Surrealist bestiary

The surrealist bestiary is not an old tome trying to account for the fauna of a lost continent.

If animals and especially certain animals are common in surrealism yet surrealists rarely want to make a big issue of this fact, this is because we hope to make other use of them. Some types of animals have assumed poetic associations from several surrealists and become part of a tradition of surrealist animals. Sometimes we describe such selected animals as “totems”, often when they represent a creative, spiritual or emblematic focus for the individual, or a sign of shared affinity among comrades. But on the collective level, they may start acquiring a “mythological” sense, being part of a life-world of hopes, values and fantasies shared between those who collaborate in the particular spirit, but also spanning over geography and history to those who work, have worked or will work within the same framework under other circumstances. And it is in the sense of real, active mythology in the hands of a movement that I am using the world “bestiary”. A shared imagery is a diffuse and largely objective or unconscious part of such a mythology, which nevertheless keeps being mobilised in minor struggles and perhaps also in major ones.

The major point with a surrealist bestiary is the extent to which it is and promises to be a force in the arsenal of ”miraculous weapons”, as Césaire said, and he was already at the time referring, no doubt, to something that emphatically included his own fiery invocations of close and exotic animals as living imaginative defiers of racist western civilisation and all obstacles to the exploration of the unknown and to the freedom of the imagination. Why would anyone want to be human anyway? There might be reasons. It's just a sad and lonely position, unless you know where to look for accomplices. Or you don't know at all, and therefore might start finding them.

Kenneth Cox: Canal Creature

A compendium that addresses the preliminary conditions for such a bestiary and collects element in an obsessed yet unbelievably sober taxonomy is now available through the bonegarden page or directly here.

Ika Österblad: Rabbit Fairytale

Matta: Science

experiment and failure revisited

The latest blogpost "Experiment & Failure" was a quick improvisation which I had to revise thoroughly a few days after its first posting, but only a week later other contributors to the merdarius persona and the icecrawler blog delivered an important chunk of criticism. As this was done largely orally and all in swedish anyway, I am now left to paraphrase the criticisms here.

And then I grab the opportunity to seemingly change the subject and acknowledge the recent passing of an old french surrealist comrade, Sarane Alexandrian, who was the grand old man of surrealist occultism, and therefore partly, but only partly, an opposing pole regarding ways of conceiving surrealism.

Sarane Alexandrian im memoriam

Alexandrian, born in Iraq in 1927, was one of the large gang of "dandy surrealists" who were one of several circles bringing new energy into the reconstituted french surrealist group in 1946 after the war. This circle believed strongly in the epistemological priority of poetry, the need for rigorous metaphysical experimentation, and the lack of need for involvement in politics; in parts coinciding with the classical "dissident" surrealist viewpoint of the Le grand Jeu group. Nevertheless, in 1946, this group was in the midst of "official" surrealism; it was specifically the clique forming the first editorial group of the french group's journal Neon in 1948, and they were very active in the organisation of the famous international surrealist exhibition in Paris 1947.

In 1948, most of them were collectively kicked out. At that time, Breton insisted that the group excluded Matta, for still partly obscure reasons; the rationale was that he would have contributed to Gorky's recent suicide by having an affair with Gorky's wife. Large numbers of surrealists opposed or doubted this, friends of Matta, or firmly believing that Matta still represented a spearhead in furthering surrealist research in art, or just questioning the validity of the grounds for the exclusion. The "dandy surrealists" gang were seeing each other a lot in the home of their mentor, Victor Brauner, and were not showing up daily at the regular meetings. For this, they too were suddenly excluded from the group "for factional activity". As the surrealist group was very large at the time, while there were still a lot of different experiences drawn from the war represented and long-term strategies were not at all agreed upon, there were many contradictions around, of which several are not very transparent to us 60 years later.

Alexandrian had also been a member of Cause, the international secretariat founded in the french group to facilitate discussion between surrealist groups in other parts of the world and to inventory and coordinate the various assessments of the historical situation - unfortunately the group was shortlived and another one of its animators, Henri Pastoureau, wrote later in life with withheld bitterness that "it was obvious that the movement preferred to embark in a less systematic direction".

Many of the outcast surrealists of the purge 1948 and the following, even more obscure one, in 1951, remained in various ways true to the surrealist spirit while working in other forums or mostly in personal isolation combined with a mediocre litterary, artistic or scholarly carreer. Alexandrian became a decent historian of modern art, writing a series of sympathetic but not exciting books about surrealist art and similar (some of which were even translated into english) - note for example Le Surréalisme et le rêve - but also a novels and books about utopianism, occultism, etc.

(It is indeed one of the remaining big tasks of surrealist history to shed light on the actual processes involved in these particular purges - a tentative attempt in Richardson's and Fijalkowski's Surrealism against the current must be noted - where the internal surrealist tradition has made it a myth (about irreducible and unexplainable historical necessity) which has not performed too well in competition with the hostile myth of academic historiography that they would be simply the expressions of Breton's arbitrary (unexplained and ultimately unexplainable even within their system) "dictatorial whims".)

Then rather suddenly in recent years, Alexandrian returned to a more active role, as the founder and director of the journal Supérieur inconnu (from 1995) and the centerpoint of the collective around it. This was the respectable midpoint of a minor resurgence of surrealist occultism, maintaining the exploration of poetry in categories clearly not subsuming the perspectives of hermeticism, alchemy, mysterious correspondences, hidden traditions and magic under those of modern science or philosophy. In a certain sense, this is a basic position of surrealism, but there was also something very provocative about it. Also in the very slickness and intelligence with which it was done. Alexandrian himself wrote primary about art. Associated with the journal were other, more picturesque characters like the twoheaded Fabrice Pascaud, who is the surrealist astrologer as well as a trusted orthodox surrealist polemicist (maintaining the rich website Arcane 17) and the weird surrealist gnostic publicist Paul Sanda.

