(Triops, an enigmatic creature in english called a tadpole shrimp, though not really a shrimp but belonging to an ancient group of weird crustaceans, not having changed their appearance for more than 200 million years)
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
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Crawling the ice for a year
Now the original intention with the icecrawler blog was to have a forum for critical discussion about organisational and internal theoretical questions of the surrealist movement, starting out from the hellchoir text. Now some people, it turned out, strongly preferred to see that discussion not publicised, and others, perhaps as usual, didn’t really react at all or didn’t bother to communicate their reactions. So what we have been doing here during the last year is pretty much to throw out some minor updates and some scraps of raw meat for anyone to snap at while still waiting for more comments and suggestions to turn up, along with other departure points to adress similar questions as hellchoir did but perhaps with other means or specific focuses. It is ok for us to display the confusion and hunches of our own ongoing discussions, but we would be very much more interested in seeing others take part in those same discussions, either as commentaries here or through email or any other means. And for those of you who believe in keeping the “public” “at bay” just mark your comments “strictly for internal use” or similar and we will not post, explicitly quote or in detail refer to them in any open forum. We may have quoted from some letters or documents the status of which were not obvious, but then we should also remember that an exaggarated carefulness and politeness is not part of surrealist or any polemics, and the major question remains remembering who your comrades are, and respecting their differences but not their shortcomings, making critical confrontation a constructive challenge and not an aggressive or selfrighteous gesture. We still need to draw a lot more strategical and epistemological conclusions from these 80 years of experimentation, and we still need new suggestions more than anything.
Monday, December 24, 2007
xii
Instead of the various previously announced (some repeatedly) discussions - december is apparently an innately bad time (the massive darkness perhaps the only good thing about it) - only a few whims are published here this time.
The cormorant council
The cormorant council (kormorantrådet) named itself after the avian oracle of Mattias Forshage's novel "Dreamgeography naturegeography" and launched a swedish-language blog for dreamgeographical projects. For your knowledge, here is translation of their inaugural texts (excluding a piece with irrelevant praise of the novel).
The cormorant council collects field notes, hunches and theories around the interface between dream and geography, wants to sharpen the attention towards this area through exchanging experience and theoretical deepening, breeds, publicises and coordinates dreamgeographical research projects, believes in conditionless enquiry but gladly and especially emphasise, in the spirit of surrealism, the poetic aspects of being.
With dream geography research we mean (for the moment):
a) Geographical observations in the dream and in dreaming.
More specifically observations on how places, events, experiences and relations are distributed in sleep-dreaming, active imagination and whisful thinking.
It should also be possible to make geographical observations in the unconscious habits and representations, that is, based on the activism of absentmindedness which can make us commit decisive dreamgeographical slips such as loosing our way, mistake one city for another, etc.
The basic question becomes in what way dream geography is distinguished from awake geography, both in a general sense (theory) and regarding how this exploration can enrich our ways of living, moving, looking at the world around us and within us (biopolitics).
Any definitive answers to these questions we will not willingly find. The section we place between dream geography and awake geography will necessarily be polyphonic and anecdotal.
b) Psychogeographical phenomenology in general
That is: whatever makes us perceive geography in one way rather than another, what maps show and what they don’t show, what desires and notions are tied or could be tied to certain places.
This means that the question arise what kinds of causal relations condition our activities, and where the decisive factors for such formative processes are to be found, and what possibilities and freedoms can be generated through making these conscious – and manipulating with them.
As a consequence of this we want of course to continuously develop and apply experimental methods making it possible for us to perceive the limitations and possibilities of geography.
(…)
An invitation to participate in this research is hereby issued. Participation is primarily attained by focusing on the dream-geographic spirit; sharpening the gaze for the dream-geographical experiences; taking notes, experimenting, communicating, involving others, modifying habits. Such discrete disturbances of behavior and perception will now occasionally (but far from always) appear trivial or pointless, but in the long run they can change the structure of everydaylife radically.
The cormorant council collects field notes, hunches and theories around the interface between dream and geography, wants to sharpen the attention towards this area through exchanging experience and theoretical deepening, breeds, publicises and coordinates dreamgeographical research projects, believes in conditionless enquiry but gladly and especially emphasise, in the spirit of surrealism, the poetic aspects of being.
With dream geography research we mean (for the moment):
a) Geographical observations in the dream and in dreaming.
More specifically observations on how places, events, experiences and relations are distributed in sleep-dreaming, active imagination and whisful thinking.
