(Alone in a multilingual situation. Night train to Bucharest. I haven't gone to bed, I turned out the light and sit there marvelling at the stars. Summer nights in scandinavia, and urban nights everywhere, are pale and you can't see very many stars. So this is my first full sky of stars in half a year.)
DARKNESS OF DARKNESS
Bellen,
den Finsternis hindurch -
Barking forth in the landscape
Great white eyes and beauteous nothingness
That twitching of the neck when darkness means something
that draping of one's bed in calcareous folds
where long lines of hidden Mantids stand waiting
taking off in flight when the moon tells them so
low and multicolored mannequin flight
The dust of which turns to mushrooms and to
severed parts of stagbeetles in this abandoned forest
Hidden gardens of aphatic rest of silver spit
draped as a landscape over the landscapes
dispersed as a sheet over the sheets
With hints of grandiose architecture hidden
and murderous toads and strangely shaped treestumps
and a flattened landscape when darkness - finally - means something
(How funny that language is nothing but certain distant constellations in this darkness
that different languages don't mind being on a collision course when these rails eventually might meet
how reassuring that darkness always lays down its own rules
and the distribution of colors is made up on the spot
and this nice coffin might have been a siberian mammoth bones tent
I will enjoy staring out at this darkness from there- )
MF
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Who are the theorists?
and what is surrealist theory?
Surrealist theory is basically a systematical investigation on the discoursive level of various phenomena focusing on what is revealed through a radical poetical perspective. Sometimes it takes the shape of an explicit historical-theoretical investigation of the role played by a certain phenomenon in surrealism's artistic creations, history, organising and collective mythology, but it must be noted that any simple gathering and comparison of such historical information is a mere academic and reifying task as long as it not clearly a prerequisite for an actual investigation of what the radical poetical perspective might reveal.
In surrealism, textual or artistic genres are not paid any respectful attention as such, and many of its products are indeed hybrids and juxtapositions in that respect, but a consequence of that respectlessness is also that the breaking of genre rules does not mean anything in itself. Surrealists simply pursue their poetic investigations in whatever forms it seems to require, and any larger exposition of surrealist works preferrably put things in different such genres side by side, not the least for the very pedagogic purpose of showing that surrealism keeps refusing any reduction to one means of expression: among such gravediggers, the ones who would like to regard it as mere art are in the majority, but occasionally someone likes to regard it as mere poems or mere politics or mere theory. (Nevertheless it was a sad and misdirected complaint campaign that, twenty years ago, demanded the opening of a surrealist bulletin of theoretical discussion for poems and drawings, and thus removed its raison d'etre and sent in an early grave - local specialisations are sometimes needed in order to get somewhere...)
Co-inventors of surrealist theory are, to start with, all of us who keep doing poetical research on the discoursive level aiming for some sense of clarity, from an explicitly surrealist perspective. Systematic thinking. Some have been doing it a lifetime, some do it for a short period. Some haven't written much at all, some have written much in other genres that tends to overshadow their actually theoretical contributions. Some take particular specialised contexts as pretexts for developing surrealist lines of thought: for example in art criticism, social anthropology, history of surrealism, etc. Others rather keep explicating the supposedly surrealist viewpoint, some keep telling anecdotes ascribing a particular epistemological weight to them, and some keep yelling at each other about the relative applicability within surrealism of various elements of situationist, feminist, marxist, structuralist, poststructuralist, occult or psychoanalytical thought, all of which may or may not be considered actual theoretical activity. On the borderline of the theorist trade we have also a lot of people who were foremostly artists and usually write down their theoretical speculations in explicit relation to their aims and methods in their own artistic work.
Then we have a whole bunch of commentators on surrealism who provided such fertile interpretations that their work - though formally secondary - actually takes the ideas further in one way or another. Often these works were published by people who were actually organised in the movement but still were writing books that were predominantly secondary in form.
Then there are the best critics of surrealism; whose criticisms were often very relevant, offered from theoretical viewpoint that could be considered at least partly objectively within surrealism, and which contributed to theoretical development within the movement at least somewhere.
Finally all of those who were more peripherally associated with the movement (in ways ranging from an intimate dialogue to an abstract influence) but whose investigations in particular areas has been recognised as at least partly perfectly surrealist. The names of some of these will be highly controversial with several of my friends... and the work of some does admittedly consist to a large part of academic or massmedial simplifications of received ideas, but might perhaps nevertheless be somehow interestingly effective in their particular formulations?
All of these partake in some way in the adventure into thinking which is one of the fronts of surrealism, and a necessary consequence of its empirical experimentations in creativity, sensibility, art and life. Again, the genre as such cannot be conceived as separate from other areas of surrealist methods and of surrealist life in general, but the difference is now huge between such specialisations which serve to crop down life, create edges for personality markets, or impose actually merely heuristic categorisations on the world in a rigid and hostile way on the one hand, and those which admit their temporary and conditional status, acknowledge other possibiities and connections with other perspectives, and which are motivated by methodological and/or passionate choices... In the second case, a theoretical perspective is a wonderful tool in conceptualising the marvels of the world.
(This text was at one point substantially longer, when I was giving lists of examples of each type of theorists, but then I realised it should be better to drop those parts, both since they threatened to distract my own concentration on the meaningful, and because I expected that if people would react to this text it would be primarily in order to complain why I had omitted, or included, this or that author or put him/her in the wrong category, which seemed beside the point.)
Surrealist theory is basically a systematical investigation on the discoursive level of various phenomena focusing on what is revealed through a radical poetical perspective. Sometimes it takes the shape of an explicit historical-theoretical investigation of the role played by a certain phenomenon in surrealism's artistic creations, history, organising and collective mythology, but it must be noted that any simple gathering and comparison of such historical information is a mere academic and reifying task as long as it not clearly a prerequisite for an actual investigation of what the radical poetical perspective might reveal.
In surrealism, textual or artistic genres are not paid any respectful attention as such, and many of its products are indeed hybrids and juxtapositions in that respect, but a consequence of that respectlessness is also that the breaking of genre rules does not mean anything in itself. Surrealists simply pursue their poetic investigations in whatever forms it seems to require, and any larger exposition of surrealist works preferrably put things in different such genres side by side, not the least for the very pedagogic purpose of showing that surrealism keeps refusing any reduction to one means of expression: among such gravediggers, the ones who would like to regard it as mere art are in the majority, but occasionally someone likes to regard it as mere poems or mere politics or mere theory. (Nevertheless it was a sad and misdirected complaint campaign that, twenty years ago, demanded the opening of a surrealist bulletin of theoretical discussion for poems and drawings, and thus removed its raison d'etre and sent in an early grave - local specialisations are sometimes needed in order to get somewhere...)
Co-inventors of surrealist theory are, to start with, all of us who keep doing poetical research on the discoursive level aiming for some sense of clarity, from an explicitly surrealist perspective. Systematic thinking. Some have been doing it a lifetime, some do it for a short period. Some haven't written much at all, some have written much in other genres that tends to overshadow their actually theoretical contributions. Some take particular specialised contexts as pretexts for developing surrealist lines of thought: for example in art criticism, social anthropology, history of surrealism, etc. Others rather keep explicating the supposedly surrealist viewpoint, some keep telling anecdotes ascribing a particular epistemological weight to them, and some keep yelling at each other about the relative applicability within surrealism of various elements of situationist, feminist, marxist, structuralist, poststructuralist, occult or psychoanalytical thought, all of which may or may not be considered actual theoretical activity. On the borderline of the theorist trade we have also a lot of people who were foremostly artists and usually write down their theoretical speculations in explicit relation to their aims and methods in their own artistic work.
Then we have a whole bunch of commentators on surrealism who provided such fertile interpretations that their work - though formally secondary - actually takes the ideas further in one way or another. Often these works were published by people who were actually organised in the movement but still were writing books that were predominantly secondary in form.
Then there are the best critics of surrealism; whose criticisms were often very relevant, offered from theoretical viewpoint that could be considered at least partly objectively within surrealism, and which contributed to theoretical development within the movement at least somewhere.
Finally all of those who were more peripherally associated with the movement (in ways ranging from an intimate dialogue to an abstract influence) but whose investigations in particular areas has been recognised as at least partly perfectly surrealist. The names of some of these will be highly controversial with several of my friends... and the work of some does admittedly consist to a large part of academic or massmedial simplifications of received ideas, but might perhaps nevertheless be somehow interestingly effective in their particular formulations?
All of these partake in some way in the adventure into thinking which is one of the fronts of surrealism, and a necessary consequence of its empirical experimentations in creativity, sensibility, art and life. Again, the genre as such cannot be conceived as separate from other areas of surrealist methods and of surrealist life in general, but the difference is now huge between such specialisations which serve to crop down life, create edges for personality markets, or impose actually merely heuristic categorisations on the world in a rigid and hostile way on the one hand, and those which admit their temporary and conditional status, acknowledge other possibiities and connections with other perspectives, and which are motivated by methodological and/or passionate choices... In the second case, a theoretical perspective is a wonderful tool in conceptualising the marvels of the world.