This reborn surrealist occultism (which is more obviously firmly rooted in traditional surrealism for its french exponents than for, i e the english-language contemporary surrealist satanists like ORB editions in Wales and the Tenebraeology) is an important reminder of the width of the sources and practices of the surrealist perspective. Especially since the emphasis and priorities applied on this webpage are often taking a very much other direction, it can be interesting to consider the extent to which the experimentation and concerns for poetic phenomenology retain a shared core throughout different routes in the surrealist project.

And as I don't have too detailed information of the direction of the Supérieur inconnu collective, I am utilising this as a way to reach back to the discussion in the Stockholm surrealist group, where there are different persons defending (at times or consistently) skepticist-rationalist views, rigid-scientofilic views, subjective-sensible views, rigid-marxist views, cynic-ultraradical views, pragmatical-philosophical views, and metaphysical-largesyntheses views - leading to some harsh discussions but still without problems to agree about fundamentals including the need for dismissal of faith, for explicit epistemology, tireless experimentation, devotion to the unknown, methodological concerns, poetic sensibility, in a insistently collective, ludic, critical, subversive, creative context; which is surrealism (insisting on the continuous relevance of the concerns and maintained activities of historical surrealism, rather than any arbitrary modernisation of it into some individual-eclectic art label or faith).

(Disclaimer: Several other surrealists have died this year. The only departure which we perceived as a personal blow was that of our old friend, pioneer surrealist organiser in the US, Franklin Rosemont. But there was also Jean-Marc Debenedetti, Anne Èthuin, Pierre Peuchmaurd, Boguslaw Swacz, Blanca Varela... The fact that we mention Alexandrian's passing is due to subject matters and should not be taken as a sign that we perceive others as less important; we do not have a news blog, and even if we had one we would be reluctant to indulge in the necrophilia of accumulating obituaries.)

Criticisms of "Experiment and failure"

So, the "Experimentation and failure" text brought in a few serious criticisms of specific points.

NN found it dangerously scientistic on a couple of points. The one most interesting to discuss would be the seemingly reifying character of its actually very tentative attempt to define poetic criteria, and the sense of selfcontradiction necessarily discernible in invoking "irreducibility" as a technical criterion and as a resource. The poetic experience, in its constitutive irreducibility, will always try to escape its determinations somehow, and appear as wondrously attaining a new level of coherence, knowledge and pleasure or not, which we might try to describe in different ways with psychological, epistemological, aesthetical or spiritual vocabularies each with their respective ballast of implied value systems of petty personal rewards and usefulness. Perhaps the objectively meaning-generating quality as well as the imaginational promise and practical uselessness of the experience makes the term reenchantment the most accurate.

Nevertheless, the surrealist viewpoint as implimented here will insist on the need to apply discipline, criteria and evaluation, in contrast to whimsy-eclectic-subjective arbitrariness of typical artistic individualism or of private spirituality, and in this respect agreeing with - but emphatically separate from - the chauvinistic-traditionalist applications of such criteria in actual spiritual disciplines as well as in the classicist-conservative-escapist system of aesthetics. In the light of surrealism, it is necessary to indulge collectively and ludically in carefree but laborous experimentation proving that poetry is immanent, readily attainable, unpredictable, not deserving a modest-pacifying type of respect, but actually a weapon of emancipation, revenge, illumination and subversion on all levels, AND that the outcome is not attained automatically nor free to consumistically enjoy nor voluntarily label according to moods, whims or skill of rhetorics, but actually can - and especially regarding the more elaborate collective projects preferrably should - be evaluated from the viewpoint of poetic efficiency, methodology, epistemology, strategy; further dynamics.

Then, the text was criticised by JE for resting on the old image of the lone researcher designating experiments and acquiring personally the knowledge as their end result. This is a very relevant critique. Regardless of whether experiments are designed by single scientists or large groups of scientists (which is different in different branches of science), it can certainly be well argued that the outcome of the scientific process, which is supposed to be knowledge, is not necessarily something residing in the scientists' heads (the entire team or the group leader or the coordinator of groups) and then communicated to colleagues and public. Knowledge might indeed be more accurately be decribed as an objective phenomenon which takes shape among the scientific community as it incorporates and acts upon results of one investigation. The image of knowledge as residing in someone's head may be nothing more than a worn but compelling metaphor which we stick to from the mere force of habit of philosophical education.

In fact, I see no need to stick to a particular ontology of knowledge, and indeed a view of knowledge as an external body which we might find temporarily and partially residing in a tree or a stone, in a particular constellation of people or in any haphazard collective engaging in a particular activity rather than in a particular head, but primarily somewhere inbetween; something which we might contribute to and play with, and which we may be possessed by rather than possess; seems to be a more dynamic and less individualist-humanist view which is probably more useful to surrealism?

