Conceptualising surrealist walking

Spontaneously, it makes sense to regard surrealist walking as militant investigation. I was recently invited to talk in a connection implying this consideration, even though it was, luckily, not an event of conceptual analysis but a discussion trying to suggest the points of, and invoke and examplify the process of, surrealist walking.

(Conceptually, since this is one of those places that do that: the concept of "militant investigations" as developed in Italy in the 60s by Romano Alquati and friends, is a dynamic and inspiring concept regardless of how widely one accepts currently available items in the margin as instances thereof.
 And the practice of surrealist walking is a continuingly rewarding practice which is not dependent on legitimation in political or philosophical terms to be meaningful.
 "Militant investigations" is the systematical practice of mapping everyday lives, conflicts and desires so as to reveal new patterns and new openings on a substantially empirical basis. Very often it is used to reveal real conflicts and real needs on workplaces, but just as fundamental is the organisation of everyday life. And the area of relevance benefits from being widened from the spheres of organising household labor and consumption to all aspects of everyday life.
 Conceptually: "everyday life" includes the area of play, love, sleep, dream, idling and fun, and "real needs" includes all needs of stimulation and provocation including intellectually, emotionally and poetically, and "social relationships" include all the potential unexpected encounters, love affairs, etc. Militant investigations in a wide sense are the empirical investigation of social reality and everyday life, with an aim to transform. Eleventh Feuerbach thesis, you know.
 Social reality is the sum of all social relationships, and the radical transformation of social reality equals social revolution.
 Specifically, militant investigations works in assuming that people's everyday experiences that are often disregarded as meaningless are part of meaningful patterns that reveal something which can be used in order to challenge the social order. It works by highlighting the invisible, and it works by discovering which contradictions that make sense in everyday life.)

Readers of this blog may know surrealist walking. Typically you just wander spontaneously, usually in the urban environment, alone or in a group, but trying to stick to the special kind of availability than distinguishes betweens urges of habit, laziness, cowardice or least resistance, and urges of discovery, curiousness, desire, inner necessity, and poetry. Being in a group easily provides release from certain utilistic constraints: one needs no idea of direction, and can always assume (if it is difficult not to worry) that someone else is leading. But there are also far more systematic approaches which are easily available to a single individual too, and indeed very often call for a splitting up of the group into divergent excursions and later reassembly for comparing notes. As surrealists, we typically arrange such driftings as games, focusing on a particular method of moving or of interpretation or a particular theme or sphere of association. Or a plethora of methods, and the autonomous movement of a living entity of which the individuals are merely parts.
 
Surrealist walking investigates the environment (typically the urban environment) in a transformational sense: moving as vagrancy, moving without authorisation, moving beyond utilistic transport; moving through a "sea of signs" (making oneself available to emergent patterns of meaning amidst the vast flow), through a "forest of symbols" (discovering the layering of patterns of meaning, the hiddenness of certain poles of intense meaning) , through a "succession of ambiances" (clear domains of tangibly different fields of possibilities inspiring different kinds of thoughts, actions, fantasies and interactions), through a "web of encounters" (bouncing from one intersection point between trajectories to another in a sequence that generates an adventure); demasking, opening up and generating meaning as it goes. It is indeed the successive revealing of "another city", which overlaps with the one on the official maps, but through a gestalt switch instead structured in accordance with desire and sensibility, a network of ambiances and surprises. It is about the reenchantment of lifespace. Making the city a liveable place by disenveloping the undervegetation in plain sight, and let our relationship with the place and our spatial movement be as meaning-generating as it would be.

A crucial aspect of this seems to be the "suspension of metaphysical judgment". A direct contrary to the miserabilist approach of no-nonsense "common sense" which aggressively assumes that things that coincide are necessarily random and have no connection, that things that speak to you actually spoke about something else and have nothing to tell you; surrealists tend to assume that coincidences make sense, that what you meet is relevant in connection with your present adventures and worries, that what you find is a response to what you are looking for, as a way of rebuilding a meaningful world, not as if it was all expressions of some particular fate or hidden will, not in the manner of the clinically paranoid as something that you need to obey or escape for otherwise you will get hurt, but simply as an inevitable part of life, as an expression of the ways by which meaning is generated. Messages speak, associations abound, interesting connections are preferred, doubts arise, hidden patterns emerge, insights awake, worlds in which the imagination enjoys to work claim space.