(This text was at one point substantially longer, when I was giving lists of examples of each type of theorists, but then I realised it should be better to drop those parts, both since they threatened to distract my own concentration on the meaningful, and because I expected that if people would react to this text it would be primarily in order to complain why I had omitted, or included, this or that author or put him/her in the wrong category, which seemed beside the point.)
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Soluble locus
What is this place called place
Some places are more places than others. But sometimes more is less. Places have tons of determinations. Global coordinate systems, positions assumed in our networks of associations and perceptions, its social productivity, biological productivity, monetary productivity; what it is used for, has been shaped by being used for, what it could possibly be used for if we want; what situated it in relation to surrounding topography, what created its soil layer, what plants and fungi colonised it when, what animals use it when and how, what are the optical and metereological conditions, who died there and who wrote a poem there and who tried to seduce whom there, and so on. This and other aspects difficultly measured will give them particular presences or absences, particular suggestivenesses and expectancies. I am not using the terms atmosphere or ambiance here, just because I sometimes suspect them to be just euphemisms for soul, which I might have said too, but which will often stand in the way of a real investigation of the factors actually involved.
Many intellectuals of conservative leanings tend to mythologise place hierarchically, primarily in terms of patria. Others, more liberal, tend to oligolectically associate places with more or less exotic anecdotes to fit a cosmopolitan image, involving either a globalisation nivellation, or good old tourist exotism, or both intermixed. But, it cannot be empasised enough, the biographical self is just one epistemological organ among others. An important one, providing much of the emotional reverbations, a good deal of the stories, a good deal of all the irrational associations and psychological overdeterminations. But real mythology, which might be described as acknowledging the ghosts we have intercourse with, presupposes availability more than anything, just like poetry, and thus all the biographical material is just a wagonload of suggestions, which might selectively be grabbed and put to use by the meaning in formation, or not. The notion of a patria is a strictly regressive one on the mythological and psychological levels, and of course one usually associated with reactionary political purposes. To see place as a setting for anecdotes is a slightly more dynamic position, but exotism and lack of exotism are equally powerful in potentially hiding specificity and particular possibilities from view. The more interesting a place is, the more it has qualities of terra incognita, something we may have rumors, dreams and prejudices about, but which primarily in itself encourages us to an active investigation of its possibilities. Consider the place a playground, yourself having gotten the task of inventing the game appropriate to it.
In the mid-90s the surrealist group in Stockholm focused much of its geographical investigations in the concept of worthless places (or atoposes), all the corners and borderzones falling between chairs, falling out of use, getting invaded by unintended usages. It could be emphasised that the criterion is largely an economic one and the setting more or less necessarily urban: only in cities is the population dense enough and the land prices high enough for any disused space to be so strongly singled out, to acquire the quality of a focus of resistance and dreaming. Other environments are organised in other ways.
Some other groups picked up the concept, particularly the Leeds group which had already from its beginnings a geographical focus parallelling ours (and preferring the probably more grammatically correct plural form atopoi). In later investigations other aspects have taken the lead, particularly in Madrid, developing concepts largely opaque to us (such as?), or in Eric Bragg's inexhaustible documentation of abandoned environments in northern California, or in Bruno Jacobs' concept of "poetic places", or in SLAG's "urban rockpooling" etc. The interface visavis popular "urban exploring" more or less based in live role playing games and situationist theory, is not yet specified. The many scattered surrealist experiments in natural, rural or suburban environments have been fruitful but perhaps not offered similar methodological conclusions.
In Stockholm we have also focused particularly on dream geography (recently at Kormorantrådet),
both the question of how space is constructed in the dream and how dreams affect our geographical orientation in general.
Together with a sense of nature geography which is perhaps more of my own personal interest, this was investigated in my novel Dreamgeography naturegeography . This sense of nature geography is about how our observations of animals, plants, stones, landforms and weathers are crucial in establishing our sense of space, our psychogeography. In this sense, it is obviously depending on the degree of selective attention and of background knowledge. But there is of course also a sense in twhich these aspects give places their position objectively.
Psychogeography was a slightly different concept when the lettrists developed it and later used it as situationists, focusing particularly on the ideological and counterideological manipulation of mental structures through city planning and experimental urban drifting, and we have, in parallel with an academic discipline which we don't know if it exists or not, deliberately generalised it into a phenomenology of space and strategies of orientation in general.
Birds, which like humans are obsessed with large-scale spatial orientation, rely mostly on visual gestalt but also seem to have a keen sense of magnetism facilitating navigation. The gestalt sense of humans is one the other hand exceedingly complex, usually resulting in quite conflicting signals which are finally resolved in a rational analysis. Here we are. We have no memory of how we might have ended up in this place where we feel we might be. Spatial recognition, if not a pastime among others, will start approaching that beautiful and profane description of mystical knowledge as the instantaneous recollection of the sum of associations to an object (where was it? Joseph Jablonski, "Surrealist implications of chance" 1976, I think). A good guess as to where one is includes all the motionless summer evenings there, all the puns and etymological speculations around its name, the taste of the soil, the ambiguous hopes of dawn, the noise of birds, the land use history, the public transport system leading there, the dream syntheses it will become part of. The notion of home does not make sense. The only adequate identification with place is an experimental and playful one, regardless of whether it lasts for just the duration of an instantaneous practical-joke-type kiss or a moment which lasts for centuries, turning us to stone, and whether we are ultimately capable of distinguishing between the two.
Mattias Forshage 3.iii
Some places are more places than others. But sometimes more is less. Places have tons of determinations. Global coordinate systems, positions assumed in our networks of associations and perceptions, its social productivity, biological productivity, monetary productivity; what it is used for, has been shaped by being used for, what it could possibly be used for if we want; what situated it in relation to surrounding topography, what created its soil layer, what plants and fungi colonised it when, what animals use it when and how, what are the optical and metereological conditions, who died there and who wrote a poem there and who tried to seduce whom there, and so on. This and other aspects difficultly measured will give them particular presences or absences, particular suggestivenesses and expectancies. I am not using the terms atmosphere or ambiance here, just because I sometimes suspect them to be just euphemisms for soul, which I might have said too, but which will often stand in the way of a real investigation of the factors actually involved.
Many intellectuals of conservative leanings tend to mythologise place hierarchically, primarily in terms of patria. Others, more liberal, tend to oligolectically associate places with more or less exotic anecdotes to fit a cosmopolitan image, involving either a globalisation nivellation, or good old tourist exotism, or both intermixed. But, it cannot be empasised enough, the biographical self is just one epistemological organ among others. An important one, providing much of the emotional reverbations, a good deal of the stories, a good deal of all the irrational associations and psychological overdeterminations. But real mythology, which might be described as acknowledging the ghosts we have intercourse with, presupposes availability more than anything, just like poetry, and thus all the biographical material is just a wagonload of suggestions, which might selectively be grabbed and put to use by the meaning in formation, or not. The notion of a patria is a strictly regressive one on the mythological and psychological levels, and of course one usually associated with reactionary political purposes. To see place as a setting for anecdotes is a slightly more dynamic position, but exotism and lack of exotism are equally powerful in potentially hiding specificity and particular possibilities from view. The more interesting a place is, the more it has qualities of terra incognita, something we may have rumors, dreams and prejudices about, but which primarily in itself encourages us to an active investigation of its possibilities. Consider the place a playground, yourself having gotten the task of inventing the game appropriate to it.
In the mid-90s the surrealist group in Stockholm focused much of its geographical investigations in the concept of worthless places (or atoposes), all the corners and borderzones falling between chairs, falling out of use, getting invaded by unintended usages. It could be emphasised that the criterion is largely an economic one and the setting more or less necessarily urban: only in cities is the population dense enough and the land prices high enough for any disused space to be so strongly singled out, to acquire the quality of a focus of resistance and dreaming. Other environments are organised in other ways.
Some other groups picked up the concept, particularly the Leeds group which had already from its beginnings a geographical focus parallelling ours (and preferring the probably more grammatically correct plural form atopoi). In later investigations other aspects have taken the lead, particularly in Madrid, developing concepts largely opaque to us (such as?), or in Eric Bragg's inexhaustible documentation of abandoned environments in northern California, or in Bruno Jacobs' concept of "poetic places", or in SLAG's "urban rockpooling" etc. The interface visavis popular "urban exploring" more or less based in live role playing games and situationist theory, is not yet specified. The many scattered surrealist experiments in natural, rural or suburban environments have been fruitful but perhaps not offered similar methodological conclusions.
In Stockholm we have also focused particularly on dream geography (recently at Kormorantrådet),
both the question of how space is constructed in the dream and how dreams affect our geographical orientation in general.