Some, and several others before when facing similar texts, have noted that it is potentially misleading to employ the word science in a restricted and somewhat ideal sense of scientific method, which is the core of science in its consitution as science and therefore the core of the meaning of the word. This is a sense of logical realism. It does not imply that, nor have the ambition to make it appear as, all the activities of scientists would be scientific, the ideological institution called science would be privilegedly scientific, etc - in fact quite the opposite, since it is only the recognition of a semantic core of the word science that makes it possible 1) to analytically distinguish between scientific and unscientific attitudes, deeds and claims among or around scientists, 2) to see what is scientific outside the sphere of the institutions of western science, and 3) to recognise that the sum of the social interactions making up the institution of science in the widest sense contains tension, tactical alliances and potentially violent contradictions between the scientific and its opposites, and 4) to see the tendency for this attitude to be unable to be practically manifested in a pure form detached from other ambitions and contradictions, instead being one of several intermingled expressions of, as well as engines fuelling and guiding, human ambitions and behaviors in playing out various social conflicts, utopian longings and pointless games.

MF

NATURE AND ITS DOUBLE

Auch das ist nur eine Wolke

Art often looks organic. The analogies between the weavings of the human unconscious and natural forms have often been noticed and is indeed a longstanding theme among others in surrealist art.

For some, this analogy is a funny coincidence, for some it has deep spiritual connotations proving the human potential to tap into the springwell of the ways of nature, and for some it is an interesting field of investigating universal characteristics of morphogenesis. These can be approached by way of psychoanalytic/structuralist/phenomenological studies, or through basics of biochemistry and other chemistry, neurology, embryology and biological evolution; similar senses of architecture, analogy, cladistics, fractals, chaos, cybernetics etc apply both ways.

But we must consider also the differences, among forms of the unconscious, between those which really are mental images and those which are the chance products of gestural automatism, and among the forms of nature, between those which are products of genetically or structurally controlled growth and movement and those which are the chance products of large-scale or extremely complex processes. They may all be similar but the processes are quite different. In a sense everything is chance and even the most perverse planning struggles vainly to produce something substantially dissimilar.

For surrealism, this is indeed an older topic than surrealism itself. Take alchemy, which indeed established the concept of "art" as something involving the entirety of knowledge and the transformation of man and nature rather than a sphere integrated into the mainstream of social structure, be it majoritary or minoritary, central or detached, immediately utilistic or ideological-aesthetical. In alchemy, the ways of nature are to be intimately studied, imitated and also challenged or broken, in order to make nature reveal its secrets and for oneself, or rather the processes one is instigating, to become part of its fundamental workings. Presurrealist and late alchemist August Strindberg, in his text about automatism (which he himself practiced in painting and music rather than in the writing he became more famous for), advocated: "Imitate nature, sure, but imitate in the first place nature's way of creating!" At the same time, Strindberg's (and mine!) idol in evolutionary biology, Ernst Haeckel, a specialist in jumping to conclusions and defending controversial positions, who was working hard with replacing idealist superstitions everywhere, took this struggle - among elsewhere - to the point of publishing albums with beautiful shells, medusas, microorganisms etc, in order to prove how superior nature was, as art, to art!

However, even though the animals, plants, stones, landscapes and weathers are indeed often extremely beautiful and rich in connotations, ambiances and associations, and of course enjoyable in the same way art is (and certainly to a far greater degree than the majority of art!), this does not actually make it art or make it suitable to actually replace art, except in very particular senses or circumstances. Art is indeed still fundamentally about human experiments with the whole of the sensory field, with the whole of experience and knowledge, and thus primarily about changing man and investigating the conditions of changing reality. Natural objects are possibly not about that, and that is one of the many fascinating things about them, which indeed makes them useful for those very purposes too.

All the while, some of our output looks like unintentional creations of nature to the point of confusion (and are proud of it). The other facet of the same analogy is that certain natural objects and certain views of landscapes etc will seem obviously to coincide with a particular kind of poetic sensibility which we, for relative lack of imagination, may associate with a particular artists', group's or method's work. Though a creator in surrealism is just the tool of poetry, of a particular aspect of poetry, sometimes cultivated-incubated through long hard work and sometimes immediately accessible by chance, experiment or whim. That mediumistic experience is at the core of the surrealist experience. Seemingly it is not identical with, but has a close relation to, the experience of discovering the poetry in the natural objects, same - as poetry is in an important sense one and indivisible - and quite different in another sense. The categories of artifacts and natural objects will not confusionally merge, but the objects will meet and start playing with each other and with us on the arena of poetic experience, where their origins, and the often so ridiculous questions of the purpose or intentions behind them, will not be their most relevant determinations.

I am not talking here about natural sciences, even though a scientific or parascientific exotism and fetishism as well as a scientificoid methodology are often present in the way surrealists deal with the natural world, but only of the direct relation to the natural objects, the everyday-curious-amateur-enthusiast-naturalist approach which is the poet's. I have been talking elsewhere about surrealist zoology. Someone else will have to speak about surrealist botany and surrealist mineralogy. Surrealist landscape appreciation enters into the works with psychogeography and with this recent enigmatic concept of exteriority. Another popular habit among surrealists is metereology. Poets, dreamers, idlers, utopists and vagrants everywhere look to the sky, of course including the surrealists. Some organise in the "Cloud appreciation society". Not too long ago (2006), the organiser of that society, Gavin Preton-Pinney, published a popular introduction to the subject, "The cloudspotter's guide". It is indeed a rich book, presenting all the major types of clouds and their various conditions, and presenting a wealth of anecdotes and small explanations; physics, art and history of science, sundogs and Carmen Miranda sprites, the history of military research in weather manipulation, the story of the magnificent "Morning glory" cloud in Australia, the story of lieutenant William Rankin who spent 40 minutes riding up and down the winds inside a raging cumulonimbus on his parachute... Indeed, the book has a tiresome populistic rhetoric and keeps making elaborate excuses before every single time it introduces a scientific explanation, but the things it has to say are still so fascinating, and as far as I can judge solid, so all that whining can be excused, even by someone like me who really hates it, and I suppose for many others it will present less of a problem. In fact, there is much of the complex morphology, the morphogenic processes, and perhaps even the ontology itself of clouds, that seems to adress the very basic notions of surrealist conceptualisation of nature. For those purposes, it would indeed seem that further reading is required, but Preton-Prinney's book serves as a fine introduction to the field.

