimensional, synaesthetical... But for people with no particular synaesthetical capabilities, or no advanced training in reading image parameters not as proportional spatial parameters but as something else, this is usually done by a scale displacement or a simulation of synaesthesia. If it doesn't look like the world as we know it, it might very well depict the microscopic world. Or the vast macroscopic worlds of outer space. Or it may be usually invisible fields rendered visible by some weird staining process: we could be seeing the form of sounds, of thoughts, of smells, of feelings, or of actual atmosphere. Or a mixture of all this. And usually it is through this desperate superimposition of spatial interpretation onto an image which does not give us the traditional clues to be read this way that we co-create this image, and co-create, or are seduced into seeing, its representation of atmosphere itself, with or without the auxiliary fictions of mental entities as part of the translations. This is of course the Matta method.

It was quite revolutionary when the surrealist painters discovered and explored it through the second half of the 30s and during the war (often under the name of "psychological morphologies"), but then it proved remarkably attractive to use this point of departure as an excuse to abandon the fundamental curiosity for the unknown... Several age groups of painters used it as an excuse to revive classic abstraction of one or the other kind, again denying that the picture is a window and depicts the imaginary and instead seeing it as a mere twodimensional surface with a certain distribution of form and colour. Without the discipline of occultism or madness which could ascribe an intense metaphysical meaning to such form and colour, and which made good old abstractionism take part in the quest for the unknown, these new "abstract expressionist" strands, most notably as "action painting" or "New York school" in the US and "tachisme" in France, often struggled to attain a complete absence of spiritual content. Why would anyone be interested? On the other hand, the decidedly surrealist half of "lyrical abstraction" kept it closer to the imaginary sources and kept redirecting it back to them whenever it went astray into those pastures where all cows are equally grey.

(Since the surrealist movement has always been non-doctrinary in stylistic terms and never has been circumscribed in pictorial terms, which by the way again is why things are so difficult for those who insist on regarding surrealism as an art movement, the surrealist movement has welcomed and encouraged those who undertake poetic explorations of the unknown with artistic means regardless of their stylistic choices. And thus, it is always surprising and frustrating when some want to make a big fuss over contradictions in stylistic terms.

Several have insisted that representational art is obsolete and we must abandon the conventions of perspective etc. Well, why? Just because it's old? No, who wants the new for its own sake! Or because the fact that it's old suggests that it is connected with traditional and repressive structures of the mind that we could attain new freedoms by abandoning? Oh, could be, but it is a bit of a far stretch, and so far it seems empirically like the surrealist use of old picture conventions still opens up for more new horizons of the mind than its voluntary abandonment does. Because advertising, pop culture and academic art took over many of the surrealist lessons in this field? Well, if they did, did they immediately acquire the full rights to everything produced through these routes? Yes, this line of thought is suggestive to the radical mind, and over and over again the urge to abandon everything that one can come up with an argument against has proven quite sterile...

On the other hand, others have grumpily insisted that they hate "abstract art", and there was a splinter group (Tendance Populaire Surréaliste) for several decades in France that kept insisting that Breton had betrayed surrealism and that the French surrealist group effectively become antisurrealists just because Breton and others explored lyrical abstraction in the 50s! The TPS have rarely been acknowledged at all in the movements own historiography, mainly because it seemed so far-fetched, beside-the-point and so utterly non-surrealist to have a battle of styles. Because any arguments for a particular style against another might possibly be valid for a particular exploration, or even for an extended exploration in the form of an oeuvre, but as arguments they prove to play on a completely different arena than that of surrealism – it becomes aestheticism or sensation-seeking or fashion strategy or political strategy, but not surrealism.)

Though the two routes I have described are not the only routes. Since the methodology of surrealism is very often about gathering random or apparently insignificant material and seeing meaning emerge from them (emergent properties), a lot of artistic practice within surrealism focus not on the manipulation of evoking atmospheres, but merely on the patient or impatient waiting for them to arise by their own accord. Many of the basic surrealist strains, for one: the immediate, naive figuration, and two: the organic-type morphological fantasy, and three: the ceaseless collaging of more or less random elements, are practices that just go on and on without caring, and that will see atmospheres emerging by chance and overdetermination, just like in reality, only increasing the possibilities, both merely statistically and with automatic sensibility....

MF

Automatism

(Excerpt from my postface to the Swedish 2011 edition of Breton's Manifestoes of Surrealism (Sphinx); a postface where I felt for once that I made a decent job of summarising what surrealism is all about... It would be good to get an occasion to make an English version of the entire text; this is just a quick translation of the section about Automatism to intervene in an ongoing discussion elsewhere)






The fact that surrealism from the beginning was equated with the automatist method has caused some confusion through history. Surrealism is a living movement, not a doctrine which lies when once laid down. Indeed, during the first few years in surrealism, surrealism and automatism were synonyms (as in the First Manifesto). But already at that time the surrealists were busy with a width, successively wider, of experiments and struggles, and fairly soon it was necessary to abandon the narrow circumscription of surrealism as a synonym of automatism, and instead the term was applied to the entire movement, the entire spirit, the entire arsenal of methods. And by the end of the 20s reasons were being felt to downplay the importance of automatism, at least in the sense that there were warnings against the thoughtless application of it as a recipe, and emphasises that the experience of automatism had been ambiguous. (Note: See the Second Manifesto, and even sharper in Aragon's "Treatise on style", then at greater length in Breton's "The automatic message".) And while a few historians have failed to grasp that the concept of surrealism was initially widened to mean more than automatism, there are others who have noted the critical evaluation of automatism around 1930 and loudly claim that surrealism abandoned automatism entirely. Both are equally wrong of course, and this should be obvious to any serious student of the activities and works of surrealists.

