editorial note

Obviously, the Icecrawler is rarely updated. There is no particular plan with that, nor any particular regrets. Of all these reflections and questions that constitute a critical effort, that constitutes a crucial aspect of life, only a few will neither find another outlet nor be forgotten over the passing of months. We are not running over that keyboard of white and black keys spiralling into empty space. There is no such thing as news. Some words are whispered in the squares, and some words are shouted in the forest. There is a continually changing map being drawn.

While a bunch of pdf:s were completed in order to be added to the ”bibliotheca onthoplanctorum” library, technical obstacles have prevented their uploading, and a number of Icecrawler texts intended as introductions to them have been postponed until further. Or smuggled in here without mentioning of context?

Icecrawler/Heelwalker is repeteadly abandoned, mostly accidentally but regularly also whenever the editor stubbornly leaves the room in protest against interpretations or expectations that it would be a personal outlet for the editor. A person is a sad entity to organise a public channel upon. Persons have other things to do. It is not persons that we want to hear. Systematical investigations, critical interpretations, poetic investigations, and sensibility itself, are agents themselves who express themselves in the work of collaborating or lonely humans.

Expulse

Cole's take on Expulsion

 Some people enjoy expulsions as a theme of anecdotes from yesteryear, something that was important in modernist movements and political movements back in the days, and which may still be a current ingredient in activities to the extent that the groups are "dogmatic" and has not adapted to modern times.
    Speaking of the contexts that I am acquainted with though, expulsions is not a matter of dogmatism, in the sense that it is not the question of differences of opinion being a reason to expel someone. There are groups where the line is laid down by a leadership, maybe even a leadership in another country, or an extraterrestrial leadership, but of course surrealism has no such leadership. In a struggling nonconformist group expulsions are entirely about confidence.
    A person may have some weird opinions, or may neglect their tasks, or may ruin certain events by being very drunk or very depressed or very stupid, and that will be causing various practical problems, but is rarely a reason to lose confidence in a radical sense. But if a person shows that it may for example deny its friends and disregard its convictions and belonging and ambitions just to get an article into a paper or get a commission on a painting or receive a prize or get picked into the critics selection, then that proves that the person lets its career weigh as much as or more than demands that poetry might put on us, especially in the form that one interprets and organises them within the framework of the collective, and, consequently, that this is an illoyal and unreliable person who should not be allowed to be in a group where it should be possible to trust each other. If a person is simultaneously member of another organisation which puts strong demands on its membership, and which might just one day by decree demand the person to change strategy completely or change circle of friends (such as in a communist party or a religious sect) then it is obvious that the double membership threatens the integrity of the group and the person is unreliable.
    Exactly how much one feels one should have a right to demand from one's comrades is of course entirely dependent on how much one perceives is at stake. Most people should be able to understand that in a situation of dramatic social upheavals, and/or massive physical threat from fascists, and/or intense attention from the police and secret police, then it becomes more sensitive with whom one forms affinity groups and shares one's dreamworlds... Then surrealists are nonconformists, have no love for the current order of things, and no obligations towards the current power structures, in fact they typically rather desperately dream of dramatic change. And this is exactly that which was the point of the situationists when they claimed (wrongly, by the way) that it was the discipline and expulsions which was the best thing about the surrealists: they implied that everything was at stake all the time and revolution could come anytime. In most cases this is a tactical misjudgement, but strategically it has some obvious points: a reminder of the necessity to maintain nonconformism and not make compromises that will demand hard work in defense, not form alliances that will obstruct any radical moves.
    Well, in fact, this is probably to a great extent the very same thing that is the dogmatism of dogmatic groups of the sectarian type: the temperature is turned up enough for the participants to really believe that everything is at stake all the time and everyone who is not with us are against us, and an erroneous stand on the situation in Ukraine or the revolution in Iran or the Nth council of the christian church must be a sign of a profound tendency to betray.
    From a methodological viewpoint, the advantages of a contrary strategy are obvious. The anarchist strategy, usually employed by surrealists, is rather that there is a point in gushing forth one's confidence and one's innermost ideas to anyone who wants to join the playing and seems basically serious about it. This has a utopian dimension in itself, that it makes sense to treat superficial social relationships as if they had already been filled with a profound content in terms of one's most passionate shared interests, and thus it is reasonable and rather important as a political strategy. Secterian suspiciousness is not only dreary and a turn-off and a prelude to massive empirical disappointments, but it also goes hand in hand with a "fascist type of human" or whatever a Reich would have said.
    In the Stockholm group we have hardly ever used the tool of expulsion. We usually expect lack of trust to be mutual and obvious, and keep empirically studying it if it's not. Nevertheless it would seem that several partings of way have occured rather too late. We happily make mistakes and sometimes learn from them. We don't care very much if ex-members or hangarounds praise us or badmouth us in connections where we have no interest of appearing, we survive if they claim to represent us, we have more interesting things to consider if they claim they know what the group is all about and that their own more or less bitter afterthoughts are highly relevant to the group several years after. This is sometimes on the comedy level, and the agents are indeed often still valued friends. Since the social circumstances in the country have been relatively peaceful, it is currently only in computer-game terms that we have died a few times over, shot in the back and sold out by a few eager carreerists, bitter blackmarket dealers, impulsive flibbertigibbets, or political opportunists. So far.
    But even if our inertia then might make ruckus-seeking anecdote lovers disappointed, we are happy to equally disappoint the humanist advocates of civil politeness. Surrealist activity is not an area where it makes sense to pay respect to the integrity of private life, individual choices and each and everyone's specific constellation of compromises, shortcomings and banalities; it is rather the opposite, an area where the individual's resources is pooled into a collective organism of collective sensibility and collective criticism where each participant contributes to developing how it should act to live up to the demands of poetry in hard times. As surrealists, we have a fruitful relationship with truth and personal friendship and even weakness itself, and respect for that which deserves respect, but we don't do civil manners and courtesy.

Stuck's take on Expulsion

merdarius

Demography in Australia

(dream)

What a relief that wacky Australia exists! Because, unlike in the rest of the world, Demography in Australia is a purely theoretical discipline, in which you don't have to meet the people you are counting. Which means you can work as a demographer without getting an erection! This is what I currently need, and since I am on holiday in New Zealand anyway when the job position is announced, I apply. And I am offered the position. Of course, there is the initial difficulty of getting to Australia from southernmost New Zealand at all. Since New Zealand extends further south than Tasmania into the "roaring forties", there is this massive wind from the west against you. But eventually I manage.