Together with a sense of nature geography which is perhaps more of my own personal interest, this was investigated in my novel Dreamgeography naturegeography . This sense of nature geography is about how our observations of animals, plants, stones, landforms and weathers are crucial in establishing our sense of space, our psychogeography. In this sense, it is obviously depending on the degree of selective attention and of background knowledge. But there is of course also a sense in twhich these aspects give places their position objectively.
Psychogeography was a slightly different concept when the lettrists developed it and later used it as situationists, focusing particularly on the ideological and counterideological manipulation of mental structures through city planning and experimental urban drifting, and we have, in parallel with an academic discipline which we don't know if it exists or not, deliberately generalised it into a phenomenology of space and strategies of orientation in general.
Birds, which like humans are obsessed with large-scale spatial orientation, rely mostly on visual gestalt but also seem to have a keen sense of magnetism facilitating navigation. The gestalt sense of humans is one the other hand exceedingly complex, usually resulting in quite conflicting signals which are finally resolved in a rational analysis. Here we are. We have no memory of how we might have ended up in this place where we feel we might be. Spatial recognition, if not a pastime among others, will start approaching that beautiful and profane description of mystical knowledge as the instantaneous recollection of the sum of associations to an object (where was it? Joseph Jablonski, "Surrealist implications of chance" 1976, I think). A good guess as to where one is includes all the motionless summer evenings there, all the puns and etymological speculations around its name, the taste of the soil, the ambiguous hopes of dawn, the noise of birds, the land use history, the public transport system leading there, the dream syntheses it will become part of. The notion of home does not make sense. The only adequate identification with place is an experimental and playful one, regardless of whether it lasts for just the duration of an instantaneous practical-joke-type kiss or a moment which lasts for centuries, turning us to stone, and whether we are ultimately capable of distinguishing between the two.
Mattias Forshage 3.iii
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Surrealism is a shrimp
(third part of a pentaptych (or hexaptych?) of not-very-exciting technical texts, the series of notes as prerequisits for autosurrealismography – see also The process of defining surrealism and What about surrealismologists?)
We don’t need a definition of surrealism. We need surrealist activity and surrealist sensibility. And within that, we will now and then stumble upon practical and theoretical problems which will make it interesting for us to think about the meaning, the logical and ontological status of surrealism, and the mechanisms by which it is detached from other concepts, by which it creates itself staying separate but making alliances and partial confluations with other currents, movements and perspectives, et cetera.
Some basic semantics: the surrealist tradition
Surrealism is a movement, a tradition, an activity, a sensibility and a point of identity. It is not a style, a doctrine, a religion, a theory and an institution. Of these different aspects, these different ways it is meaningful to talk about surrealism, the surrealist tradition seems to be the logically central as all the others gain their meaning from it. For different people, in different situations, other aspects might seem more central or even more fundamental, but it is also by way of the surrealist tradition that surrealism gets a content that makes it possible to make objective correlates. For example, the surrealist movement is surrealist, can recognise itself as surrealist, and can meaningfully claim to be surrealist, only inasmuch as it rests on the surrealist tradition, and also its innovations, novelties and deviations only make sense inasmuch as they take the surrealist tradition to new areas and new combinations.
Then, the surrealist tradition is the part worth taking a closer look at. It is mostly a continously disenveloping investigation and creative expression of a field of investigation and creativity; a rhetoric, a sprit, a vague methodology, a particular hope, connecting with each other a growing set of classic themes, classic aims descriptions and classic techniques. The tradition is the volontary historical continuity of these investigations, a freely chosen and mythical social community spinning over many decades and countries accumulating experience in this field. As soon as we place ourselves in this tradition, we become comrades with the earlier explorers, and their results become ours.
Thus, the core meaning of surrealism is dynamically and intrinsically tied to the developments and activities of the surrealist movement. We do find surrealism outside it, and long before it, but it is only in the light of the ongoing activities that these various elements get their surrealist meaning. The adhesion of such elements to the surrealist tradition is a part of surrealist activity. The tradition and the activity do not exist without each other. Schuster’s famous idea of the distinction between eternal surrealism and historical surrealism makes no sense and is just a piece of really bad metaphysics; this has been pointed out before but is worth repeating.
Some boring semantics: the surrealist adjective
There is a surrealist identity. Different criteria can be applied to who is a surrealist. The most common criteria is either or a combination of three: subjective surrealism (who regards himself/herself as a surrealist, preferrably based on adequate knowledge of the surrealist tradition), objective active surrealism (who pursues a surrealist activity, in everyday life investigations and subversions, in thinking, writing, painting, playing etc, preferrably in several of these), objective formal surrealism (who is involved in the surrealist movement by participating in a group or in network collaborations, in discussions, journals, exhibitions, anthologies, declarations from within the surrealist movement, preferrably actively and by own choice). These criteria all make sense by way of the surrealist tradition.
The subjective and the objective formal criteria are very straightforward to apply, even though the circumscriptions will have to be specified for the particular purposes wherever the question is asked. But the objective active criterion is more fundamentally problematic. What activity do we regard as surrealist if not a subjective surrealist identification or an association with the surrealist movement is there to highlight it?
On an intuitive level this is still fairly easy, and we might explicate it as those activities which are in line with the overall aims and some of the particular methodological characteristics and some of the thematic focuses that are part of the surrealist tradition. Again it is the surrealist tradition which decides. In this sense, it is also fully comprehensible and makes sense to speak about not only the surrealist painters and surrealist poets but also their surrealist paintings and surrealist poems. Single works merit the adjective by their being congenial with the surrealist tradition, often but not necessarily also inspired by and in turn inspiring that perspective. It does not have to be more difficult than that.
(Some people are eager to make it more difficult. A particular strand of surrealists like to modestly repeat that “we probably don’t really live up to surrealism”. Michael Richardson recently in a personal communication gave this a more coherent explication, claiming that surrealism must not be conceived as something attainable, and specifically that no works can be surrealist films, surrealist paintings or surrealist poems, because surrealist work is “’the annihilation of being into a jewel that is neither of ice nor fire’, lies beyond life and death and therefore cannot exist in this realm of existence”. This perspective does have some appeal, but it is not consistent with the traditional usage within the surrealist movement (and indeed, would force the the movement to rename itself as the “movement for surrealism” instead?) and mostly it will just create unnecessary difficulties.)
Because of course we keep forcefully denouncing that there could be any stylistic or doctrinal criteria from which to judge whether things are surrealist or not. Let us not be obstinate, there are stylistic and doctrinal elements in the surrealist tradition, yes there are, but none that are homogenous, straightforwardly applicable, nor very interesting. A certain style which we associate with surrealism, or a certain opinion we regard as central to surrealism, may serve to initially awaken our interest when we see it elsewhere, but we would certainly not regard it as part of surrealism unless we also found a meaningful creative relationship with other and more general concerns within the surrealist tradition.
Some ludic semantics: the surrealist shrimp
As the meaning of surrealism rests in the surrealist tradition which is continually actualised and partly revised in the surrealist movement, it is quite obvious that one of the things we can do with it is to play with it. As we have learnt from this tradition itself, play is an easy, difficult, joyful and instructive way of opening new perspectives and leaving behind ones own petty prejudices. Similar to how experimental identifications of the self in play and in poetry is far more interesting than the self which is analytically or spontaneously-defensively constructed; identifications of surrealism which appear in surrealist games, in poetry, in playful improvisations which are part of alliances and collaborations, will produce numbers of suggestions which can gain further meaning when they are confronted with each other, or pondered upon, or transferred into new media, and thus incorporated into the elements of a mythology in becoming. “Surrealism is a secret society, which will initiate you into death” Oh yeah? Well how is this going to happen?
A couple of years ago, the Stockholm surrealist group were fond of a game we invented that we called “the objectification of morals”. It was a simple analogy game where we found concrete objects as correlates to abstract concepts. We chose an abstract concept, each player suggested one sensory characteristic associated with the concept, and from the constellation of adjectives we kept discussing until we found an object that embodied all these sensory characteristics. The first succesful round was doing this with the seven deadly sins, which we sent as a somehow contribution to the surrealist exhibition in Plzen 1999. Once, we tried with Surrealism. I don’t remember now what the actual sensory adjectives were, (like, hmm, wet, calcareous-hard, quick, submarine, itching? this is obviously just a pedagogic later rationalisation) but it was very easy to realise that what we had all converged in a shrimp.
MF
We don’t need a definition of surrealism. We need surrealist activity and surrealist sensibility. And within that, we will now and then stumble upon practical and theoretical problems which will make it interesting for us to think about the meaning, the logical and ontological status of surrealism, and the mechanisms by which it is detached from other concepts, by which it creates itself staying separate but making alliances and partial confluations with other currents, movements and perspectives, et cetera.