Clouds themselves are indeed a topic dear to surrealism from before surrealism. First of all we have of course Hamlet's often cited dialogue with Polonius, in which the changing shapes of cumulus clouds as projecting screens for images of the human imagination present the first clear illustration of the paranoic-critical method. And then in the immediate forerunning of surrealism, continuing into the middle of it, we have Arp's fantasies of the machinery of "die Wolkenpumpe", the cloud pump, and its products. Then in the middle of surrealist imagery and thinking, Magritte stands out as an enthusiastic cloud invoker, but there are also significant clouds in early Tanguy, in Dalí, we have Paalen's umbrella, Noguchi's sofa, the mists of Toyen and others, Bachelardian speculation, and so on. And many of us have already noticed with Dalí how clouds are among the elements of non-conventionally-realistic figuration in painting from earlier centuries, soft forms, to the point of incarnating phantoms and concrete irrationality. But nevertheless I put even more hope to the usage of clouds in speculations of the origin and development of forms making sense, the perverse science of what Haeckel called "Generelle Morphologie".

MF

two books

As the subject of surrealismology has been up here, let me recommend two new english-language books about surrealism:

Gavin Parkinson's "Surrealism, art and modern science" (Yale University press, 2008) A remarkably well-informed, broad and critically-minded academic book of surrealism, based on a doctoral thesis in art history but necessarily broad in scope in investigating what the developments within physics of the early 20th century (relativity and quantum physics) meant for surrealists, in outlook, theory and art alike, and in what shape it had a function to fill in surrealism. Especially refreshing is the author's irritation over all these ever-repeated vague analogies between modern physics and modern art in general terms of perspectives, sensibility or very newness, demanding that all such comparisons must be actually investigated on the epistemological level.

Nikos Stabakis's "Surrealism in greece - an anthology" (University of Texas press, 2008) For the first time in english a very substantial portion of creations of greek surrealists. But the point - in this particular context - is the introductions, where Nikos Stabakis of the Athens surrealist group lucidly formulates questions and observations on the particular conditions for surrealism in a peripheral country, in a partly very specific and partly highly generisable way which could teach us one or two lessons in how to look for objective surrealism and how to sharpen local interventions in a variety of contexts.

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

Atheism as the metaphysics of experience

The purely logical distinction between absolute and relative is not present in our experiences. That is why any notions of sacred and profane must be seen as conventional constructs, whatever ones particular experiences may indicate. Neither can these concepts, relative and absolute, according to traditional metaphysics, be completely separated from each other, as christian theology have stressed for so long, namely by subjugating mans influence to a higher all-powerful god, relativizing the realness of our experience, aggrandicizing a speculation. This means that the relative is present in the absolute (for example: the relative manifests as endless variation, "endlessness" obviously being an absolute trait, not a relative) and that the absolute can be found in the relative (for example: since the relative is a part of the absolute, or the whole, the one, this part-whole relationship logically connects the absolute to the relative).

So much for logic and metaphysical distinctions. Do we need them to understand atheism? And how do they relate to the immediacy of concrete experience? We can surely see and experience the world in its endless variation, as a heraclitean flow, in its inherent relativity. The relative is today associated with individual choice, freedom, tolerance, while the absolute has become associated with the opposite traits; perfect control, discriminative authority, qualitative optimums, binding necessity.

Contemporary atheism seems to a large extent to be upheld by moral relativism and scientific rationalism. These attitudes, whether combined to form a liberal standpoint of humanist common sense or not, can be effectively aggressive in addressing religious forms in society and thought. Or can they? In its reactive moralism and in its linguistically hygienic praxis respectively these attitudes could be more ineffectual than is generally recognized by the evangelical atheists in question, both in expressing logically the profaneness of fully experienced living and in the core of any honest atheist intentions; to challenge religious thinking, not just religious forms. For example; instead of developing a discourse where God is no longer necessary, as intended, the impulse of scientific rationality in this century have left this idea somewhat outside of its scope, where the God-notion then is continually being re-interpreted as, instead of a unifying principle as in former times, a complementary entity. The idea of this positive enlightenment has taken on the rhetorical structure of a suppressed correlative, maintaining a verbal distinction between religion and science that is only partially an accurate reflection of history. In europe scientific rationalism and christian religiosity were never mutually excluding forces, but co-evolved and depended on each other for ideological support, especially during the birth and growth of an extractive economy in the 17th century, where a radical desacralization of the world was a crucible aim for both parties involved, thus they would at that time rather combat natural philosophy and magic, the institutionalization of alchemy, the egalitarian fringes of protestantism and folkish animism in general than each other. This seems to me to be the background for the suppressing outlook on on faith and beliefs as "superstitions" defining religion rather than as the simple psychological facts they are, relative in essence and phenomenologically universal, useful or not, even worthy of a science (as they are in the psychology of religion, and in the indian devotional science of bhakti). There is nothing wrong with scientific rationalism in itself, it just seems to be an insufficient basis for an active atheism, as natural science is an insufficient basis for evaluating religion. Surrealism tend to anchor exceptional states such as temporary confusion and mad love in lived reality, in the heraclitean flow of vaguenesses, dialectic play and preliminary discoveries. If an issue at all, doctrines is a secondary one. One could hardly defend the irreligiosity of surrealism by adhering to a scientistic dualism of nature and psyche. The spiritual element exists only within the individual psyche, but with the open experimentation of surrealist ingenuity, for example by elaborating the notion of sacredness in direct opposition to monotheistic modes of sacralization, towards enrichening experience rather than directing it (which is what religion does) there begins an experiment to interconnect the spiritual with the material world, and this would have little to do with a world-view of beliefs built on scientific rationalism, where matters are either subjective or objective. Neither would it suffice with the discriminative sensibilities of individual hedonism. (Is not in fact hedonistic atheism an unwittingly christian attitude, where the inherited dualism between creator and creation is maintained on several levels, particularly in merely emphasizing the separation of creator and creature?)