Next surprise: the outline of Australia has changed radically. Western Australia is all still there, but most of Eastern Australia has sunken into the sea, leaving just a cluster of land blotches with interconnecting land bridges in the south east. There is a leg stretching out from the west into a southeastern pancake, connected to Tasmania which is still there, and to a small headland shooting up a little bit to the north, but all of Queensland is gone, none of the major cities in the South and East are there, and, far more surprisingly, all the Eastern mountains are gone. How can the mountains have disappeared without a trace?

I realise I have to start doubting the plate tectonics theory; maybe there has never been a Gondwanaland! Maybe Malaise and Odhner were right in their Atlantis theory about random successive upheavals and submergings. All these landbridges, they were indeed an important element in all pre-plate-tectonic biogeographical theories. No Gondwanaland! All that we have built our knowledge on gone like so much dust! Everything is vain! Then, no doubt, I can easily spend the rest of my life as a loner in the Australian outback.

Because there are indeed no major cities here at all. I am supposed to work in a small town called Fox. It is the main city of the remaining Southeast, but really nothing more than a shitty rural smalltown. It is all flat and you can hear the wind blowing around garbage in the streets. I arrive in Fox at half past three in the afternoon, and walk into the public library which is where I will be working. Of course, in this small town everything closes at 4 pm, so I only have half an hour. Life is going to be slow here anyway, so I don't introduce myself, I may just stand and look at a bookshelf for half an hour, and then come back tomorrow and tell them who I am. Though sometime in the future, I will reinvent the song "Fox on the run"; not as a joke, but as part of my work.

Also, I don't quite know how these Australian demographics are done. I suppose it is mainly by modelling population change and entering the relevant parameters into a set of small machines that may, for all I know, be common taxicab taximeters, indeed they look like a common car stereo, but series-circuit coupled in tall racks, ticking away. If plate tectonics is wrong and Gondwanaland never existed, everything I believe in is ruined anyway. The only empirical work you are allowed in Australian demography is that you may possibly try to walk the distances that people are assumed to be have walked, like a Heyerdal. But I'm starting to get an unorthodox theory already. I have this strange feeling that the really tiny dull burrowing weevils of the genus Barypeithes are actually people, so they will have to be counted too.

MF

Interrogation of the 3000

The 2633 surrealist contributors I once mentioned in a blogpost? I am in fact interested in them all. It does look ridiculous, and it is easy to take lightly as mere juvenile-ultranerd fact obsession, "knappologi" (buttonology) or even "compleatism". Ok, no, I do not expect this (or any other of those long lists) to be complete. In fact, I trust reality to be at least so inexhaustible, and the unknown so productive, that I would be not just disappointed but very suspicious about an allegedly complete enumeration. Maybe I just have never learned to restrain my childish enjoyment in collecting and compiling data, maybe I just enjoy playing with large data sets. But then, that's not what it is. Individual surrealists are not just items on a list. (And, by the way, if they were indeed just items on a list, 2633 items would not be a strikingly large data set. Only if considering each item as a meaningful whole with a story of its own, it's a large data set. The same number of mere measurements, or names, or nucleotide base pairs, would not be remarkably many.) Of those thousands of people that have contributed to the surrealist movement, I honestly think that they all make some sense.

Some people still lean toward either aristocratic or misanthropic views and consider only the brilliant few really interesting, while the hordes of mediocre adherents are as uninteresting in surrealism as they are elsewhere.

Such considerations have typically dominated the public view of surrealism. Just a few decades ago there was a consensus among external commentators that all second-generation (post-war) surrealists were mediocre adherents and only a bunch of poets and painters of the first generation the real thing – but since then several post-war surrealists have become famous and recognised, and instead it is us third-generation (post-breton) surrealists (cf three eras of surrealism) who are considered mediocre adherents. Of course, this kind of recognition is not particularly what we're after, but it is still notable how flexible but slow it is, the mechanisms of recuperation being pardonless like a bandwagon yet clumsy and dimwitted. Strangely, even some individuals among ourselves within post-bretonian surrealism correspond to this two-tier anthropology too (while regarding themselves as luminous exceptions to widespread mediocrity or just modest executors of "objective judgment"?). It could be motivated with a pataphysical leaning: claiming that it is always only exceptions that are interesting, anyone fitting in an existent camp or side or pattern is mediocre and uninteresting. This may seem like an attractive argument, but is obviously formal and superficial to the point of hollowness. There are patterns in everything, and it is usually the fundamental break with available consensus and conformism that creates a dialectical leap opening up a vastness of new possibilities, not the neurotic flight from any structure or belonging. This aristocratic view, at a closer look, regardless of whether it is honestly misanthropic or downright chauvinistic, appears connected with a general fear of touch, fear of intimacy, fear of defending anything, fear of taking sides, fear of intimacy.

And on the other hand, as the obligatory pure negation of the aristocratic argument, still not making it off the ground, there is a formalist materialist position, that no individual contributors are significant, it is only the collective actions of the movement that counts. Sterile as such, when not actually being able to discern the human agents, this still opens up for a lot of important points. Clearly, it opens up for the interesting antihumanist criticism of the aristocratic dualist position: it is not necessarily the human individuals who are the most significant units in the surrealist adventure. There are conditions in terms of time, place, social structures, social habits, trends, ideas, needs and all the objective ongoings of matters of the spirit, which individual endeavours are expressions of and contributions to in part. Most persons (or all) may be mediocre by themselves, as persons, but when stepping into the surrealist adventure, both in terms of stepping out into a poetic exploration of the unknown, and into a compelling tradition and a compelling collectivity presenting a very different constellation of the everyday playground, they are partaking in an objective adventure, where it is more the degree of seriousness, the fortuity of circumstances, the ways of chance, than it is the individual abilities, which will decide just how strong or convincing the works or actions seem and what their historical significance might lie in.