Some basic semantics: the surrealist tradition
Surrealism is a movement, a tradition, an activity, a sensibility and a point of identity. It is not a style, a doctrine, a religion, a theory and an institution. Of these different aspects, these different ways it is meaningful to talk about surrealism, the surrealist tradition seems to be the logically central as all the others gain their meaning from it. For different people, in different situations, other aspects might seem more central or even more fundamental, but it is also by way of the surrealist tradition that surrealism gets a content that makes it possible to make objective correlates. For example, the surrealist movement is surrealist, can recognise itself as surrealist, and can meaningfully claim to be surrealist, only inasmuch as it rests on the surrealist tradition, and also its innovations, novelties and deviations only make sense inasmuch as they take the surrealist tradition to new areas and new combinations.
Then, the surrealist tradition is the part worth taking a closer look at. It is mostly a continously disenveloping investigation and creative expression of a field of investigation and creativity; a rhetoric, a sprit, a vague methodology, a particular hope, connecting with each other a growing set of classic themes, classic aims descriptions and classic techniques. The tradition is the volontary historical continuity of these investigations, a freely chosen and mythical social community spinning over many decades and countries accumulating experience in this field. As soon as we place ourselves in this tradition, we become comrades with the earlier explorers, and their results become ours.
Thus, the core meaning of surrealism is dynamically and intrinsically tied to the developments and activities of the surrealist movement. We do find surrealism outside it, and long before it, but it is only in the light of the ongoing activities that these various elements get their surrealist meaning. The adhesion of such elements to the surrealist tradition is a part of surrealist activity. The tradition and the activity do not exist without each other. Schuster’s famous idea of the distinction between eternal surrealism and historical surrealism makes no sense and is just a piece of really bad metaphysics; this has been pointed out before but is worth repeating.
Some boring semantics: the surrealist adjective
There is a surrealist identity. Different criteria can be applied to who is a surrealist. The most common criteria is either or a combination of three: subjective surrealism (who regards himself/herself as a surrealist, preferrably based on adequate knowledge of the surrealist tradition), objective active surrealism (who pursues a surrealist activity, in everyday life investigations and subversions, in thinking, writing, painting, playing etc, preferrably in several of these), objective formal surrealism (who is involved in the surrealist movement by participating in a group or in network collaborations, in discussions, journals, exhibitions, anthologies, declarations from within the surrealist movement, preferrably actively and by own choice). These criteria all make sense by way of the surrealist tradition.
The subjective and the objective formal criteria are very straightforward to apply, even though the circumscriptions will have to be specified for the particular purposes wherever the question is asked. But the objective active criterion is more fundamentally problematic. What activity do we regard as surrealist if not a subjective surrealist identification or an association with the surrealist movement is there to highlight it?
On an intuitive level this is still fairly easy, and we might explicate it as those activities which are in line with the overall aims and some of the particular methodological characteristics and some of the thematic focuses that are part of the surrealist tradition. Again it is the surrealist tradition which decides. In this sense, it is also fully comprehensible and makes sense to speak about not only the surrealist painters and surrealist poets but also their surrealist paintings and surrealist poems. Single works merit the adjective by their being congenial with the surrealist tradition, often but not necessarily also inspired by and in turn inspiring that perspective. It does not have to be more difficult than that.
(Some people are eager to make it more difficult. A particular strand of surrealists like to modestly repeat that “we probably don’t really live up to surrealism”. Michael Richardson recently in a personal communication gave this a more coherent explication, claiming that surrealism must not be conceived as something attainable, and specifically that no works can be surrealist films, surrealist paintings or surrealist poems, because surrealist work is “’the annihilation of being into a jewel that is neither of ice nor fire’, lies beyond life and death and therefore cannot exist in this realm of existence”. This perspective does have some appeal, but it is not consistent with the traditional usage within the surrealist movement (and indeed, would force the the movement to rename itself as the “movement for surrealism” instead?) and mostly it will just create unnecessary difficulties.)
Because of course we keep forcefully denouncing that there could be any stylistic or doctrinal criteria from which to judge whether things are surrealist or not. Let us not be obstinate, there are stylistic and doctrinal elements in the surrealist tradition, yes there are, but none that are homogenous, straightforwardly applicable, nor very interesting. A certain style which we associate with surrealism, or a certain opinion we regard as central to surrealism, may serve to initially awaken our interest when we see it elsewhere, but we would certainly not regard it as part of surrealism unless we also found a meaningful creative relationship with other and more general concerns within the surrealist tradition.
Some ludic semantics: the surrealist shrimp
As the meaning of surrealism rests in the surrealist tradition which is continually actualised and partly revised in the surrealist movement, it is quite obvious that one of the things we can do with it is to play with it. As we have learnt from this tradition itself, play is an easy, difficult, joyful and instructive way of opening new perspectives and leaving behind ones own petty prejudices. Similar to how experimental identifications of the self in play and in poetry is far more interesting than the self which is analytically or spontaneously-defensively constructed; identifications of surrealism which appear in surrealist games, in poetry, in playful improvisations which are part of alliances and collaborations, will produce numbers of suggestions which can gain further meaning when they are confronted with each other, or pondered upon, or transferred into new media, and thus incorporated into the elements of a mythology in becoming. “Surrealism is a secret society, which will initiate you into death” Oh yeah? Well how is this going to happen?
A couple of years ago, the Stockholm surrealist group were fond of a game we invented that we called “the objectification of morals”. It was a simple analogy game where we found concrete objects as correlates to abstract concepts. We chose an abstract concept, each player suggested one sensory characteristic associated with the concept, and from the constellation of adjectives we kept discussing until we found an object that embodied all these sensory characteristics. The first succesful round was doing this with the seven deadly sins, which we sent as a somehow contribution to the surrealist exhibition in Plzen 1999. Once, we tried with Surrealism. I don’t remember now what the actual sensory adjectives were, (like, hmm, wet, calcareous-hard, quick, submarine, itching? this is obviously just a pedagogic later rationalisation) but it was very easy to realise that what we had all converged in a shrimp.
MF
Occultation
There was a short period when I used to read timetables for occultations. In astronomy, occultation is whenever a celestial body gets in the way of a lightsource and thus blots it out.
Here on earth, in surrealism, occultation is something slightly different. It was introduced by Breton in the second manifesto 1929, and Breton certainly does not make it easy for the reader here. The concept of occultation itself is not very transparent. In the manifesto, it is obvious that occultation primarily regards a strategy versus publicity. How the sphere of publicity is circumscribed, and what that strategy actually consists in, is not specified. And especially not since Breton in this text also discusses alchemy and hermetic philosophy, causing careless readers to immediately believe occultation to be identical with a plunge into occultism. He does cite the alchemists in the paragraph leading up to the demand for occultation, but that is for their strategy of secrecy and not particularly for their art. But then in a footnote, he makes things more difficult by seemingly suggesting this simplified equation between occultation and occultism himself, but keeping moving back and forth. The occultation of surrealism is on the one hand the escape from frivolous contemporary influence, but on the other hand also the occultation of thought which perhaps is best served by for example astrology and “metaphysics”. What is this? His first example is parapsychology, which he connects with surrealist games as efforts of collectivising thought. Also hysteria, and above all love, are cited as favorable for such occultation. At that it point, it seems again like the occult references are just an additional way of adding connections and meaning to the surrealist core activities in their surrealist significance. But then he ends the footnote with a paragraph of astrological speculation, which does not establish any real connections with the surrealist activity and does not include any real thinking, and really seems inorganically pasted onto the text for some casual polemical/rhetorical reason.
Now, some surrealists recently have started using the word as a formula for a general situationist-anarchist strategy of “refusal of mediation”, against the spectacle. Obviously this is something derived from situationist theory even more than from surrealism, and may if not carefully employed just cause even more confusion.
Considering the fact that the call for occultation is within a text where Breton tells a lot of embarassing personal anecdotes about people for mere polemical purposes and relates a lot of stupid quarrels, misunderstandings and idiocies, it would be strange if the original surrealist sense of occultation had something to do keeping things internal or secret, of not doing ones dirty laundry in public.
What is occultation really, then? In general, I perceive it, in its context, as something straightforward: remain in the shade and remain inaccessable and opaque to the public eye, in a simple effort to retain control over your public image, not allowing any journalists insight into internal affairs, striving for freedom of action rather than fame and recognition, in fact distrusting and avoiding fame and recognition. Every activist and underground worker knows this. People who are catching the publicity contagion will always have to be reminded.
But then, it is not an ordinary, plain straightforward occultation that is being called for in the manifesto, but a “profound and veritable” occultation. This motivates all the question marks and makes this an issue we can continue to discuss if we want. But let’s just note that it is probably not something as simple and anachronistic as a general embrace of occultism, nor a generalised refusal of mediation.