Since we still very much live in a christian society, the very logic of its metaphysical language continues to structure the dialectic of experience, now in the artificial paradise of a consumerist environment. God is no longer Absolute, the necessities we fetter ourselves by are. Ignorance does not save us from absolutes. If we do not notice this in daily living, it is the more visible in periods of crisis, when the stable network of habits and meanings that once sustained us become replaced with a state of affairs more in accordance with the godless theory of a purposeless, neutral, meaningless universe. God never was more than this guarantee for harmony.

So the modern claim: "There are no absolute values!" has a dual answer. No, they are constructed. Yes, they are constructed. Or: Are absolutes quasi-absolutes, were they always?

With Hegel the christian god, an unattainable absensce, incarnated as world spirit while the holy ghost became an active agent in history, which meant that the incomprehensible absolute of the pre-romantics legitimately could be found in the timely world. And it has been searched there ever since, further and further down. "Je cherche l'Or du Temps ..."

This world we live in is all there is, it may not have meaning, as reason tends to demand of it, but as man is not perfectly loyal to reason anyway, we tend to evaluate through other faculties than reason and abstraction, and according to other principles than moral opposite-pairs from another time, another language. Reality is felt as something like a transparent manifestation of sensuality. The void sometimes glimpsed beyond it could be something best not to pay attention to, or it could be a blinding layer of further sensuality, too bright for our present senses, it could be a reflective screen for unconscious desires and fears, as common sense will have it, or it could be something entirely different, or maybe all of these, who knows. It is hardly relevant to have consistent viewpoint. Our inner sense of beauty and meaning never give us certainty, but increased intensities of experience that do not convert us to new values, only deepens our knowledge about and gives concretion to values we already know about, like authenticity, goodness, right, truth. And while our sense of competative ego is taught as a required absolute in today´s society, that make social personality so much of an hindrance in attaining hitherto unknown cognitive situations, personality can reassemble itself from unforeseen directions, as unforeseen unities in the poetry of evaluating sensual rearrangements.

Metaphysics was/is the science of origins. When we were told by religion that god created the world we were merely fed with mythology taken literally, then dressed up as metaphysics. Man´s moral honesty, not science, nor sophistry, eventually did away with the concept of god in this lingustic mess, where mythology could not be discussed as mythology and metaphysics suffered badly under theology until the two now often seem inseparable. Science of today have some cosmological hypotheses that still need to be verified, but replacing a mythological origin with an attitude of common sense is not the issue here. Like the objective world, mans cognitive reality, his experience was never willfully created once and for all at some given point, it is continually being created here and now by ourselves. This reality in its endless or "endless" unfolding is the only spiritual dimension, the only eternity, the sole unimaginable ideal an atheist acknowledges.

Is there a healthy way to utilize beliefs? If so, we will have to recognize that beliefs are not meant to be realistically representing experiences and that they are not always voluntary. So although they are expressed by individuals theyt are not necessarily individual matters. There are many types of beliefs, but let´s stress the psychological aspect and just distinguish passive from active beliefs here. If we only percieve dead nature around us, "dead" as in in some fundamental and important way less living than ourselves, there are plenty of others to act out our beliefs for us if the issue seems irrelevant to us (and they will speak of natural resources rather than dead nature). Those beliefs would be passive, even unconscious. If we on the other hand would value the world as sacred, it is not hard find ways to act this belief out. Beliefs could be born out of necessity and strategical choice rather than as "being true to experiences" (obviously a limited field anyway). Beliefs are motivating, so this could make a difference.


/Niklas Nenzén

Surrealism and the holy crap

Surrealism is a revolutionary poetical movement that strives for the liberation of mankind in all its aspects. This is not a simple task, and we see that the surrealist movement often suffers from weaknesses in making this understood. As we know, this has been a constant problem throughout its history, especially as regards its relations to art and "culture".

Here, we'd like to focus on the problems of unclarity regarding the supernatural and its ideological companion, supernaturalism, and also about some related surrealist hookups which seem to be lacking an honest and critical approach.

It is (more or less!) known that surrealism is actively and explicitly against religion.