I do claim that everything that is most interesting will play on a surindividual level. On the other hand, the circumstances will always be struggled with in an interaction between the objective situation and directions and the individuals' desires, interpretations and backgrounds. This is why I see very little need to hamper the curiousness I feel about surrealist individuals. Every person in surrealism has a particular constellation of desires and fantasies, an individual trajectory; which surrealism as such at any given time goes on as the non-deterministic synergistic sum of. Therefore I want to know about every single individual. Not the least the ones who never got famous, and those who have remained anonymous even within the movement. For some, it was because they were just shortly involved, sensation seekers or merely curious, that went on to something else; here it is potentially interesting to note what they went on to; what activities and positions do present a lasting and perhaps more socially acceptable alternative to things people may be looking for in surrealism; or from which spheres, circles and activities people are briefly pulled in; sometimes their objectives were clearly surrealist (objectively!) but the historical guise of the movement, cultural or personal differences made it impossible for them to make surrealism their personal base. For some, it was because they were simply less eager to compete for attention, either because of imposed restrictions and that realistic-pessimistic modesty (as was famously the case for some female artists) or of actual carefreeness and independence, ranging from relaxed souvereignity to troubled clinical madness (whenever the former is not just a gesture of fear of touch, the step between them is probably not a big one). Most people involved, even the seemingly quite peripheral, do have a particular vein that keeps them attracted, have a particular understanding of the current relevance, often even have to defend surrealism in its entirety against less understanding social friends...

So, yes, I consider every one interesting. When I have travelled, also surrealists from which I have very different view of critical issues, have been interesting persons to meet and usually enjoyable. Meeting groups, I have often found "lesser players" equally or more interesting than main organisers and great artists; very often those who are not yet comfortable – a ruminating conscience, a voice that does not quite fit in, a "troubled soul", someone with a very odd outlook or just someone more intolerant than others against habits, informal hierarchies, remnants of sexism, complacency, etc, is someone who might have far more to offer in terms of future dynamics than a completely convinced spokesperson.

But again, this does not mean that I correspond to some humanistic deviations (regarding the individuals as more important than the objective necessities of poetry), nor that I want to be the "sheep-dog of the class" staying in touch with everybody. Breaks are breaks and important for the progression of a particular collective – but they are often of primarily local relevance so that somebody who fails to find a constructive way of participating in their local group may still be able to contribute in various international and/or bilateral connections. And clearly, even those who may not live up to standards or may uncritically accept certain reifying interpretations, often make interesting human encounters...
But I do remain suspicious of anyone who is attracted to surrealism without seeing the need to explicitly embody it and take a share of the responsibility for it in an organised and collective guise, specifically by consciously pooling ones own creative and organisational resources both to a physically present group and to the accumulated sea of the surrealist tradition in order to further develop its perspectives and results as an ambitious critical as well as experimental enterprise, and finding the sharpest applications of it to one's own life in present society – embracing, revising and reinventing (and I will not refrain from occasional harsh polemics against someone actively compromising the integrity and dynamics of surrealism).

No, no one will be able to convince me to prune the historical membership roll and dismiss even a few hundreds as inconsequential or mediocre...

M Forshage

Manners?

The recent argument about the surrIV initiative (surréalisme-au-service-de-la-4ème-internationale?) produced no further discussion about organisational or political issues. Some applauded the tracts entirely; one surrIVist and a few other surrealists went on entirely about manners and hurt feelings; while yet others couldn't but agree with our point but were also concerned about our lack of courtesy in tone. This is an undesirable digression.

Indeed criticism (even when far more timid and careful than ours) leads to hurt feelings. Hurt feelings are a poor guide for behavior, and will create a focus on ego-reinforcement, an insistence on irrelevant details and abstract generalisations at the same time, unless held in check by some constructive machinations or participation in some dynamic process that will facilitate the focus on essentials, such as an ongoing surrealist activity.

It is not about not caring for individuals and their feelings. But caring for individuals and their feelings in terms of mere short-term tact, carefulness and respect for people's compromises and rationalisations, means respect for conformist individuality, manners and lifestyle, respect for the obstacles against creativity, knowledge and freedom. It appears more congenial with surrealism to care about individuals and their feelings in terms of sublation; of challenging and provoking ideological concepts such as prepsychoanalytical psychological fictions and liberal concepts of life, behavior and society; terms of uncomfortable truths, unknown triggers of creativity, liberating refusal, radical criticism and long-term strategy. Since most of us are still struggling with oidipal-defensive fears and defense strategies, still struggling with systems of compromises of everyday life, struggling to "keep it together", we will often feel uncomfortable with any addressal of critical or complicated issues. We need to have a framework of holding such gallopping defensiveness in check, and I claim that surrealist activity is such a framework. Surrealist activity with its extremely immodest focus on essentials, on nonconformism, and on emergent overindividual subjectivity, has – hooray – a potential to make us disconsider our boring old defensive emotions. In a surrealist context, we are focusing on truth and poetry so much that we may even be enthusiastically curious about any actual critical issues in even the most rudely formulated criticism against us, anything that could teach us to stop repeating some irrelevant clichés and defences, to avoid stopping just short of new discoveries, and avoid getting carried away by our own reasoning to the point where we accidentally miss some of the essentials ...

Again, the "human aspect" that is interesting here is all about finding ways of igniting, transforming and collectivising subjectivity for the cause of poetry, more or less the opposite of respecting people's egos by delving in hurt feelings and questions of manners. Indeed, how this very focus on essentials through surrealist activity made the early surrealists sublate bourgeois ethics codes is one of the constructive and lasting achievements of the movement. We shouldn't take the step back to excavate them again and lose sight of more farreaching aims.

MF

Surrealism and Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mattias Forshage

Flowershop schematics

A recent little flair in organisational discussions sparked by events of no public concern has provided a pretext to formulate some new general thoughts and to return to some old favourites (the particularities of post-classic surrealist organising, the sense of surrealist antihumanism, the joy of curiousness, the importance of error, the role of strategy) some of which have particular applications in recent, ongoing or upcoming discussions.

Surrealist quasihumanism

Even if curiosity appears like a force of nature, the standard "stand-by" mode of the poetic organ, it can be considered on an intellectual level too, and not just ending up with Freud suggesting it to be the twisting into a socially acceptable goal of the given drive for investigating the physical differences between the sexes and the enigma of where children come from. We were discussing curiosity towards other surrealists.

For me, in fact, every single other surrealist has things to teach me. To begin with they often have anecdotes and personal characterisations of surrealists that I haven't met, and more importantly they often have experiences of their own failures and successes in terms of organising and experiments, but the major point is that in the end every single one of them has a unique way of having acknowledged, approached and appropriated surrealism and therefore a unique constellation of angles and particularities constituting that individual reflection of surrealism, and therefore also something to teach me about surrealism itself as such.

The point is not whether I will enjoy their company or not, whether our social skills or lack thereof will match, more that everyone will make an example worth consideration, a worthy suggestion.