By the way, this was a short period. Approximately 1934, the french surrealist group is eagerly public again. This is partly because of the huge impact of surrealist art, and partly because of the popular mobilisation in the streets. Participating in and founding all kinds of “alliances for vigilance” as well as riots and desperately looking for adequate ways of politically organising, participating in and founding alliances for the defense of modern art (which at this point more or less seems identical with surrealism), taking part in various kinds of exhibitions and art journals, the surrealists are obviously not into occultation but into investigating means of mass communication. In connection with the international surrealist exhibition in London 1936 surrealism for the first time definitely reaches a mass audience, and this is obviously an exciting prospect, perhaps even intoxicating, to them. The exhibition in Paris 1938 is much in the same vein. But at the same time the defeats in Spain and the advances of nazism give little food for optimism, and the failure of FIARI to become a large and influential organisation is soon mercifully taken off the agenda by the breakup of regular surrealist activity in the call of general mobilisation.
Then, in Marseille waiting to escape the country, in exile in north america and the caribbean, clandestinely in Paris and elsewhere throughout france, the whole socalled diaspora of the second world war, is this an occultation or not? Less public for sure, but forced onto the activities by external circumstances rather than a volontary choice. And what about czech surrealism between 1947 and 1967? Clandestine, tough, but occultated? What about the so-called “desert years” of the french group between 1977 and 1990? Hard and non-public, but occultated? We are getting into the sphere of mere rationalisations, just like the famous occultation of the pataphysical college for several decades, simply because of lack of inspiration and resources.
But also the strategy of avoiding publicity will sometimes seem like making a big fuss over how things go on spontaneously. In 1929, surrealism and its scandals was a hot topic for the gossip press, particularly since many associates of the surrealists and even some of the surrealists themselves made a living by writing for newspapers. Nowadays, this is not so much so. In the eye of current mass media, surrealism is outdated, and as a rule quarrels are interesting only inasmuch as the participants are celebrities, and you become a celebrity only by hard labor of marketing your person. Contemporary journalists will occasionally get the idea that they might do a “thing” about this funny hyperradical living corpse, but usually any afterthought, restrictions, slowness, on our part will make them loose interest. To get represented in mass media, you will first have to adapt yourself to the particular requirements of media logic in general and to the specific journalist who will mediate it.
With a deeper understanding of mass media and the function of the public sphere, developed by frankfurt critical theorists and by situationists among others, we do see that the mass media is not a separate evil but an integrated part in the general ideological machinery.
Occultation, staying out of the limelight, primarily still means not allowing the mass media any real insight, not accepting the conditions for mass media representation, not marketing surrealism or oneself through the available marketing channels and with the available marketing mechanisms. This seems again rather obviously fundamental to organised surrealism after the 60s.
But with critical theory, with the situationists’ concept of the society of the spectacle, and with the swedish surrealists’ concept of the personality market, the ground is obviously open for broadenings and further developments of the concept of occultation too. But before this is explicitly done, let’s stick to the basics of speaking freely only in selfcontrolled media, of always treating journalists and academics with proper suspiciousness, of considering public activities as tools among others, keeping alive a strategic and theoretic discussion about them all.
The astronomical sense of occultation is a subjective phenomenon, it is about blotting out lights from our view. We spontaneously apply this to surrealism as a question of darkening our actions to the eyes of the public. But the reverse is also important, the big inkblob that hides all the mass media news, advertisements, entertainment, all these frenzied meaningless appearances. This is what the swedish group once started an investigation of in terms of the “cold hand” and even more the “silent hand”; the big palm of silence blotting out the damned noise, making it possible to hear again. Of course this formula could be reduced to zen buddhism or to radical conservatism, but of course a surrealist perspective is not identical to those.
MF
Here on earth, in surrealism, occultation is something slightly different. It was introduced by Breton in the second manifesto 1929, and Breton certainly does not make it easy for the reader here. The concept of occultation itself is not very transparent. In the manifesto, it is obvious that occultation primarily regards a strategy versus publicity. How the sphere of publicity is circumscribed, and what that strategy actually consists in, is not specified. And especially not since Breton in this text also discusses alchemy and hermetic philosophy, causing careless readers to immediately believe occultation to be identical with a plunge into occultism. He does cite the alchemists in the paragraph leading up to the demand for occultation, but that is for their strategy of secrecy and not particularly for their art. But then in a footnote, he makes things more difficult by seemingly suggesting this simplified equation between occultation and occultism himself, but keeping moving back and forth. The occultation of surrealism is on the one hand the escape from frivolous contemporary influence, but on the other hand also the occultation of thought which perhaps is best served by for example astrology and “metaphysics”. What is this? His first example is parapsychology, which he connects with surrealist games as efforts of collectivising thought. Also hysteria, and above all love, are cited as favorable for such occultation. At that it point, it seems again like the occult references are just an additional way of adding connections and meaning to the surrealist core activities in their surrealist significance. But then he ends the footnote with a paragraph of astrological speculation, which does not establish any real connections with the surrealist activity and does not include any real thinking, and really seems inorganically pasted onto the text for some casual polemical/rhetorical reason.
Now, some surrealists recently have started using the word as a formula for a general situationist-anarchist strategy of “refusal of mediation”, against the spectacle. Obviously this is something derived from situationist theory even more than from surrealism, and may if not carefully employed just cause even more confusion.
Considering the fact that the call for occultation is within a text where Breton tells a lot of embarassing personal anecdotes about people for mere polemical purposes and relates a lot of stupid quarrels, misunderstandings and idiocies, it would be strange if the original surrealist sense of occultation had something to do keeping things internal or secret, of not doing ones dirty laundry in public.
What is occultation really, then? In general, I perceive it, in its context, as something straightforward: remain in the shade and remain inaccessable and opaque to the public eye, in a simple effort to retain control over your public image, not allowing any journalists insight into internal affairs, striving for freedom of action rather than fame and recognition, in fact distrusting and avoiding fame and recognition. Every activist and underground worker knows this. People who are catching the publicity contagion will always have to be reminded.
But then, it is not an ordinary, plain straightforward occultation that is being called for in the manifesto, but a “profound and veritable” occultation. This motivates all the question marks and makes this an issue we can continue to discuss if we want. But let’s just note that it is probably not something as simple and anachronistic as a general embrace of occultism, nor a generalised refusal of mediation.
By the way, this was a short period. Approximately 1934, the french surrealist group is eagerly public again. This is partly because of the huge impact of surrealist art, and partly because of the popular mobilisation in the streets. Participating in and founding all kinds of “alliances for vigilance” as well as riots and desperately looking for adequate ways of politically organising, participating in and founding alliances for the defense of modern art (which at this point more or less seems identical with surrealism), taking part in various kinds of exhibitions and art journals, the surrealists are obviously not into occultation but into investigating means of mass communication. In connection with the international surrealist exhibition in London 1936 surrealism for the first time definitely reaches a mass audience, and this is obviously an exciting prospect, perhaps even intoxicating, to them. The exhibition in Paris 1938 is much in the same vein. But at the same time the defeats in Spain and the advances of nazism give little food for optimism, and the failure of FIARI to become a large and influential organisation is soon mercifully taken off the agenda by the breakup of regular surrealist activity in the call of general mobilisation.
Then, in Marseille waiting to escape the country, in exile in north america and the caribbean, clandestinely in Paris and elsewhere throughout france, the whole socalled diaspora of the second world war, is this an occultation or not? Less public for sure, but forced onto the activities by external circumstances rather than a volontary choice. And what about czech surrealism between 1947 and 1967? Clandestine, tough, but occultated? What about the so-called “desert years” of the french group between 1977 and 1990? Hard and non-public, but occultated? We are getting into the sphere of mere rationalisations, just like the famous occultation of the pataphysical college for several decades, simply because of lack of inspiration and resources.
But also the strategy of avoiding publicity will sometimes seem like making a big fuss over how things go on spontaneously. In 1929, surrealism and its scandals was a hot topic for the gossip press, particularly since many associates of the surrealists and even some of the surrealists themselves made a living by writing for newspapers. Nowadays, this is not so much so. In the eye of current mass media, surrealism is outdated, and as a rule quarrels are interesting only inasmuch as the participants are celebrities, and you become a celebrity only by hard labor of marketing your person. Contemporary journalists will occasionally get the idea that they might do a “thing” about this funny hyperradical living corpse, but usually any afterthought, restrictions, slowness, on our part will make them loose interest. To get represented in mass media, you will first have to adapt yourself to the particular requirements of media logic in general and to the specific journalist who will mediate it.
With a deeper understanding of mass media and the function of the public sphere, developed by frankfurt critical theorists and by situationists among others, we do see that the mass media is not a separate evil but an integrated part in the general ideological machinery.
Occultation, staying out of the limelight, primarily still means not allowing the mass media any real insight, not accepting the conditions for mass media representation, not marketing surrealism or oneself through the available marketing channels and with the available marketing mechanisms. This seems again rather obviously fundamental to organised surrealism after the 60s.
But with critical theory, with the situationists’ concept of the society of the spectacle, and with the swedish surrealists’ concept of the personality market, the ground is obviously open for broadenings and further developments of the concept of occultation too. But before this is explicitly done, let’s stick to the basics of speaking freely only in selfcontrolled media, of always treating journalists and academics with proper suspiciousness, of considering public activities as tools among others, keeping alive a strategic and theoretic discussion about them all.