Of course a lot of this general manner of drifting and interpretative movement is codified by some of the surrealists' successors, the lettrists and situationists, and its inception into radical movements today very often as distinct post-situationist interpretations with different proportions of anarchism, poststructuralism, heterodox marxism, desire philosophy and live-role-playing in their foundations. Through this part of tradition, there is an increasing tendency to focus on the dynamics and disregard the ambiances; attentive to factors that facilitate movement in one direction or another but less likely to exert a sensibility to the places themselves and acknowledge their spirit. Such drifting is typically fuelled, and attracted or repelled by, the spirit of places but without recognising it and questioning it. Modern activists are well aware of the contradiction between free availability and imposed control over space, and sometimes may have a tendency to interpret all available signs as signs of this particular conflict (at worst seeing the landscape only as a massive bulletin board for signs of exclusion and the occasional scattered stickers with shouts for freedom). But signs of what you were already looking for are not signs in the sense of free movement and in the hope of discovering hidden patterns, it is necessary to move beyond the preconceived conflicts to see other potential conflicts arising, and especially the utopian suggestions, be they already put into practice or just feral hunches.

The conflicts in the urban environment are thus not just the ones in terms that are perhaps conventionally targetted by militant investigation (conflicts between access and exclusion, free popular use and controlled use) but also conflicts between actual use and possible use (in terms of playful, poetic, wild or utopian use) and conflicts in atmosphere and directionality which surrealist methods may perhaps be specifically useful for finding (conflicts in emerging patterns of meaning, but also conflicts in categories and implications of found objects and material association chains). The transformation invoked is both the change already implied in the investigation, rendering the environment meaningful, readable, savourable, and the direct changes of slight disturbances as well as the opening up of paths through the urban landscape, and the change suggested by conceptualising new use of places, including the various forms of exchange and alliances with other people encountered there.

MF

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

Bats and transit (variation about games)

(Niklas Nenzén)

It is always good to imagine the world from the viewpoint of fellow organisms. A famous one is to see the world from a bat's view. A philosopher even wrote a book about it. Indeed, philosophers' "thought experiments" are typically crude reveries. A biologist may say something else about the probable forms of life experience of a bat and the phenomenology of batness. The bat is, as we know, seeing the world primarily from a nightly, aerial, swiftly and erratically turning and flapping, standpoint, with the landscape and its parts painted for the hearing sense by echoes. This is a very vivid and accurate view, but not only does it play at high speed, it is also extremely demanding as it requires the instantaneous processing of a vast amount of complex information at every moment. No rest until hanging upside down in some hideout.

For this very complex processing of information, bats need a well-developed neural system and brain. But if we assume brainpower is identical with intelligence we go wrong. When basic orientation is such an immensely complex task, there is actually very little capacity left for problem-solving, flexibility, sociality and other things we associate with intelligence. In human terms, bats are brainy yet remain rather stupid.

Next place to start: I really enjoy how time stands still in travelling. The long waiting, spent on board the vehicles themselves as well as in the different terminals, is not really waiting but spending time outside time, which is good for nothing, and therefore very favourable for revery, for non-directed reflection, for unexpected discovery. My friend Riyota Kasamatsu once wrote an essay saluting the surrealist potential of this "transit time", as connected to the watchword of "worthlessness" which was popular at the time.

Indeed and inevitably, the lack of access to the tools of conventional productive work, whichever they are in the situation of each person, creates a certain void, a void that tends to get filled. There are no immediate practical tasks for the mind (unless it indeed impractically gets stuck in the mode of paranoid worries and repetition-obsession). It is not work, it is not productive side activities, it is not useful leisure, the reproduction of labor force.