Other beliefs of dubious character also occur though, e.g. that surrealism, inspired by the psychoanalytic ideas, sees as its mission to liberate the unconscious from the repression of the superego; that surrealism accepts and likes everything that defies rational thinking, including not only dream and chance but also, for this reason, spiritism, esoterism, chaos, the "wild", "primitive" peoples, everything non-Western, sadism, perversions, crime, serial killers ... all this in opposition, of course, to the prevailing capitalist order, but also in opposition to rationalism itself.

We are sorry to say that the reasons for these miscomprehensions are not only misunderstandings from art scholars or journalists, they are often caused by texts written by surrrealists themselves. In the worst cases, these surrealists appear to be little more than art-producing new-age apologists. In better cases, they are inspired writers that somehow have a difficulty of explaining the limits and circumstances of the surrealist appreciations of dreams or of primitive peoples, for example. Maybe they are actually confused, or maybe lazy. (We're not in the business here of judging who is a surrealist or not - but regardless of the label they might put on themselves, they hold attitudes that we find important to confront and that we think surrealism doesn't benefit from. In some cases we think it's obvious they misunderstand basic concepts of surrealism, in others it might be necessary to modify or clarify the surrealist standpoint. We don't mention names because it's better for those concerned to recognize themselves instead of feeling that they need to defend themselves. If someone should be mentioned, why not Breton himself? Isn't it obvious how exaggerated his trust in Freud was, or that he had an uncritical belief in the abilities of (certain?) clairvoyants, mediums and even astrologists?)

In many surrealist texts, the uncritical repetition of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts is embarrasing (or to say the least outdated). Freud's ideas can at most be taken as an inspiring and fascinating attempt to make a theory about the mind, but not as indisputable truths or undoubtable scientific discoveries about it. It must be admitted that they consist of non-scientific specualtion and partly also of falsifying evidence. Freud's writings have in many ways also been contradicted by later research and discoveries. This might therefore not have been possible to know at the time and the surrealists were also apparently lacking in knowledge about scientific methods and the necessary rigour demanded of scientific investigation. The psychoanalytic "case studies" are of no more scientific value than the many observations of UFO landings and their accompanying "conclusions". The tendency to regard the Freudian concepts as holy and unquestionable, whatever they are, does no good to surrealism.

Alchemy and other occult, esoteric or mystic currents, dead or alive, are other subjects that need to be approached more critically. If they historically could be described as "precursors" to science as well as to surrealism (even though many of them still prevail or have been reintroduced), it must also be clarified in what way they have been doomed to be abandoned: their supernaturalistic (often religious) world-view made (and makes) it impossible for them to significantly advance human knowledge and understanding of the world. (The development of science and critical thinking does this, though.) What remains, at best, is a poetical practice misunderstanding itself as anything else. Their beauty and fascination, then, is also tragic.

To hail alchemy as a watchword, like so many surrealists do, is obscurantistic. Alchemy had certain interesting elements, while others are examples of superstitions and the primitiveness of thinking that we should fight today as ever.

The double tool of surrealism: dialectics (or, why not say "critical thinking?") and analogy can only be useful if they are kept apart but also taken to the extreme. Superstition and supernaturalism are failure to do so.

Esoterics and psychoanalysis have been getting an exagerrated attention from some surrealists also just because they to a large extent are symbol-makers. The mere listing of these conventional symbols in accounts of dreams or "objective chance" experiences are not of specificly surrrealist value. Symbols have no truth value and surrealism is not a symbolism. Symbols, just as anything else, can of course be of poetical value if they appear in a personal mythology relating to actualities in the individual desires. But symbols, looked up in a book in order to write a more juicy text to impress the reader, are just anthropological anecdotes, and to base observations on those is a false drama. There is a literature based on the concept of objective chance, that sometimes seem shallow and fake in the sense that they don't really tell about the poetical value for the individual, they list a number of encounters such as every person has now and then. Chance encounters are valuable to people not because they reveal telepathy or other psychic powers, fate or signs of a higher truth (they don't!), but simply because they consist of coincidences that involve elements who talk to the memories or desires of the persons involved or create a certain kind of beauty or adventure. It's no mysticism. It's a heightening of the sensibility in everyday life.

Among the exaggerated hailings are the ones of "primitive peoples" or anything not belonging to the western civilization. This seems sometimes to have a tendency of a blind embrace, disregarding everything that wouldn't fit into the picture. According to this attitude, primitive peoples have a closer non-exploitative relation to nature, they have a poetic relation to the universe, their art is integrated in all of their lives etc; but it's never mentioned that they might have superstitions, they never have a limited understanding of the world, they don't repress women or children and are never violent. A criticism of western civilization doesn't need this one-sidedness. Maybe it is a misdirected solidarity that comes from the fact that primitive and non-western peoples certainly are repressed groups. That surrealism is against workers' chauvinism is clear and obvious since the 30's confrontations with stalinist "workers' culture", but it's time to abolish also "primitive" or "non-western" chauvinism. Neither they, nor us, benefit from it.

We're not new agers or exotists. We have to be more clear about our relation to magical thinking as a world view. As with alchemy, we have to distinguish things. Magical thinking, stripped of its supernaturalism, is no longer magical thinking. It is poetic sensibility.

Magical thinking has to be replaced by personal mythology and poetical thinking. Magical thinking creates superstitions, conserves lack of understanding and blunts critical thought. It enforces gullibility and authoritarianism. Next step is religion and capitalism. Magical thinking did not die with the development of civilization, it's at the base of capitalist ideology and teams up with its "rationalism". (Isn't it enough to look at commodity fetishism and advertisement?)