The astronomical sense of occultation is a subjective phenomenon, it is about blotting out lights from our view. We spontaneously apply this to surrealism as a question of darkening our actions to the eyes of the public. But the reverse is also important, the big inkblob that hides all the mass media news, advertisements, entertainment, all these frenzied meaningless appearances. This is what the swedish group once started an investigation of in terms of the “cold hand” and even more the “silent hand”; the big palm of silence blotting out the damned noise, making it possible to hear again. Of course this formula could be reduced to zen buddhism or to radical conservatism, but of course a surrealist perspective is not identical to those.
MF
Thursday, January 24, 2008
surrealism and science
"thought is one and indivisable" (Péret)
Occasionally some people have referred to some kind of contradiction between scientophilia and scientophobia within surrealism. To say that, for example, Breton, Césaire, Colquhoun, Baskine, Seligmann, Artaud, Miró, Péret, Legrand, Jouffroy, Brauner, Chazal, Tarnaud, Jouffroy, Dax, Carrington, Mabille, the majority of the french, czech and latin american surrealists, were against science and Paalen, Mabille, Matta, Rybak, Brunius, Jennings, Davies, Pailthorpe, Hérold, Caillois, Leiris, Nougé, Senecaut, Masson, Ernst, Onslow-Ford, Seligmann, Jorn, Breton, perhaps the majority of english, belgian and scandinavian surrealists plus the whole groups of Dyn and La Main à Plume, were for science is extremely superficial. The function of the thematisation of science in the works of individuals may be predominantly polemical or predominantly curious, but this is only about where individuals like to put the stress. (And any such sorting, such as this one here, will be extremely dubious as it necessarily extrapolates from mere hints in their works, from anecdotal evidence and from the most stupid denial of ambivalence and conflicting data.) The surrealist viewpoint in itself in its historic continuity is fairly unproblematic as long as the questions asked are made more specific.
1. Surrealism is passionately in favor of reality, truth, and the the natural world, and has a distinct taste for empirical data, documentation, objectivity.
2. This taste for documentation and objectivity is often expressed in a pseudoscientific style and pseudoscientific attitudes.
3. Surrealism has no longing to reach inside academic or other institutional structures.
4. Surrealism has no particular love for instrumental rationality or simple logic, but uses them in its quest for knowledge and for everyday purposes just like everybody else.
5. But it also challenges them and remain interested of whatever seems to counter them, get missed by them, be hidden behind them, get unleashed by abandoning them.
6. Surrealism is very often elaborate in its praxis of designing experimental methods, but usually in a more or less improvised way. Methodological concerns do come in, but are only occasionally an important focus.
7. Just like real science itself (but unlike the education system, mass media, and all the other pillars of ideology production) surrealism is very sceptic towards large generalisations based on scientific results and arbitrary applications of detached scientific results on other aspects life, and towards identifying one’s own world view with truth.
8. Surrealism is suspicious, critic and vengeful against all systematic ideology production, where the one carried out under the banner of science is but one, but a fatal one.
9. Surrealism is curious about all unusual thinking. Not for its own sake but for the possibilities of new poetic and epistemological revelations, and secondarily for the disturbance of habit in general as a method of triggering unknown dynamics.
10. Even though its own methodology is usually not that systematically developed, surrealism tends to agree with its “house-philosopher-of-science” Gaston Bachelard that new knowledge is produced foremostly by abandoning prejudice and making epistemological leaps. In one sphere, this is one of poetry’s functionings. In another, this is where the specialised natural sciences investigating our world work.
11. In that sense, surrealism has many reasons to appreciate and make usage of the marvellous worlds of for example particle dynamics, spacetime theory and the whole of quantum physics, scientific cosmology and astronomy in general, meteorology, systems ecology and microbiology, evolutionary theory and genetics, plate tectonics and geomorphology, quaternary geology and palaeoecology, cladistics and probability theory, cybernetics and general linguistics (just because these are the examples mentioned in “Hellchoir”). Such disciplines are creating coherent mythologies animating natural forces in a sense which is counterintuitive but makes poetic sense to our sensory and imaginational experience.
12. Some frameworks making sense of the world are called myths. Their poetic substance do not reside in some purely aesthetic perception beside truth, nor in any profound traditional truth which is fundamentally opposed to autonomous critical examination. They are in themselves not superior to the scientific framework, nor are they inferior. In mythology as well as in science, some domains are revelatory, liberating and poetic, while some are mainly dull or oppressive. Many surrealists are personally more interested in either myth or science, and may from that viewpoint also investigate scientific aspects of myth or the mythical aspect of science. The classic surrealist method is to snatch poetical elements from both, integrating them in a framework ordered by purely imaginational imperatives. But some surrealists keep warning about the ideological and social implications of many such thefts, potentially reproducing various available exotistic ideology or even create a new system of hostile liberal integration into an aesthetic framework; which are valid points even though the specific cases of surrealist appropriation may possibly well elude them. Some surrealists here insist on the need of deep knowledge of the framework in selected other worldviews, or of the principles of science – often surrealism may benefit from epistemological or methodological or comparative points made that way, just as much as from the poetical elements.
13. Thus, surrealism loathes and opposes all ideology and especially narrowminded instrumental reductive confinedly rationalist ideology, but loves the systematic and poetic study of the natural world.
merdarius
Occasionally some people have referred to some kind of contradiction between scientophilia and scientophobia within surrealism. To say that, for example, Breton, Césaire, Colquhoun, Baskine, Seligmann, Artaud, Miró, Péret, Legrand, Jouffroy, Brauner, Chazal, Tarnaud, Jouffroy, Dax, Carrington, Mabille, the majority of the french, czech and latin american surrealists, were against science and Paalen, Mabille, Matta, Rybak, Brunius, Jennings, Davies, Pailthorpe, Hérold, Caillois, Leiris, Nougé, Senecaut, Masson, Ernst, Onslow-Ford, Seligmann, Jorn, Breton, perhaps the majority of english, belgian and scandinavian surrealists plus the whole groups of Dyn and La Main à Plume, were for science is extremely superficial. The function of the thematisation of science in the works of individuals may be predominantly polemical or predominantly curious, but this is only about where individuals like to put the stress. (And any such sorting, such as this one here, will be extremely dubious as it necessarily extrapolates from mere hints in their works, from anecdotal evidence and from the most stupid denial of ambivalence and conflicting data.) The surrealist viewpoint in itself in its historic continuity is fairly unproblematic as long as the questions asked are made more specific.
1. Surrealism is passionately in favor of reality, truth, and the the natural world, and has a distinct taste for empirical data, documentation, objectivity.
2. This taste for documentation and objectivity is often expressed in a pseudoscientific style and pseudoscientific attitudes.
3. Surrealism has no longing to reach inside academic or other institutional structures.
4. Surrealism has no particular love for instrumental rationality or simple logic, but uses them in its quest for knowledge and for everyday purposes just like everybody else.
5. But it also challenges them and remain interested of whatever seems to counter them, get missed by them, be hidden behind them, get unleashed by abandoning them.
6. Surrealism is very often elaborate in its praxis of designing experimental methods, but usually in a more or less improvised way. Methodological concerns do come in, but are only occasionally an important focus.
7. Just like real science itself (but unlike the education system, mass media, and all the other pillars of ideology production) surrealism is very sceptic towards large generalisations based on scientific results and arbitrary applications of detached scientific results on other aspects life, and towards identifying one’s own world view with truth.
8. Surrealism is suspicious, critic and vengeful against all systematic ideology production, where the one carried out under the banner of science is but one, but a fatal one.
9. Surrealism is curious about all unusual thinking. Not for its own sake but for the possibilities of new poetic and epistemological revelations, and secondarily for the disturbance of habit in general as a method of triggering unknown dynamics.
10. Even though its own methodology is usually not that systematically developed, surrealism tends to agree with its “house-philosopher-of-science” Gaston Bachelard that new knowledge is produced foremostly by abandoning prejudice and making epistemological leaps. In one sphere, this is one of poetry’s functionings. In another, this is where the specialised natural sciences investigating our world work.
11. In that sense, surrealism has many reasons to appreciate and make usage of the marvellous worlds of for example particle dynamics, spacetime theory and the whole of quantum physics, scientific cosmology and astronomy in general, meteorology, systems ecology and microbiology, evolutionary theory and genetics, plate tectonics and geomorphology, quaternary geology and palaeoecology, cladistics and probability theory, cybernetics and general linguistics (just because these are the examples mentioned in “Hellchoir”). Such disciplines are creating coherent mythologies animating natural forces in a sense which is counterintuitive but makes poetic sense to our sensory and imaginational experience.