CM Lundberg: Groundless action

To this "surrealist quasi-humanism" it might be necessary to also add a disclaimer. In many cases, people's personal vanity, or eagerness to stick to banal misunderstandings, represents a serious obstacle on the practical level that will make this unique angle virtually inaccessible or at least hardly worth the effort. Among these unique angles, many are exotic distorsions based on personal instrumental needs, that are interesting primarily as negative examples...

Surrealist antihumanism

One important point of anti-humanism is to get rid of the perpetual obsession for self-justification and self-defense that keeps people from discovering anything new, taking risks, pooling our resources, and truly communicating.

Ok, I certainly think my own perspectives can be argued for, and my own impression of people has a validity; but my own sensibility and my own judgment are but tools, in fact my self, my existence as an individual, is but a tool, for the large-scale machination of the chaotic interference and reciprocality of passions governed by none which is the poetry of the world, and more specifically, I have put my own sparkling and ridiculous person in the service of that great conspiracy of cultivation of that poetry known as surrealism. Surrealism is my weapon of choice to some extent, but I find the other way around much more crucial, how I am a strange flower in surrealism's arsenal.

I too prefer people I like to people I dislike, and promising atmospheres to suffocating ones, but I remain suspicious that any such assessments of mine may be made on the basis of comfort, which is objectively misleading from the viewpoints of both poetic, epistemic and social dynamism, or that I may be simply mistaken. I could dismiss an association for lack of dynamism (for repetitivity or predictability or banality or comfortable habit) or for lack of seriousness (superficial noise and craving for entertainment) but if I would do it for instrumental reasons, or spontaneously, or strictly based on emotions, or strictly based on an argument, I would take great interest in doubting and questioning that judgment. Because intuitions, emotions and rational reasons are, in my view, merely functions whereby that approximate entity known as my person tries to find its path, and there is nothing in them that I consider worth eagerly defending or identifying with the focal point of my sensibility, which is necessarily an ambiguous and errant point. Just like in science, it is strictly speaking easier, as well as more meaningful and more constructive, to demonstrate something to be wrong than to be right. To be proven wrong is simply one of the most obvious situations of epistemological privilege where the configuration of the world is unstable, prejudices topple, the field of possibilities opens wide.

(If I argue at length for some of the positions I take, it is more in the purpose of conveying all facts, laying the cards on the table, demonstrating what conditions and logics that determine that position, in order to make it transparent, and to invite objections on a level as advanced as possible, rather than to convince someone or to justify my position. I am not making a fetish of arguing, since most "critical discussions" remain in sterile bickering over semantics, and many ideas have an inspiratory power regardless of being flawed or false...)

CM Lundberg: Manifestation with fishes

(Let's repeat that semantic point about intuition once again. I have here used the word in the cynical sense of "the total configuration of unconscious and preconscious prejudices", or what we call spontaneous judgment, good for most practical purposes. I have often ended up in quarrels over this, as some people, and sometimes myself too, instead use the word "intuition" for designating the very "focal point of sensibility" conducting the choir of epistemic means at hand. It remains important to note in this connection, that since rational reasoning has a limited range, dead angles, and is easily manipulated, and other particular methods have only specific applications, it is only such a higher-order intuition that is able to identify truth in some substantial sense (beyond both the instrumental and the scientific senses of conditional truth) and more importantly to distinguish between the interesting and the uninteresting, but that is an intuition which must have passed through thorough self-scrutiny, self-questioning, and the experience of systematic disorder of the senses... )

CM Lundberg: Houses of the rising sun

Surrealist anarchism

Surrealism looks for the point of no rule. But just like any formal anarchism it must ask itself "who rules if no one rules?" and dismiss a large number of alternatives. First of all, if there are no effective mechanisms to keep power in check, of course the one who had most power before, or most money, will rule; liberalism. If there are mechanisms restricting ascension to power, habit will rule alongside silent manipulations. Excessive behavior might multiply, but excessive behavior manifesting the same banal desires and ressentiments in mere pathetic gestures again reinforcing the rule of the normal order. Only where habit, banality and prejudice are actively counteracted, the path of no rule will truly be a path towards freedom. And it is therein that a fundamental anarchism of surrealism lies. We wish to live a life that is not just not in the control of some particular other force, but a life which does not conform to somebody's control at all, and therefore would disenvelop according to its own dynamics.

Anarchism itself remains the only political theory based on unrestricted democracy. Thus it has a strong focus on procedure, which is the first step of a methodological attempt. But usually, as it were, stopping short, in the fluctuation between decision-making so ultrademocratically slow as to be practically impotent on the one hand, and bonehead spontanism to counter this on the other hand. There is very little strategy in anarchism.

CM Lundberg: The voyage of Randolph Carter

While surrealism, sometimes consciously, and sometimes merely implicitly due to its interest in methodology, is quite strategical in its long-term quest for a truly anarchic life. On the everyday level, surrealism strives for nothing but to "tune in" to the dynamics of the unknown, long-term striving to open portals and "slight disturbances" that change "business as usual" into a state where effectively no one has the power to impose any of their prejudiced aims, avoiding most of the noisy and predictable gestures of spontanism and looking for the truly strange angles, where everything is a windling path fuelled by the interplay of desire and chance through enchanted landscapes full of monsters.

Surrealist horizontal organising

An anarchistic organisation of surrealism in a decentralised and diffusely circumscribed network of heterogenous contact points differently linked through selective affinities, is the inevitable result of the death of the founder and (somewhat later) the subsequent (temporary) abandonment of organised activity in its historical centre of Paris. It is neither a regrettable organisational incapability, nor a consciously adopted implementation of anarchist ideology, but merely a historical effect. With particular possibilities inherent. Which seem particularly adequate in the present historical situation where available knowledge of democracy and vigilance towards everyday injustice is far greater than before, strategies of resistance and of cultivating various aspects of freedom have multiplied, while miserabilist organisation of life is reinforced by rampant conformism and ever-increasingly aggressive exploitation.

Any dreams of reorganising a surrealist international according to a leninist vanguardist model with national sections, a central line, or just the unambiguous line drawn to separate the true core from the rest, are just as practically unattainable as pointless today.

Real meetings between people are still at the core of this (groups, for true synergistic, overindividual and antihumanistic effects, for mutual moral criticism and poetic encouragement, for manifesting a collective thinking, playing, creating, etc). Nevertheless, international collaboration goes on at a daily basis through digital communication, and numerous projects and even groups are organised according to other delimitations than geographical ones. (Still, I find it difficult to see reasons not to take opportunities to meet any surrealists physically available.)