Some surrealist writing shows a more or less plain opposition to science in general and might scorn its strict rational methods. This is absurd. What is the point of attacking the scientific method? Surrealism has never been an irrationalism, absurdism, anti-intellectualism or denying rationality. (If it ever had tendencies to it, they should be abandoned!)

Science and the scientific method are among the greatest achievements of the human mind, and are enormously valuable to the understanding of the world and, at least potentially, a great vehicle against human misery; material, social, intellectual as well as spiritual. This doesn't mean that science would be the only source of knowledge or of inspiration, but it can certainly be one of the sources, alongside other expressions of the spirit that are more likely to be mentioned by surrealists; love, desire, creativity, play and curiosity: activities outside of, but not necessarily in opposition to, science.

The scientific method is nothing more than an extension of critical thinking. That scientists are often bought and sold and used for commercial and repressive purposes - much in the same way as artists - is an altogether different affair. Science might be done mainly by experts, but is in its philosophical base egalitarian. (Science should be made by all!) Science's theories about the world can in principle be tested by anyone, provided he or she does it in controlled circumstances and with relevant methods. Anyone that have claims about some part of reality will fail to convince scientifically if the claim can not be confirmed through repeated experiment or (in relevant cases) randomized, double-blind observation. Scientific rigour, thus, is above personal interest and a moral question.

The scientific world is not lacking in self-consciousness about its scope and limitations. We want to draw special attention to the international movement of so-called Skeptics in this matter. Robert T. Carroll, author of the Skeptic's Dictionary (http://skepdic.com/) calls skepticism a "virtue" rather than a philosophical system. The different groups and individuals related to this movement fight frauds and pseudoscience and debunk supernatural claims, in an ongoing fight to protect the mind from charlatans, spiritists, healers, fakirs, astrologers, psychics and other liars, robbers and swines, and defend the status of the scientific method. Many sceptics also fight religious superstitions and their preachers' absurd claims about reality.

There must be no doubt that surrealism whole-heartedly supports these struggles, although with (at least theoretically) a wider and complementary understanding. This is not only a fight for the defence of science. Those "healers" (protected by the freedom of religion, i.e. the freedom to fool and be fooled), can destroy people's lives giving them false hopes, false treatments, false beliefs, false understanding of reality and obediance to false authorities besides giving them stupidifying entertainment and wasting their time. In this way it's also a fight for the defense of the freedom, power and understanding of the human spirit.

Surrealism should be in a special position to properly embrace the whole scope of the reasons to fight supernaturalism: the scientific, political, ideological, moral and poetical reasons. We don't need any mystical, esoteric or psychoanalytical concepts to explain that the human mind by itself (interacting, of course, with the "outer world") is capable of its deductions, productions and inspirations, that the poetic sensibility is not divine or supernatural, but purely human.

Surrealism should be able to appreciate the discoveries and the achievements of the rational and intellectual minds, at the same time demand the same liberty for the imagination and see them as one and the same quest. Surrealism should see the repressions of free inquiry (scientific investigation, research and knowledge), of the freedom of expression and the freedom of imagination as one and the same. The liberation from capitalist and state repression, commercialism, work ethic and careerism is the same as the liberation from priests, superstitions, healers and psychics.

If surrealism will have any significance today, it is still in the struggle for the liberation and expansion of the totality of the human potentials; fighting all the repressions of the mind: from stifling symbolism and stupidifying supernaturalism to repressive ideology and downright ignorance; for the expansion of rational thinking as well as of inspired thinking.

Anna BERGMARK
Johannes BERGMARK

Surrealism and the holy 'nuff

While the text Surrealism and the Holy Crap addresses important issues concerning an uncritical appraisal of esoteric, mystic and symbolistic traditions, it tends to display that same amount of one-sidedness that it intends to critize. Rationalism and science are not in themselves something good, something that advances our struggles. Another problem is that what is needed is not to launch another battle in the field of ideas. Rationalism versus supernaturalism, skepticism versus hoaxism, etc. What is needed is an investigation into the material conditions that give rises to such ideas, their geneaology and relation to existing power structures. Our critique should not be aimed at the ideas as such, but their material base, the suppressing environment that surrounds them, the specific practices which sustain them. How interesting is it to be against an idea? Who cares about ideas anyway? Doesn't the very idea of being able to fight an idea necessarily involve a commitment to a bürgerlicher Öffentlichkeit, to a tradition no more than 200 years old and seriously integrated with capitalist ideology?

Let’s discuss the specifics.

Two quotes from the text:

"Science and the scientific method are among the greatest achievements of the human mind."

"That scientists are often bought and sold and used for commercial and repressive purposes - much in the same way as artists - is an altogether different affair."

The scientific method is a great achievements when it comes to understanding the mechanisms of nature, yes, but while some might argue that it is a great achievement of the human mind (what does that mean?), it's main achievement is as a tool for developing the productive forces of capitalism. And these productive forces are not neutral; the capitalist mode of production has an internal drive to maximize the productive forces in order to subdue more of mankind under the toil of labour. There is no such thing as a neutral discovery, a neutral science, a neutral machine: the capitalist relations of production imbues science with its specific logic. Thus, while science definitively has increased material wealth in society, it has at the same time been instrumental in intensifying labour, repression and global domination of capital. Let me stress this one more time: there is no such thing as a 'pure science', there are specific practices, by specific institutions in specific historical circumstances. Science is one such practices, and while it's method might be very sound, it's employment is not. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with this or that scientist being bought up and used for commercial and repressive purposes. On the contrary, science itself is an internal affair under capitalism, and the individual scientist is completely irrelevant in the broad picture. What is needed is not a naive and uncritical praise of science, but a vision, outline and practice of what the science of the future, i.e. communist science, might look like: how is its method employed, how will it be related to other practices of knowledge, what is its epistemology and most important, what will its relation to rest of society look like?