With no practical tasks at hand, with the mind in several respects vacant, we enter absentmindedness, which is a state of availability. This is where thought gets its opportunity to play freely, including taking a rest, leaving the stage open for various other modes of movement of the mind. This is an area where automatism, obsessive imagery and vivid revery sometimes play havoc, and sometimes just have their little stand in some corner and the limelight remains unoccupied. This is a state which has a great potentiality to focus on the unknown, and even more which is actually focused on potentiality; the mind is available for something to happen, and it might or might not.

This is why I typically prefer to travel alone – so as not to have to spend this whole time playing out normal social interactions. Unless one is busy with socialising with a companion, there will also typically emerge potentially interesting interactions with strangers. Potentially, not necessarily; it is all about availability. Of course, I try to avoid the entertainment with which ideological forces struggle to fill this void with advertising, indoctrination and numb relaxation of all kinds. For everyday transports I regrettably often fall into a practical need of utilising transport time for something useful, but at least whenever I am on something considered a journey, I very often avoid picking up self-chosen entertainment like novels, or picking up a laptop to do some regular work of one or the other kind. Yet there is no need to stick to any of these preferences as rules, because all these entertainments and conventional tasks will produce a certain boredom or just feeling of inadequacy, and the "withdrawal" into availability will eventually be spontaneously preferred.

It was quite refreshing to see a lot of the old fantasies about this "transit time" confirmed from an unexpected angle in Olga Tukarczuk's very readable novel Bieguini 2007 (eng Runners, sw Löparna).

From this viewpoint it is remarkable to see the large amounts of people nowadays spending all such free time playing little games on their phones. A certain amount of travellers in every waiting area, in every train car, will be busy filling their time with such desperate filling out the void and avoiding the potentialities that void might contain. (And I'm not primarily complaining about new technologies, I was just as irritated with the widespread habit of reading the newspaper while travelling, long before mobile phones with games came.) So with such games, typically of the simple kinds, a lot of people make sure to stay out of boredom by rapid repetitive action, cognitively demanding but intellectually dull. Games, the crude ethologists and neurologists say, are an advanced type of behavior, keeping motoric-sensorial-neural systems vigilant, good practice for hunting and for escaping predators.

But in the framework of contemporary human society, it would seem that these one-person high-speed no-thought games are much more characterised by their role as generalised entertainment, fulfilling the function of fending off thought, availability and potentiality. Indeed a lot of people in this society are in a fragile state, and know or suspect that any undirected thought might easily get stuck in repeating worries, problems, shortcomings, traumatic experiences, and lead to depression or nervous breakdown. For a lot of people, massive entertainment (be it TV, newspapers on the morning train, mobile phone games etc) is simply selfmedication against severe depression. Of course, the same entertaining noise that keep obsessive repetition away also keeps away any serious enquiry of one's desires (what one really wants to do), any serious reflection over one's situation (are there things that are in fact intolerable, and need to change, sometimes even with means already at hand) as well as any play of imagination that might constitute an inner counterpoint to depression.

There is a lot of important dynamics waiting in boredom. Because boredom is not about boredom, but only about the absence of desperate measures for entertainment. It is about facing the unscheduled, useless and sometimes extremely useful, it is about letting the mind go, and see it wander off, and discover beautiful stuff, or not.

This is not a question of denouncing modern digital gameplaying on the whole. That would not only be vain and pointless but also beyond my knowledge. Furthermore, apparently, there is also a vast sphere of ambitious games, more similar to actual playing, involving inventiveness, imagination, complexity, interpretation as well as eclectic and new mythologies, poetically suggestive graphics, and often actually entailing the development of entirely new skills, new ways of moving, new circumscriptions of the subjective unit, new utilities of the spirit, and therefore slightly altered bodily existence and individual existence. I don't know, but it seems to represent an analogy to the altered states in poetry. Of course such games tend to become obsessive and probably often outcompete most of the things that makes life itself an exciting game, but this is a delicate question, and not at all my subject here. I'm talking only about those trivial games available as apps on people's mobile phones, with which they are "killing time" unless there is any other entertainment around; making themselves permanently unavailable-occupied, extinguishing absentmindedness and potentiality along with threatening introspection, overview and boredom. The mind is constantly busy solving perfectly trivial problems. There is an incredible capacity, there is even an immense activity going on, but all this capacity is kept busy with this one particular activity and nothing is left for anything else. Just like bats! But still without the excitment of flying, of catching insects, and of experiencing the night...