12. Some frameworks making sense of the world are called myths. Their poetic substance do not reside in some purely aesthetic perception beside truth, nor in any profound traditional truth which is fundamentally opposed to autonomous critical examination. They are in themselves not superior to the scientific framework, nor are they inferior. In mythology as well as in science, some domains are revelatory, liberating and poetic, while some are mainly dull or oppressive. Many surrealists are personally more interested in either myth or science, and may from that viewpoint also investigate scientific aspects of myth or the mythical aspect of science. The classic surrealist method is to snatch poetical elements from both, integrating them in a framework ordered by purely imaginational imperatives. But some surrealists keep warning about the ideological and social implications of many such thefts, potentially reproducing various available exotistic ideology or even create a new system of hostile liberal integration into an aesthetic framework; which are valid points even though the specific cases of surrealist appropriation may possibly well elude them. Some surrealists here insist on the need of deep knowledge of the framework in selected other worldviews, or of the principles of science – often surrealism may benefit from epistemological or methodological or comparative points made that way, just as much as from the poetical elements.
13. Thus, surrealism loathes and opposes all ideology and especially narrowminded instrumental reductive confinedly rationalist ideology, but loves the systematic and poetic study of the natural world.
merdarius
22/1 2007
When my ship comes sailing in in the moonlight,
it will be filled with an elk carcass and a lot
of mouseshit, and barefoot I will kick the beehive.
- raging charon
it will be filled with an elk carcass and a lot
of mouseshit, and barefoot I will kick the beehive.
- raging charon
What about the surrealismologists
- to the question of surrealism and ideology
Something could be said about the general topic of surrealismology, especially since this scholarly appropriation of surrealism nowadays finally seems an equally active force in academia and mass media as the good old bagatellisation, denunciation or denial, which perhaps may better be described as forms of misappropriation.
But almost since the beginnings of surrealism, critics, gallerists and academics have been writing essays and books and staging exhibitions to represent surrealism. The surrealist movement has usually distrusted and often loudly denounced such representation, but of course also recognised that there is a big difference between sympathetic and unsympathetic initiatives, and between serious and unserious inititatives (the two distinctions not always being the same). But on the whole, contemporary active surrealists have often made a kneejerk reaction out of denouncing such outside representationers as parasites, gravediggers, counterfeiters, and often actually to the level of themselves not being able to explain what surrealism is other than in negative terms; surrealism is not whatever you have been taught it is, surrealism is not an artistic or literary movement, surrealism is not within the realm of the historians of art and literature, surrealism has nothing to do with… bla bla bla. This mere negative positioning does not contribute anything to a greater understanding of surrealism, even though it may possibly contribute to the inner dynamics of the group expressing it, establishing a solid infantile feeling of being universally misunderstood and isolated and thus, at least for some time, a source of inspiration for not accepting ideologically entangling compromise.
Still, any attempt to sum up surrealism in an accessible form, any attempt to ensure it a share of exposure within contemporary culture, tends to reify surrealism and make it a part of this society’s ideology. Anything which is part of this society’s selfunderstanding is ideological; and it is very obvious that radical cultural movements are very easy swallowed up into an embellishing function, only proving the breadth and diversity of the blossoming cultural sphere under capitalism. Active surrealists more or less necessarily contribute to this when they publish to look for allies and show their works. Of course there are differences in degrees and strategies here, with rather different implications of different media and different levels of active mystification and of the active response demanded from the receiver, but there are no general solutions or obvious circumscriptions. Many surrealists want to disseminate their knowledge, their experience and their continuous thinking about surrealism in some form; thus writing books, book prefaces, pamphlets, newspaper articles, giving conferences, blogging, arranging exhibitions, readings, festivals. Objectively, this is all part of the general movement of transforming surrealism into ideology, but in practice this is of course countered by whatever active involvment, independent thinking, radical initiative it might inspire, and this in the long run rather than the short, so it is very diffult to assess.
These ideologists do then not form a distinct group but a spectrum blending into the very centre of surrealist activity. Some of the academics writing about surrealism have actively befriended surrealists and received an inofficial but very real stamp of “accepted” – of course they are sympathetic, but it varies a lot whether they actually had anything to contribute to the understanding of surrealism – compare for example the solid empirical work of Marguerite Bonnet with the rather superficial flow of books from JH Matthews. Some commentators have been active in the movement and often remain involved, while still preferring and putting most of their efforts into writing about surrealism; again contributing more or less to the understanding of surrealism. Compare for example Michael Richardson’s and Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s fruitful efforts to think critically about the issues involved, with on one hand the ceaseless flow of informed and sympathetic overviews of for example José Pierre, Ragnar von Holten, Michael Rémy and (though a bit more trustworthy than the others) Edouard Jaguer, all very informative and very shallow, and on the other hand some minor spirits who are trying to impress their academic colleagues (probably in vain?) with “real life” experience of surrealist activity while still writing only the most shallow derivatory work in their field with a smaller or larger portion of simple exotistic journalism. There seem to have been an increase lately in allowing surrealists into academic contexts (conferences, journals) with essayistic presentations of one or other subject related to surrealism (sometimes a vague sketch of the conditions and particular spirit of surrealism within a certain country), of course of very varying quality but usually lacking any real scrutiny in any method, serious thinking and even academic formalities, thus having been brought along primarily for the sake of breadth, exotism and entertainment, thus just representing surrealism in connections where it can have very little hopes of performing any fruitful subversion.
So it is obviously not the degree of sympathy which determines whether the commentators have anything to say or not. What then about critiques of surrealism from the outside? Again we have to involve the concept of ideology from the start. Any attempt to accuse a struggling radical nonconformist movement for exaggerations, naivity-puerility, overconfidence, rash generalisations etc, are mostly just the voice of the reproaching father or even more often the nervous wellbehaved sibling, and are usually formulated from a secure viewpoint of a comfortable everyday life with a job and a family and no struggle whatsoever; thus they evaluate authentic liberatory initiatives in comparison with the entire system of available ideology – such a criticism will rarely be relevant, independently of how factually true it may be in specific points! The academic feminist and poststructuralist critiques of surrealism are very often in this genre; regardless of whether their reproaches are true or not, they are simply not legitimate as long as they are offered from academic chairs and pertaining to no application into real critical-creative activity and actually no application at all, perhaps other than less surrealism or less activity in general. For the critique to be really relevant, it must be a critique aiming to a more radical, more coherent, praxis. This could be a critique suggesting new lines of research and action; a critique reminding of coherence or particular important factors that sometimes gets lost in the process, rectification of specific misunderstandings, or a critique pointing out where unconscious or consciously tactical halts and compromises in thought and action are made. It is obvious that such a critique could be made, and sometimes has been made, from the viewpoint of situationist thought, from the viewpoint of struggling feminism outside the academies, from the viewpoint of several other radical movements, but actually also from the viewpoint of the guardians of certain senses of truth, truth as coherence, truth traditions, truth as poetry: occasional outstanding thinkers in some philosophical, poetological, psychological and occult disciplines.
Now when glancing through this mountain of books, conference reports and journals that constitutes surrealismology, it strikes one as such a monumental waste of effort. The academic journals devoted to surrealism are many, Mélusine, Pleine Marge, InfoSurr, Cahiers DadaSurréalisme, Dada/Surrealism are only the ones you most often find references to. They have slightly different profiles (and some of them are cancelled), most of them are there so that the various academic students of surrealism (be it students in history of literature, history of art, history of film, anthropology, aesthetics, or “surrealism studies” in the places where that has surfaced as a separate discipline) can publish their entirely mediocre papers, usually poor explications or simple comparisons concerning surrealism and this, surrealism and that, usually not even on a general scale but confined to the context of one or two artists or authors, often only one or two works. Every now and then there are papers based on actual empirical work, presenting new or forgotten documents and historical facts about certain old surrealist, surrealist activities in certain cities or countries; of course these are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but there is obviously some meaning in writing and publishing them. Very rarely there are papers including real thought efforts in terms of actually interpreting, enquiring, reconstructing and criticising surrealism. Any efforts to interpret and criticise other things in the light of surrealism are entirely absent (naturally, since this would be the activity of the surrealists rather than the surrealismologist). So, even though much of this is sympathetic, and some of it may be really interesting, the effort to keep updated and active in the field is the profession of professional academic surrealismologists, and the rest of us have no big reason to regret we don’t have the time or patience to keep up with it, there is little illumination and inspiration of surrealist practice from that source.
They are not even very interesting from a strategic viewpoint, to keep detailed track of the ideological appropriation (socalled recuperation) of surrealism, since they are confined to the sphere of specialised academics, and cannot disperse outside that sphere without only putting people to sleep. It is merely the fact of the existence of this sphere, and its little brotherhood of professionals, that is interesting; in order to study the forms of ideological appropriation (and the corresponding countermovement) it would be much more important – and slightly less tedious – to study so-called popular culture, by which I then mean mostly advertising and commercial design (but also the cinema, music, comics and humor industries), and also its relationships with real social forms, habits, creativity and inventiveness, slang, superstitions and humor (the latter sphere perhaps popular culture in a more rigid sense).