Within this, we will keep elaborating our principles and investigating their consequences. Some of us will keep emphasising the importance of our history and continuity as well as of the chosen designation of that tradition (surrealism in the letter). In bilateral terms here will be approachments, brawls, romances, ongoing tensions as well as dead zones. We will keep cultivating our friendship and collaboration with those who are interested in posing a similar kind of questions, investigating a similar type of experiments, provoking ourselves with similar atmospheres, regardless of which country they're in and regardless of how great their knowledge of the surrealist tradition and how devoted to the surrealist letter they are.

/M.Fo.

In praise of infighting

From the inception of the movement to the present day, Surrealists have been devoting time, energy, ingenuity and material resources to hating each other’ guts. We have a glorious history of splits, infighting, self-destruction, cannibalism and general fuck-uppery. When we fall out with each other it is rarely a case of politely agreeing to disagree. We spit, we scratch, we scream, punch and kick, tear at each others’ veins, banish each other to outer darkness, drag each other through the shit, and every fight is always to the death.

The attitude of many Surrealists today seem to be that this kind of infighting is a bad thing, at best unnecessary, at worst potentially fatal to the movement as a whole. The same plaintive cries go up at every fight, not just from the appalled bystanders but also, as often as not, from the protagonists of the infighting themselves. Why do Surrealists fight so viciously, and so often? Shouldn’t we be fighting our enemies instead of each other? Why can’t we be more united? Aren’t we all struggling for the same goal?

I’m not interested at this point in the rights and wrongs of particular splits and fights, including those that I’ve played a role in myself. I’m also not very interested in arguments to the effect that open disagreement and/or free expressions of anger within the movement are ‘healthy’, because the imperative to psychological or emotional health seems is something of which Surrealists should be highly suspicious at best. Instead I want to take a step back and to reflect on some possible alternative ways to think about Surrealist infighting.

To start with the idea that we shouldn’t fight because we’re all ultimately struggling for the same goal: what, then, is the goal of the Surrealist movement? The pat reply to this question is usually: to change life and transform the world. That famous Bretonian watchword uniting Rimbaud and Marx sums up exactly how and why Surrealists do not, in fact, share a common goal. The Surrealist movement, as we all so fond of repeating, is neither an art movement (because we regard the social revolution as a burning Surrealist necessity) nor a political movement (the annihilation of one’s being into a diamond which is no more the soul of ice than of fire is hardly a comprehensible political demand). Our insistence on the simultaneity of Marx and Rimbaud, life and the world, social revolution and the imagination triumphant, is what makes Surrealism – regardless of the specific political commitments of individual Surrealists – in its essence a utopian movement. Our goal is utopia: our goal is nowhere: we have no goal.

So we are not all pursuing a common objective which we will attain that little bit sooner if we unite and work together. Unity is a red herring. Surrealism is a collective adventure, but collectivity is not the same thing as unity, any more than adventure is the same as pursuit of a goal. And insofar as splits and infighting are searing shared experiences of rage, passion, pain, mutual hatred and destruction – not to mention hilarity and exhilaration – don’t they count as particularly intense expressions of, precisely, collectivity, shared experiences not just within but also between the warring groups? Even perhaps – let’s push the argument – peculiar forms of collective adventure in their own right? Surely there’s no one in the movement who thinks that collectivity should be safe, agreeable, or merely positive in any generally accepted sense. Negativity is a vital dimension of any truly collective dynamic, and I’m suggesting that it is more exciting and productive to embrace and investigate its periodic eruptions than to regret or condemn them. The forest of the unknown is full of horrors as well as enchantments.

Embracing and investigating collective negativity requires inventiveness, courage and terrifying honesty. This is not the least of the reasons why we are usually so reluctant to do it. Nobody wants to spend their time at group meetings or on collaborative projects gnashing their teeth and drinking their comrades’ blood. But while the group members sit around the table, having their discussions and playing their games, the maw of the group’s collective unconscious is ever open. The more ‘successful’ the group on its own terms – the more it exceeds the sum of its parts, the more exciting, the more intuitive and creative it becomes – the wider the jaws, the sharper the teeth…

So let’s embrace and investigate the monsters that this collective unconscious vomits forth. Here comes one now, a real whopper: his name is Oedipus, and if we ignore him he most definitely will not go away. For those individuals who have grown up under the sign of the nuclear family – which is probably a fairly large proportion of those currently active in the Surrealist movement, given its geographical and cultural distribution – the dynamic of the Oedipal family romance is one of the most readily available patterns of group interaction, and one against which we all need to be constantly and explicitly vigilant. The danger lies precisely in the fact that the family romance, in Surrealist contexts as much as in mainstream ones, often dissembles its more blatantly oppressive aspects behind the compensations it offers in return: companionship, comfort, a sense of shared identity, an occasional refuge from a fucking horrible world. The danger is that the collective unconscious (whether of a formally constituted Surrealist group, or of a looser or more temporary collective, or even at the level of the movement as a whole) may all too easily lapse into an Oedipal mode and silently form itself into the private haven of a ‘family home’, complete with nursery and servants’ quarters. There’s the parent-child dynamic: respect your elders, do your homework, nurture my potential, change my nappy. There’s the sibling dynamic: you’re my brother, you’re my sister, you’re my rival, they love you more than they love me…

The family romance plot is almost certainly present in the collective unconscious of almost every current group and collective, because for most of the participants it is not just the first pattern of group interaction they ever knew, but the one which formed their ‘personalities’ at a basic level (and this is also one of the reasons why Surrealism must be anti-humanist and opposed to ‘personality’). The intensity of rage, pain and joy unleashed by really serious infighting probably comes in large part from this unconscious family dynamic. What can be more thrilling than to kill one’s father? What more appalling than to be attacked by one’s child, or more paralysing than to watch one’s parents and siblings tear the family apart?

The monster of Oedipus demands constant and explicit vigilance, then, and the deliberate invention and cultivation of alternative forms of collective life. All kinds of alternative models are already to hand and many more remain to be invented, from superhero teams to libertine conspiracies to wolf packs. The difficulty is always to make those models work as really operational egregores rather than merely as rhetorical self-exhortations, and that will only be possible if we first accept and embrace the power of collective negativity, including Oedipus, as a creative force in its own right.

The trick is not to fight the monster, but to embrace and transform it into something else. Tam Linn is transformed into a newt, an adder, a bear, a lion, a red-hot iron and a burning coal, but it’s precisely because Fair Jenny refuses to let go of him that he finally becomes her beautiful naked lover.

/M.Fl.