It should also be possible to make geographical observations in the unconscious habits and representations, that is, based on the activism of absentmindedness which can make us commit decisive dreamgeographical slips such as loosing our way, mistake one city for another, etc.
The basic question becomes in what way dream geography is distinguished from awake geography, both in a general sense (theory) and regarding how this exploration can enrich our ways of living, moving, looking at the world around us and within us (biopolitics).
Any definitive answers to these questions we will not willingly find. The section we place between dream geography and awake geography will necessarily be polyphonic and anecdotal.
b) Psychogeographical phenomenology in general
That is: whatever makes us perceive geography in one way rather than another, what maps show and what they don’t show, what desires and notions are tied or could be tied to certain places.
This means that the question arise what kinds of causal relations condition our activities, and where the decisive factors for such formative processes are to be found, and what possibilities and freedoms can be generated through making these conscious – and manipulating with them.
As a consequence of this we want of course to continuously develop and apply experimental methods making it possible for us to perceive the limitations and possibilities of geography.
(…)
An invitation to participate in this research is hereby issued. Participation is primarily attained by focusing on the dream-geographic spirit; sharpening the gaze for the dream-geographical experiences; taking notes, experimenting, communicating, involving others, modifying habits. Such discrete disturbances of behavior and perception will now occasionally (but far from always) appear trivial or pointless, but in the long run they can change the structure of everydaylife radically.
Mass mobilisation in northern Europe
I apologise in advance for this relapse into good old whining anarchism, but the times are a bit compelling…
When, in the upper teen ages, substiantial possibilities offered themselves of establishing a more serious sense of independence from the parents and their mode of life, the first things I abandoned was TV-watching and christmas-celebrating. I had theoretical justifications for it at the time, though not based on Marx and Debord, but rather on bottomline humanist individualism. The concrete experience was unambiguous, that regardless of how much you had managed to develop your interests, your means of expressions, your personal choice of perspectives, curiosities, preferences and opinions, when leaning back in the family TV sofa in the end of the day, all of this was in a sense reduced to zero, all souls were synchronised to standard settings, all thoughts, desires and knowledge were rectified with the conventional. And if this wasn’t enough there was also the annual brainwash where strict repetition of strange rituals combined with an overflowing conventional warmth convinced everybody that all personal development, all self-chosen lifestyles are just illusions and we all ultimately belong inside the bourgois core family and its caring conventions.
Now, some people claim they developed their own, creative, ways of watching TV. Perhaps.
Others have developed their own christmas traditions and pull off ordinary parties or other self-chosen rituals on the same day. In a sense we are free to choose what to celebrate, but only in a sense; and it must be noted that all these “alternative” christmas traditions are merely defensive, trying hard to make up something pleasant to survive in the midst of the huge void created by the unique mass mobilisation of the entire society in celebrating christmas.
And let us do away with these old illusions of what is being celebrated. Many people still believe christmas is primarily about christianity (well there is a clear increase in christian symbols and christian platitudes, but seemingly not a corresponding one in proselytising by christian sects or advances by christian ideology; and most of the celebrators here remain confessing atheists) or primarily about capitalism (well many parts of economy profits sweetly on this huge boost of consumer goods sales of course, but capitalism is a fairground all the year round and nothing is really dependent on this particular festival, and most of the celebrators are explicit that this commerce is just a minor part of the meaning). Well quite obviously christmas is primarily about family values. This is the only time of the year when society quits functioning, almost every single public function, including infrastructure, management, even commerce itself on the actual holidays, and more importantly almost all of urban sociality (in short: interacting with strangers) is just turned off. There is only the family. There is only the confined selfsufficient world of endless but narrowminded caring, of warm and unescapable maternal love, of absolute loyalty, of an immutable orderliness, of the perpetual repetition of the golden age scene of always being a child again never wanting anything else but the love and gifts of the parents. Of course christmas is one of the huge holidays of repetitive domestic conflicts despair (in Sweden invoked with the chamber plays by ex-surrealist writer Lars Norén) and domestic violence, of people eating and drinking themselves to death and of lonely people dying of loneliness, but that is just the other side of the coin of course. None of this, none of the frustration with being reduced to an infantile stage - a universalised under age, never any citizens rights, never adult responsability - leads to anything but refreshing the hope that next year it will all be good after all. Some may say in a structuralist sense that the volontary lack of freedom this day gives contrast and meaning to the relative freedom of the rest of the year; maybe so, and like typical structuralist models this means static, no hope of real change.