But then of course, keeping track of the history, people, developments, strategies, tactics and works of surrealism is of course one of the tasks of the surrealists, and this is one area where we can counterparasitize and steal back valuables from the academics wherever our own records are insufficient. It is only the surrealists who can judge where to draw the relevant circumscriptions, what makes true surrealism and parasurrealism and interesting parallel investigations and what makes sterile derivatives of isolated surrealism elements and superficial stylistic similarities and ideological trends regarding shared interests. No, in fact not even the surrealists. But the viewpoint of the surrealists is in itself much more relevant since it is directed towards praxis and transformation.
M Forshage
Something could be said about the general topic of surrealismology, especially since this scholarly appropriation of surrealism nowadays finally seems an equally active force in academia and mass media as the good old bagatellisation, denunciation or denial, which perhaps may better be described as forms of misappropriation.
But almost since the beginnings of surrealism, critics, gallerists and academics have been writing essays and books and staging exhibitions to represent surrealism. The surrealist movement has usually distrusted and often loudly denounced such representation, but of course also recognised that there is a big difference between sympathetic and unsympathetic initiatives, and between serious and unserious inititatives (the two distinctions not always being the same). But on the whole, contemporary active surrealists have often made a kneejerk reaction out of denouncing such outside representationers as parasites, gravediggers, counterfeiters, and often actually to the level of themselves not being able to explain what surrealism is other than in negative terms; surrealism is not whatever you have been taught it is, surrealism is not an artistic or literary movement, surrealism is not within the realm of the historians of art and literature, surrealism has nothing to do with… bla bla bla. This mere negative positioning does not contribute anything to a greater understanding of surrealism, even though it may possibly contribute to the inner dynamics of the group expressing it, establishing a solid infantile feeling of being universally misunderstood and isolated and thus, at least for some time, a source of inspiration for not accepting ideologically entangling compromise.
Still, any attempt to sum up surrealism in an accessible form, any attempt to ensure it a share of exposure within contemporary culture, tends to reify surrealism and make it a part of this society’s ideology. Anything which is part of this society’s selfunderstanding is ideological; and it is very obvious that radical cultural movements are very easy swallowed up into an embellishing function, only proving the breadth and diversity of the blossoming cultural sphere under capitalism. Active surrealists more or less necessarily contribute to this when they publish to look for allies and show their works. Of course there are differences in degrees and strategies here, with rather different implications of different media and different levels of active mystification and of the active response demanded from the receiver, but there are no general solutions or obvious circumscriptions. Many surrealists want to disseminate their knowledge, their experience and their continuous thinking about surrealism in some form; thus writing books, book prefaces, pamphlets, newspaper articles, giving conferences, blogging, arranging exhibitions, readings, festivals. Objectively, this is all part of the general movement of transforming surrealism into ideology, but in practice this is of course countered by whatever active involvment, independent thinking, radical initiative it might inspire, and this in the long run rather than the short, so it is very diffult to assess.
These ideologists do then not form a distinct group but a spectrum blending into the very centre of surrealist activity. Some of the academics writing about surrealism have actively befriended surrealists and received an inofficial but very real stamp of “accepted” – of course they are sympathetic, but it varies a lot whether they actually had anything to contribute to the understanding of surrealism – compare for example the solid empirical work of Marguerite Bonnet with the rather superficial flow of books from JH Matthews. Some commentators have been active in the movement and often remain involved, while still preferring and putting most of their efforts into writing about surrealism; again contributing more or less to the understanding of surrealism. Compare for example Michael Richardson’s and Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s fruitful efforts to think critically about the issues involved, with on one hand the ceaseless flow of informed and sympathetic overviews of for example José Pierre, Ragnar von Holten, Michael Rémy and (though a bit more trustworthy than the others) Edouard Jaguer, all very informative and very shallow, and on the other hand some minor spirits who are trying to impress their academic colleagues (probably in vain?) with “real life” experience of surrealist activity while still writing only the most shallow derivatory work in their field with a smaller or larger portion of simple exotistic journalism. There seem to have been an increase lately in allowing surrealists into academic contexts (conferences, journals) with essayistic presentations of one or other subject related to surrealism (sometimes a vague sketch of the conditions and particular spirit of surrealism within a certain country), of course of very varying quality but usually lacking any real scrutiny in any method, serious thinking and even academic formalities, thus having been brought along primarily for the sake of breadth, exotism and entertainment, thus just representing surrealism in connections where it can have very little hopes of performing any fruitful subversion.
So it is obviously not the degree of sympathy which determines whether the commentators have anything to say or not. What then about critiques of surrealism from the outside? Again we have to involve the concept of ideology from the start. Any attempt to accuse a struggling radical nonconformist movement for exaggerations, naivity-puerility, overconfidence, rash generalisations etc, are mostly just the voice of the reproaching father or even more often the nervous wellbehaved sibling, and are usually formulated from a secure viewpoint of a comfortable everyday life with a job and a family and no struggle whatsoever; thus they evaluate authentic liberatory initiatives in comparison with the entire system of available ideology – such a criticism will rarely be relevant, independently of how factually true it may be in specific points! The academic feminist and poststructuralist critiques of surrealism are very often in this genre; regardless of whether their reproaches are true or not, they are simply not legitimate as long as they are offered from academic chairs and pertaining to no application into real critical-creative activity and actually no application at all, perhaps other than less surrealism or less activity in general. For the critique to be really relevant, it must be a critique aiming to a more radical, more coherent, praxis. This could be a critique suggesting new lines of research and action; a critique reminding of coherence or particular important factors that sometimes gets lost in the process, rectification of specific misunderstandings, or a critique pointing out where unconscious or consciously tactical halts and compromises in thought and action are made. It is obvious that such a critique could be made, and sometimes has been made, from the viewpoint of situationist thought, from the viewpoint of struggling feminism outside the academies, from the viewpoint of several other radical movements, but actually also from the viewpoint of the guardians of certain senses of truth, truth as coherence, truth traditions, truth as poetry: occasional outstanding thinkers in some philosophical, poetological, psychological and occult disciplines.
Now when glancing through this mountain of books, conference reports and journals that constitutes surrealismology, it strikes one as such a monumental waste of effort. The academic journals devoted to surrealism are many, Mélusine, Pleine Marge, InfoSurr, Cahiers DadaSurréalisme, Dada/Surrealism are only the ones you most often find references to. They have slightly different profiles (and some of them are cancelled), most of them are there so that the various academic students of surrealism (be it students in history of literature, history of art, history of film, anthropology, aesthetics, or “surrealism studies” in the places where that has surfaced as a separate discipline) can publish their entirely mediocre papers, usually poor explications or simple comparisons concerning surrealism and this, surrealism and that, usually not even on a general scale but confined to the context of one or two artists or authors, often only one or two works. Every now and then there are papers based on actual empirical work, presenting new or forgotten documents and historical facts about certain old surrealist, surrealist activities in certain cities or countries; of course these are sometimes good and sometimes bad, but there is obviously some meaning in writing and publishing them. Very rarely there are papers including real thought efforts in terms of actually interpreting, enquiring, reconstructing and criticising surrealism. Any efforts to interpret and criticise other things in the light of surrealism are entirely absent (naturally, since this would be the activity of the surrealists rather than the surrealismologist). So, even though much of this is sympathetic, and some of it may be really interesting, the effort to keep updated and active in the field is the profession of professional academic surrealismologists, and the rest of us have no big reason to regret we don’t have the time or patience to keep up with it, there is little illumination and inspiration of surrealist practice from that source.
They are not even very interesting from a strategic viewpoint, to keep detailed track of the ideological appropriation (socalled recuperation) of surrealism, since they are confined to the sphere of specialised academics, and cannot disperse outside that sphere without only putting people to sleep. It is merely the fact of the existence of this sphere, and its little brotherhood of professionals, that is interesting; in order to study the forms of ideological appropriation (and the corresponding countermovement) it would be much more important – and slightly less tedious – to study so-called popular culture, by which I then mean mostly advertising and commercial design (but also the cinema, music, comics and humor industries), and also its relationships with real social forms, habits, creativity and inventiveness, slang, superstitions and humor (the latter sphere perhaps popular culture in a more rigid sense).
But then of course, keeping track of the history, people, developments, strategies, tactics and works of surrealism is of course one of the tasks of the surrealists, and this is one area where we can counterparasitize and steal back valuables from the academics wherever our own records are insufficient. It is only the surrealists who can judge where to draw the relevant circumscriptions, what makes true surrealism and parasurrealism and interesting parallel investigations and what makes sterile derivatives of isolated surrealism elements and superficial stylistic similarities and ideological trends regarding shared interests. No, in fact not even the surrealists. But the viewpoint of the surrealists is in itself much more relevant since it is directed towards praxis and transformation.
M Forshage
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