Platforms in the Canopy of Z – Surrealism and Objectivity (Internal resolution)

There may be a lesson to learn from how we were once, and rightly so, snubbed for our enumeration of objective themes in the old text "Scream in the sack" which I would enunciate like this: at the next attempt we must try to better communicate the dynamics of elusiveness (which JE recently described as "something that generates a content but keeps moving beyond this content.") By better I think I mean – rather contrary to the vocabulary that in speculative hegelian terms talk about objectivity in an absolute sense – with clarity about the fact that surrealism is manifested in the individual case and is not present in the particular idealisation (and I'm not talking about its objective characteristics, because that I call sociology) which is being formulated ever so carefully and exhaustively as a support for our intentions and self-consciousness.


In that case, it is reasonable to speak about the essence of surrealism, namely, as immanent in the materialised poetic phenomenon, in the collective experience giving flesh and life to those intuitions which haven't yet been conceptualised and the concrete results of activity that, rather than living up to the contents, tend to establish new platforms in the unknown, or, like in the "Silent hand"-experiment, for a moment evokes that this is the case.


In the Stockholm group, a pronounced tendency can be perceived to recognise and suggest the possibilities of each trodden approach, and to imply that their logical or other contexts form the starting point for a specifically surrealist field of research where always "almost everything remains to be done". This scientific or pseudoscientific attitude also entails a mythopoetical or actually even literary exaltation of the intentions in a sublime self-consciousness concerning the modest proportions of the ego before the magnitude of the unknown, which admittedly makes an adequate representation of epistemological honesty, insider humor, and (by extension) hopeful despair.


So, what we are less good at is to demonstrate that we yet and always are "almost there", which is to say that surrealism hardly shares the existentialist gesture of an unattainable ideal or pretends to be an atomistic constellation of aspects holding merely an abstract configuration of wholeness, but instead that the unpredictable poetic phenomenon not just timelessly "heals the rift in the world" but also consummates the image of surrealism with a living reality that is all the more vivid and even more real because it is shared. And , as someone said, it seems to be the French who assumes the task, in their counterproductively totalitarian-poetic prose, to bear witness to and try to perpetuate this particular state and, at worst, to prove it. In the witnessing freedom of thought no difference between the marvellous and the sublime point is being reflected, but whenever one slyly wants to communicate in a more concise and directed form, there could be a point in showing that we count on two different moments, one of which is an external configuration, and which we want to learn to be attentive towards, and the other one shows itself as a mental state. And furthermore, that there are relations and methods to connect these two moments in a wider continuum, and that the rite of surrealism is aimed at freedom of movement in both directions. The pretentious implications of the discoveries, and confounding the one who benefits from the unusual states of mind, is a possible summary of the dynamics which should not be reduced to "we are interested in a, b, c..."; surrealism means "x + y but also z".


If we stick to the fact that this irrepresentable mystery makes surrealism something far more than a collection of themes, and something more than the academics' focus on the relationship between the statements of the surrealists and the representative examplifications of these statements, then you too realise where I am going when I am saying that the romantic idealization of the scientific methods may potentially play us a trick concerning the attempts to communicate or determine surrealism, especially if it concerns communicating with the tattered sphere of humanities, that sometimes succeeds to trap us in a position where we refer to our group experience as an "independent observer before a subject". It is this objectivity in a non-hegelian sense that reifies surrealism as a subject matter – and thereby also the typical questions of the decadence phase about legitimacy, succession, authencity, purity etc which make up the part of the sociological viewpoint that we could do very well without – that makes me think it could be time to sharpen the conflict between the humanities and surrealism (natural science still seems a less dangerous hearth to warm ourselves by, though).

/NN

Arch-arms of the Dead

Let's talk about death. We sometimes denounce things as death-oriented, while still ravelling in spectacular death paraphernalia. Death is not a moral category. Death is a phantasm, a tiny void generating a blossoming thicket of stories and emotions. Death is a great mythology. With rather weak links to the biological facts of death (a totally different matter), and even weaker to individual death which we know squat about but make a big issue based on rumors, inductive logic and psychological projections. We are immortal in the sense that our individual death can't have a reality for us except as a chosen myth. Let's not talk about death. But what about the dead? Do we keep track of which ones of our friends are dead? Can we ever know? Does it matter for whether their experience is available to us?

Well, surrealists are often a bit grumpy here. "I shall leave no memoirs" goes an often quoted Lautréamont bon-mot. Why not? Because memoirs, and the biographical urge on the whole and all of personal image management (Public Relations), is directed towards death – trying to summarise life in a stable pattern as if finished and unchanging, as if useful for a particular instrumental purpose? (By the way, memoirs in that sense is very similar to novels in general, isn't it? simply death-orientation...) Yet that biographical act is also a sacrifice for the benefit of the living, for the sake of the savoir vivre of others. To actually die when the story is completed is just a vain gesture to get the last word.

There is little meaning in respecting the boundaries between individuals here. It's not just that we can claim other's experiences as a slightly vaguer sector of our own experience, it is also that we can see many of our ambitions and interventions as those of our forerunners continued, using us as vehicles! Experience is overindividual. This is rather obvious in a collective-constructive enterprise such as science, but even more so in a movement encompassing a larger sector of life (namely the attitudes of living in general) such as surrealism.

It did seem like many surrealists passed away last year. Actually, if comparing the numbers of deceased surrealists (and ex-surrealists), the number was not significantly larger than usual (23 as compared to an average annual 21.3 the past decade in my headcount), but nevertheless it was quite obvious that we were abandoned by a number of people who were still active, who were good friends of those most active, and/or who were relatively famous.

The number of surrealists (and ex-surrealists) dying is far more steady than the number of people leaving surrealism (which is dependent on general historical trends and the intensity of surrealist activity), but the latter figure is very difficult to calculate since in most cases it is not possible to distinguish (except often in hindsight) between those who merely cease to be active but remain surrealists at heart and those who abandon surrealism, or between those who do this definitely and those who take a temporary leave of absence. And we also cannot compare the figure with the numbers of surrealists being born (since that will be known only in a far longer perspective), nor with the numbers of people joining surrealist activities (which will become apparent to surrealists or surrealismologists elsewhere – if ever – only after a relatively long time lapse, because to begin with they are rarely apparent in public material, and it is not certain whether they are serious investigators by their own force or merely ephemeral curiosity-seekers or social friends).