The celebration of the family is performed with equal fervor of those who are happily confined within a family, those who live alone but wish nothing higher than to be granted entry into this paradisical existence, those who don’t even try to reach it for themselves but still pay deep respects to it “for the sake of the children”, conservatives, liberals and socialists, homo- and heterosexuals, atheists, christians and nowadays even muslims (when they are finally realising that it isn’t about religion).
I still claim that TV and christmas are perhaps the two single most important vehicles of reproducing conformism, of creating a sense of unity of the citizens in the defense ot the current order, of creating a more or less bearable lifestyle without openended communication efforts, without adressing real problems, without facing uncertainty and possible change. But I know that this makes me a boring old moralist, straggling to escape the seductions of the conventional, seductions of that old death wish; and idealistically ascribing evil intents to social forms. Suggestions to any constructive views on this whatsoever could be appreciated.
MF
When, in the upper teen ages, substiantial possibilities offered themselves of establishing a more serious sense of independence from the parents and their mode of life, the first things I abandoned was TV-watching and christmas-celebrating. I had theoretical justifications for it at the time, though not based on Marx and Debord, but rather on bottomline humanist individualism. The concrete experience was unambiguous, that regardless of how much you had managed to develop your interests, your means of expressions, your personal choice of perspectives, curiosities, preferences and opinions, when leaning back in the family TV sofa in the end of the day, all of this was in a sense reduced to zero, all souls were synchronised to standard settings, all thoughts, desires and knowledge were rectified with the conventional. And if this wasn’t enough there was also the annual brainwash where strict repetition of strange rituals combined with an overflowing conventional warmth convinced everybody that all personal development, all self-chosen lifestyles are just illusions and we all ultimately belong inside the bourgois core family and its caring conventions.
Now, some people claim they developed their own, creative, ways of watching TV. Perhaps.
Others have developed their own christmas traditions and pull off ordinary parties or other self-chosen rituals on the same day. In a sense we are free to choose what to celebrate, but only in a sense; and it must be noted that all these “alternative” christmas traditions are merely defensive, trying hard to make up something pleasant to survive in the midst of the huge void created by the unique mass mobilisation of the entire society in celebrating christmas.
And let us do away with these old illusions of what is being celebrated. Many people still believe christmas is primarily about christianity (well there is a clear increase in christian symbols and christian platitudes, but seemingly not a corresponding one in proselytising by christian sects or advances by christian ideology; and most of the celebrators here remain confessing atheists) or primarily about capitalism (well many parts of economy profits sweetly on this huge boost of consumer goods sales of course, but capitalism is a fairground all the year round and nothing is really dependent on this particular festival, and most of the celebrators are explicit that this commerce is just a minor part of the meaning). Well quite obviously christmas is primarily about family values. This is the only time of the year when society quits functioning, almost every single public function, including infrastructure, management, even commerce itself on the actual holidays, and more importantly almost all of urban sociality (in short: interacting with strangers) is just turned off. There is only the family. There is only the confined selfsufficient world of endless but narrowminded caring, of warm and unescapable maternal love, of absolute loyalty, of an immutable orderliness, of the perpetual repetition of the golden age scene of always being a child again never wanting anything else but the love and gifts of the parents. Of course christmas is one of the huge holidays of repetitive domestic conflicts despair (in Sweden invoked with the chamber plays by ex-surrealist writer Lars Norén) and domestic violence, of people eating and drinking themselves to death and of lonely people dying of loneliness, but that is just the other side of the coin of course. None of this, none of the frustration with being reduced to an infantile stage - a universalised under age, never any citizens rights, never adult responsability - leads to anything but refreshing the hope that next year it will all be good after all. Some may say in a structuralist sense that the volontary lack of freedom this day gives contrast and meaning to the relative freedom of the rest of the year; maybe so, and like typical structuralist models this means static, no hope of real change.
The celebration of the family is performed with equal fervor of those who are happily confined within a family, those who live alone but wish nothing higher than to be granted entry into this paradisical existence, those who don’t even try to reach it for themselves but still pay deep respects to it “for the sake of the children”, conservatives, liberals and socialists, homo- and heterosexuals, atheists, christians and nowadays even muslims (when they are finally realising that it isn’t about religion).
I still claim that TV and christmas are perhaps the two single most important vehicles of reproducing conformism, of creating a sense of unity of the citizens in the defense ot the current order, of creating a more or less bearable lifestyle without openended communication efforts, without adressing real problems, without facing uncertainty and possible change. But I know that this makes me a boring old moralist, straggling to escape the seductions of the conventional, seductions of that old death wish; and idealistically ascribing evil intents to social forms. Suggestions to any constructive views on this whatsoever could be appreciated.
MF
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