Automatism, originally the writing with such speed that all conscious aesthetical and moral concerns were incapacitated, has remained one of the most basic sources in its principle, but quite differently implemented, and of quite different relative weight in different projects, different methods, different points in time, different groups, different writers, different artists. The various guises that automatism appears in offer a remarkable width, the mapping of which perhaps still remains to do. And its most fundamental content is perhaps not the flow – it is for example substantially different from any spontanism or "stream of consciousness" – but rather the mediality. The automatism "opening the tap" is not only about sidestepping censorship and not primarily about quantitative production. It is rather the actual absence of conscious aesthetic concerns which is central, and whoever creates under those circumstances will be sidestepping their persons and thereby paradoxically revealing their inner resources, making themselves mere tools for poetry, which is something objective, larger and more general. It is necessarily done in an experimental way, it is about exploring something unknown, rather than assembling by recipe. This mediality will sometimes take the shape of rigid concentration, even discipline, which may to an external person seem confusingly unlike the expansive flow. But such a more general sense of mediality is typically implemented in the majority of surrealist games and methods, regardless of what is invoked is chance itself, or the product of collectivity beyond the purposes of any single individual, or mere sensibilities and material of unconscious character within the single psychic individual. It is, not the least, about demystifying inspiration, forcing inspiration, and, mark me well, this without depreciating it!

Often the results are not very striking: they may be predictable or just bland: that is a natural risk in any experimental undertaking. Two points must be made in this connection. One is that for surrealists it is very often not the final result, for example a poem or a painting, which is the interesting thing, but instead the experience, the application of the experiment, making oneself available for poetry; and the works coming out of it hold an interest that is highly contingent. Often enough they succeed in conveying new perspectives or unusual atmospheres and images, but it is not at all decisive whether they they do it or not, they may just as well be pure by-products of at most documentary interest – and the fact that still they have a form which makes it possible to put them next to works produced with completely different purposes and methods current in contemporary cultural production, may be confusing enough for those critics and historians who wants to judge over the works with an aesthetical (in the narrow sense) measure which is rigid, predetermined and timeless, and of course also if it struggles to be timely and is idea-based and relativising.

The second point is one which is almost diametrically opposite, and is presented in the First Manifesto, remembered in the Second and still has its relevance in particular situations, but which is almost entirely polemical within the cultural field. It is the point that the products of automatist methods will have a poetic, humoristic, surprising and prophetical character which often enough will turn out to be distinctly more interesting than most of what is produced with conscious aesthetical aims within contemporary literary and artistic practice. And this despite the fact that they will have a distinct naivity, a lack of outlook, a certain ridiculousness and an immediate absurdity. Or not really despite, but often thanks to this, since this will be capable of being preferrable –from all viewpoints – over works struggling to fit into the fashions and competition for recognition of the times.

Furthermore there are many questions around the importance of automatism that still remain to investigate critically. Within the surrealist tradition it is obvious that there has been, and still are, a width of interpretations, all the way from those emphasising how the experience and the traces must be interpreted and evaulated on an analytical level, to those who emphasise that the practice in itself is paradigmatical as an image of and a step in the reintegration of man; nevertheless for surrealism all such contradictions are clearly secondary compared to the intense curiosity that spurs us to ceaselessly expose ourselves to the experience. Most of those critical perspectives are actually put forth in passing already in the Second Manifesto anyway.

The story is well-known. Breton had become curious about free associations and hypnagogic images through his Freud-reading and his work as a doctor during the war. He was led to associate them with the application of methods of chance and of flow within litterature, especially with the flow in Lautréamont, and he got involved together with Philippe Soupault in writing The Magnetic Fields in 1919, which has entered the annals of history and the whole story is related in the first manifesto. There were strong connections with many of the chance experiments in Dada; Arp's poetry, Huelsenbeck's poetry, collective writing games like "Die Hyperbol vom Krokodilcoiffeur und dem Spazierstock". There were strong connections with mystical mediality, with spiritist and religios mediality (while of course denouncing those metaphysical assumptions that the practioners of these were content with), but more than anything with the distinct vision of poetical clarity as expressed in Rimbaud, and which in him explicitly was the product of a long and careful disorder of the senses. (Note: Some have made a big issue out of noting how the concept of automatism within surrealism has failed to stick to the concept within mysticism, or to purely therapeutical applications within psychoanalysis; which nevertheless was the basic point since the aim was something quite different! Just as irrelevant are all those literature historians who make a big issue out of "revealing", in opposition to the surrealists' own declarations of their dependence on Freud, that the concept of automatism in surrealism "actually" rests on some other authority within psychology; whole careers have been built on insisting on Jung, Myers, Janet or Taine.) Three years later, when the Dada movement was collapsing, it was chosen to pursue experimentation in this particular direction. Yet more automatic writing, and hypnosis, were put at the top of the agenda. Hypnosis was quickly abandoned, and instead accounts of dreams became very popular, and there came a number of different suggestions as to how to implement automatism in visual art. And also after automatism had been denied as the golden road to the surreal, people continued to write automatic texts, daily games continued to rest on one or other type of automatism, and important steps forward in surrealist painting was very often about the invention of new methods of implementing automatism. In more recent times, musical improvisation has been added as a new, distinct and fruitful area of automatist experimentation.




Mattias Forshage