Yet the number of surrealists dying is in itself a very concrete figure with a limited number of uncertainty factors. It is possible to model the number as a combination of mean lifespan and numbers of arrivals, and especially if we take into account the overall trends of surrealism (number of arrivals at different times in the past). The mean age of surrealists arriving does not seem to have changed very much over time and could be simplified into a timeless average. If we want a more complicated and possibly much sharper model we could try to account for the difference in trends in different countries and the overall contribution to the population of surrealists from each of these countries.

Ok, the humanistically minded will already have seen the (to them possibly blasphemous and cruel) trend of the methodological surrealist and the natural scientist here: treating human deaths as a phenomenon possible to consider matter-of-factly, to quantify, and even to predict (on a statistical level).

Because, on the individual level, every death is an exception and a reconfiguration of the field of possibilities. Well, most people passing away are like all these other people that we meet, possibly take a liking to, and never meet again; except in the sense that we for some reason have the uncanny certainty that it will not be possible to ever communicate with them again. All the things imaginable that we would like to try to do with this person, all the questions we would like to ever ask, are not possible anymore: it is a serious violation to the openness and uncertainty of the possibility field, both objectively and subjectively, and on the latter level very often feels unfair and bottomless in its definitiveness.

But many of us are bored or suspicious about conventional grief and long sentimental obituaries. In surrealism, paying too much attention to those departing by death can be seen as part of the pattern of belittling contemporary surrealist activity and regarding the days of glory past as "the real thing". Some do not consider this a big problem when it concerns real friends and/or active comrades, and there are some surrealist periodicals that occasionally devote most of their space to more or less conventional obituaries and reminiscences. Except for among personal friends, this always creates a definite feeling of not having enough living activity to write about.

Others perhaps correspond to the activist view that death is primarily a bourgeois mythology, and shout "let the dead bury the dead". In some cases this is pure self-defensive denial and rationalisation of one or other brand of shallow hedonism. In other cases it indicates a purely instrumental struggle where individuals are largely cannonfodder. From the latter perspective of course, some will be martyrs or possible to exploit for the cause in some other way. But neither shallowness nor instrumentalism are congenial to surrealism.

Death is always an occasion for attention to and reassessment of the works, ideas, deeds and historical function of an individual. It is a very often a pity that it comes just a little too late, because very often the person it concerns would have been able to clarify some things, and would have been able to benefit and learn from the comments... That is, of course, to the extent that the discussion is based on serious and honest concerns rather than conventional painting in bright colors, shallow mythologisation, denial and propagandisation, or finding a good angle at any price.

But specifically in a living movement like surrealism, the dead are not just dead but still around in a particular active sense since they are part of the collective experience. This is part of the specific reason for surrealists to be explicit surrealists. Most of surrealist activity could be carried out just as well or almost just as well without being referred to as surrealism. Applying that designation is to join in with a community of experiences, and extends this field of action and experience widely in time and space. In space, it is obvious that being surrealists facilitates establishing bonds and collaborating with surrealist groups and individuals in other parts of the world.

In time, it is just as obvious that we all can learn from the experiences of the surrealist groups, contributors and dissidents from the 20s onwards, from the paths taken, the adventures in spirit and everyday life, the daily life of all the groups as well as the individual works, thoughts and deeds of an André Breton or an Antonin Artaud just as well as by a Leonora Carrington or a Claude Cahun, or a Franklin Rosemont or a Sarane Alexandrian; or a René Alleau or a Gaston Bachelard, or an Annie LeBrun or a Matta, or, or, or any of us – it is a marvellously rich field of experiences which lies available to us all (and as an addition, some of these people are still alive and can communicate directly!).

Ok, we occasionally have to stop ourselves not to sound foolish, spiritistic or unnecessarily unreasonable when we want to refer to "oh, but Max Ernst told me this" "that was in our talks with Trotsky" "I remember it so well" "no, but we already tried that, it was in... 1929". But in general, of all the various parameters in mediating experience (language and translations, channels and technologies of direct and indirect communication, published and unpublished works, clarification and mystification, individual or collective accounts, etc) , just as whether one has met someone personally or not very often is not one of the decisive ones, currently dead or alive is clearly a less decisive parameter too. Our individual beings are in many ways merely approximative pragmatic fictions anyway, and in the activities we partake our experiences and ambitions are broadly mixed between those of us who are still alive in the biographical sense and those who aren't.

...

M Forshage

So far this year, we note the passing of: Jean Benoît, Wolfgang Frankenstein, Elizabeth Onslow-Ford, Alejandro Piva, Horus Schenouda, Ursula Trevelyan... Comrades or past fellow travellers, all with experiences worth our attention, which we may or may not integrate with our own ramblings-

THE FABULOUS CONTINENT

A PROPOSAL FOR THE CREATION OF A SURREALIST BESTIARY

Simultaneously with the contemporary approach to the animal from an ecological perspective, a perspective that proclaims the animal’s excellence as a living being (this necessarily implies the protection of animals from one of the worst human diseases: slavery), another attitude imposes itself as it seeks to exalt and perpetuate the animal, once again, as a real space of emanation and intervention of the marvellous.

The animal is a great unknown, and this transforms it into a geography of the unexplored. In the relationship with the elements and its analogues, through its rituals and games, in all its ways of behaviour, the animal contains an act of inspiration as well as being inspiring.

We condemn the paralysing and despicable inclination due to which the animal is presented with human attributes. The recognition of the animal goes inexcusable through a recognition of the beauty that the animal projects: the song of the whale, the love declaration of the penguin, the headlong flight of a kingfisher, the 180-degrees head turn of the eagle owl, the ‘innocent’ ardor of a nocturnal moth and the luminous trail left behind by the firefly during its courting dance. The animal generates a magnificient succession of alternative currents, ‘true emblems of all its splendour.’ (1) On the one hand, these currents constitute an example of generosity towards itself, an authentic demonstration of ‘passional attitude’, but on the other hand, they challenge every human logical system of relation, including that which complacently passes for human sensitivity. In any case, the animal denotes the notion of the particular and the concrete, which in the universe of the perceptible by the senses – and in its relations with every operation of recognition – configures a paradigm of the revealing.

In this sense everything indicates that the operations of extinction and appropriation performed on the animal, cause, simultaneously with the animal’s eradication, a kind of taming of our emotions, or in more brutal terms, a kind of castration of the human emotional capacity and disposition towards the ‘inspiring’. The criminal activity directed against the Amazonian rain forest and countless other actions perpetrated on a national, regional or local level, monstrously and hypocritically by all States of the world, without exception, leads to the gradual disintegration of an infinitely sensitive space of reality, where the intervention of the marvellous could be found in an unadulterated state. Therefore such operations implacable tends to deprive us of that which, inseparable from every activity of our spirits, corresponds to a horizontal and vertical dynamic of knowledge. Because the animal is wisdom! Its forms of existence include an authentic expression of an intuitive, emotional and passional life, which, as we enter into contact with the poetic thought, opens the true path of sailing towards that island which some beings agreed to call, after resting on its shores, the island of wisdom.