Mattias Forshage

In what sense is surrealism urban? (sketch)

Surrealism is indeed a fundamentally urbanistic endeavour, not at all in that it would be inconceavable in a rural setting or uninterested in extraurban environments (as the situationists tended to be), far from it, but in that some urban attitudes lie at its core.

1. Urban identity
Based on flow, overflow, absurdity, on both fast variations and real ambiguities concerning responsibility versus irresponsibility, and loneliness and company. Fundamentally urban is that more or less dynamic notions of cosmopolitanism-humanism-liberalism-individualism-selfrealisation replace the static notions of kin, trade and caste and “place in the order”. Family is distinctly inurban, freedom of association/ organisation exclusively urban; only in an urban setting can nonconformism, radicalism, divergence and refusal be a point of departure and not have a fulltime defensive occupation!

2. Fundamental heterogenity
a) of people in terms of demographics (age, origins, occupations, attitudes & behavior)
b) of environments, architecture and atmospheres (from luxurious and/or official to shabby/decomposing or unstructured/wild along different axises)
c) of supply of commodities, entertainments, information and signs
The urban environment provides not just a wide variation but is dependent on a deeper sense of heterogenity in a lot of factors (many of these are occasionally empirically weak, which is experienced as distinctly inurban and smalltownish (which is a personally important to me as I am working in a horrible narrowminded-conform conservative university small-town, parading as Sweden’s fourth largest city but lacking all sense of urbanity).

3. Abundance
a) of signs (nivellation of signs)
b) of encounters (flexibility, anonymity, abundance of encounters)
c) of possibilities (chaotic patterns, unpredictability, abundance of signs)
providing a ceaseless and in itself meaning-generating flow, within which we make associations and selections making up poetry and chance phenomena, and eventually situations (in the sense of the situationists), opportunities where the usual inauthentic habits and reactions obviously not are valid anymore and the field of possibilities therefore suddenly vastly opens, which might be socially explosive.

4. Mobility
The city provides a concentration not only of people and messages but also of structures (architecture and city planning), all of which makes a unique background for psychological mobility and dynamism. The possibility to move between different spheres of heterogenity, which is the hedonistic pleasure of all urban walkers, and provides the basic psychogeographical data for anynone interested in such questions. As an experimental setting, this is incredible: any random walk will provide you with a chain of messages (anarchistic knowledge) and potentially make you lose your way (with some sense of danger but usually not mortal danger). There is a text about this (walking and happiness from a surrealist perspective) which the author has been trying to translate for quite some time but just never got enough time…
The city is also the only environment where we have trustworthy public transport, making it possible to extend this mobility, go far on sudden associations and clues, into surrounding areas and ambiances; in a convenient form which itself provides exposure to new people, new possibilities, new atmospheres to savour and/or interpret.

Three fundamental negative corrollaries of surrealist urbanity:
* No family
* No regular hours fulltime job
* No car for regular transport
(Having to deal with only one of these factors, it is very often possible to design a personal compromise that makes many aspects of urban lifestyle still available, but anyone leading a life circumscribed by more than one of them usually finds himself/herself excluded from embodying true urbanity)

Or is surrealist urbanity/walking just bachelor bohemic?
No, I don’t think so. Isn’t bachelorism an individualistic organisation of comfort? Isn’t this opposed to flexibility and true curiosity? Isn’t bohemism primarily the absence of planning and commitment? Aren’t both opposed to any systematic experimentation, and thus the very opposite of surrealism?

MF

LÖSDRIVARENS ÄVENTYR 1

LÖSDRIVARENS ÄVENTYR 2