This attitude is not, in any way, that which appears in the Article 2, Section B of the Declaration of the Universal Animal Rights: ‘Man is obliged to put his knowledge into the service of the animal (sic).’ Such an appreciation – the ‘good will’ of which does not suffice – characterises the pathetic nature of general approach of man towards the animal being, exposing openly and unashamedly his determination rooted in a system of rationalist thought that places the faculties of the animal onto a lower existential plane. Far from resuscitating a new sensitiveness that would reactualize and reorientate our relationship towards the animal onto a plane of reciprocity, it continues to express the same obscure presumptions by which man strives to establish, now through declarations, the human capacities as superior to that of the animal. And nothing seems to indicate that in order to aspire to this reciprocity it is necessary to be in the field, or that its recognition would pass for such reciprocity. The contemporary difficulty is obvious of a recovery, under the present form of contact, of a relationship that existed as a result of an everyday contact with the animal in tribal, ‘primitive’ or entirely rural societies, and brought a form of knowledge of the animal being. It will have to reconcile the scientific information (which presupposes – principally objective – the absence of such a contact) with an attitude of longing and passion towards the animal, an attitude that responds to an incipient and fundamental recognition, transcending and overriding, at the same time, the limits installed by a restrictive and socially dissociating form of life (inseparably on the mental and the physical level). Moreover, the absence of practical conditions for the concrete recognition of the animal ‘is not incompatible with theoretical recognition, nor would it be incompatible with feelings.’ (2) What is proposed is a necessary change of disposition as a first step towards the breaking of the equivocal: a recognition of the animal? yes, by our recognition of the wisdom of the animal. Only by giving the latter a paramount significance we can place our knowledge at its service and thus establish the coordinates of a reciprocal relationship. As Mariano Auladén affirms, ‘this would require the placement of the operations of relationship between humans and the animal on the same level as the relationships which humans attempt to establish among themselves. Only a human effort departing from such a premise, independently from the result which we can obtain with our present strength, would enable us to leave the trite path of routine and mental lethargy towards the animal.’ (3)

In all its categories, the animal awakens an intricate web of correspondences in their highest degree of transparency. The poet will make them his own; surrendered to a state of metamorphosis the poet will establish with the animal, ‘in contrast with the scientist and his methods of enquiry based on plain descriptions of the animal’s physiology and his habits’ (4) a relationship animated by a dialectic between the unknown-marvellous-revealing that leads him to a new magic recreation. The poet will employ means of analogy and poetic imagination as a vehicle for translating his knowledge of the animal, from a perspective which would exalt, once again, the animal’s totemic and symbolic role. The animal has not lost its fabulous essence seen by travellers in past times, an essence confirmed by the tradition of the imaginary. Similarly, the image of the animal as an instructor and inductor of his wisdom has not disappeared. This role surfaces in indigenous cultures (‘…we have been here for thousands of years and long time ago the animals instructed us.’) (5) It is the modern and the contemporary man who has rid his spirit of the awareness of these phenomena that were traditionally consubstancial to him. The reestablishment of relationships based on the principle of the marvellous entails an attitude by which the faculties of the animal are to be recognized.

As an eagle over the forest, as a sheldrake on a female shelduck, the animal accelerates a reunion with the lost mythogenic consciousness of life. This will become the foundation stone in a construction of a bridge, the determination of which implies that the desire of Joseph Jablonski that one day man should know, again, how to identify the animal world as his totem, will begin to be fulfilled. In any case, such a provision does not cease to incite a form of reconduction towards that being (it remains to us to place and contemplate that day in our time). In this way, the end of the false fascination expressed in the condescending vision of the animal, a vision that predominates at the present time, would begin; the end of a vision that turns against him ‘the double stigma with which the modern man tries to defend his enslaved reason: the useful-the harmful.’ (6)

Neither a perverted action (appropriation, murder) nor an obscene one (the animal as entertainment for the masses, i.e. circuses, zoos, art exhibitions…) can lead, in spite of man, to a decimation of the animal. At the same time, no such actions can prevent us from seeing in the spiral of its forms of life a space of enchantment from which to reenchant what we vaguely take as the Human Condition.

As Mariano Auladén asserts, ‘…the animal is not property, it is a REVELATION. It is not a cultural object, but a CREATOR OF ACTS.’ Such manifestations will open for us the source of a true recovery of sensibility regarding the animal world. In their critical consideration, these manifestations proclaim the absence of awareness that the modern and contemporary man holds of the animal world. The repercussions of such an absence are omnipresent: man projects his base condition on the animal and extends it over the animate and inanimate continent of new references. To this attitude we, surrealists, would like to respond with a formula to convert the historical time that restricts it to a mythogenic time that would transcend it.

The creation of a Surrealist Bestiary corresponds to these ideas. As long as the surrealist thought will demand a mythogenic perspective of life, it will communicate an attitude of exaltation and recognition of the animal’s behaviour (way of life) and its own morphology from the view point of a dialectic of imagination that would transmutate it onto a totemic level.

The animal, a being whose existence is inseparable linked with a total sense of the marvellous, and whose majestic presence fabulously completes and presides the universe of the imaginary, contributes here to the realization of the immanent attraction that exists between the desire for a myth and its satisfaction. It offers to our sensitivity and knowledge an invitation in a way of challenge:

Let the flight of thousands hummingbirds create through the agitation
of their wings an equal number of air currents which will surround man
and erase him, return to him his absolute presence that would irreversible
identify him - this was for Marianne Van Hirtum already a practical condition -
with the perennial image of the Enchanter.


The Surrealist Group in Madrid
Madrid, 1993


Notes:

1. The Anteater’s Umbrella. A Contribution to the critique of the Ideology of Zoos, The Surrealist Group in Chicago, 1971.
2. Claude Levi-Strauss, La Pensée Sauvage
3. Mariano Auladén, “Quiyi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yi”, Luz Negra, Comunicación surrealista nº 2, Gijón, 1981, p 5.
4. Mariano Auladén, ibid.
5. Claude Levi-Strauss, ibid.
6. Mariano Auladén, ibid.