The same naiveness shows itself in the one-sided praise of rationalism. I'm not sure what rationalism is exactly - perhaps a specific mode of thought related to logical investigations of causality, perhaps a practice in society related to the construction of a public sphere where debates and critical analysis could be conducted, perhaps a philosophical tradition which places emphasis on the ability of the human mind to grasp the totality of nature without empirical investigation - but I'm quite convinced that rational thinking is not bestowed upon us by the grace of our own mind to critical analyse our surroundings and concoct how society best should be constructed. Rational thinking is - just like science - employed through the practices of the capitalist machinery as a means to repress, subjugate and intensifiy the exploitation of mankind. This is of course the dialectic of enlightment, the darkness that springs forth from the back-alleys of rational thinking, where fordist production, colonial enslavement, concentration camps, IBM, the modern HSB-kitchen and such all are based on the same mode of thought.

In the text, one gets the sense that there is a confusion about causality. How can one state that fighting priests is the same as fighting capitalism? While the priest serves ideological purposes, capitalism is not an ideology. Committing oneself to ideological battles is a dead end. If one could gladly choose ones enemies from the realm of ideas, I for one would pick a more interesting and worthwhile opponent than supernaturalism. And if teaming up with other ideological fighters was important, The Skeptics homepage would not be my first alliance (aren’t they just scientific Sverker Olofssons?). When it comes to ideology, the first and foremost task of surrealism is to not become ideological.

Let us not forget who is the real enemy. While local schamans and charlatans might hoax people into bying their useless medicine and miracle potions, it is the major medical companies who on a daily basis exclude a major portion of mankind from vital medical supplies. It it is the major medical companies who put a large portion of the citizens under the spell of pharmaceutics which deterriorates our senses and holds us in a state of chemical conformism. It is the major medical companies who are the chemical landlords of modern capitalism and dominating agents in the sphere of biopolitics. Oh, and it's the major medical companies who use science and the scientific method as their chief productive force.

Therefore: while rational thinking and the scientific method are important practices in the formation of a surrealist mode of thought, they should not be uncritically appraised outside of their historical context. What we seek is the surrational (what the hell is that?), the transgression of the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, and the deployment of specific techniques of attaining knowledge of our surroundings that are neither exclusive nor instrumentalizable. What we don’t need is boring, common sensical, debating this-or-that, one-sided rationality. We are not Noam Chomsky.

JE

OPEN LETTER TO GUY GIRARD (1999)

Guy Girard has sent us an ambitious and detailed criticism of our declaration "The Scream In The Sack" (see appendix 1 & 2 below). We would like to emphasize that Guy Girard – except for a couple of minor points – has understood the content and the spirit of it completely and extensively.
To reply to his criticism is therefore most relevant, because it exposes differences within the surrealist movement that we are happy to discuss in a wider context. Our admittedly deficient but nevertheless thought-out declaration, "The Scream In The Sack", has met with predominantly negative reactions within the movement – this pleases us immensely – but now, at last, there is someone who speaks out against us!

Defense of intelligible speech
Surrealism is the imaginary solution of the contradiction between Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the philosophical meaning it is surrationalist. From the beginning it has also had scientific ambitions (or pseudo-scientific ones, as it is situated outside all scientific institutions).
More than a few surrealists in the world have acquired an elementary humanistic education at universities or through other ways. They are consequently able to read Marx, Hegel, Freud, Sade, Lautréamont, Herakleitos, Nietzsche, Benjamin, etc. and understand their writings in a reasonable way. This basic knowledge, however, is not available to all. We live in a class society with unevenly distributed educational opportunities and literacy rates.
For sure, surrealism can never become a mass movement or a popular movement. But nor should it ever give up the ambition to intervene in the social struggle that permanently storms everywhere, to influence a larger number of people through its radicalism, its unusual perspectives, its spirit. This is not done through incomprehensibility. Guy's criticism on this point could easily be interpreted as elitist. It is not enchanting enough to speak intelligibly.
That surrealism puts becoming before being is obvious. A fundamental point
regarding surrealism is its refusal to reduce what it speaks about to the already familiar, to the easily surveyable and unambiguous. It is therefore not surprising if surrealism sometimes must sound unintelligible. But from there to assert that one never can express a clear and intelligible assertation about surrealism is idiocy.
We regret certain things in our declaration. Remorse is a truly surrealist virtue – one too seldom given its due by too many conceited surrealists. In our group we have always stressed the importance of taking risks. To subject oneself to the possibility of getting lost. Sometimes some have gotten lost so thoroughly that they have stayed lost and not wanted to acknowledge their crazy path; the other of us draw our conclusions with lighter or heavier feet.
Trying to write a short intelligible text about surrealism is such a risk. We know that it is much easier to agree on sweeping, lyric formulations precisely because they do not require any responsibility from us. That is why we have aimed at avoiding the seductive, the suggestive and the passionate.
There is another issue concerning intelligible speech that is more important. Guy doesn't take it up, probably because it puts much more at stake for the whole movement. It is the question of the relationship of the surrealist group to the public sphere. In the beginning of the history of our group were imbued with presumptuous secretiveness and the paranoic feeling of having penetrated all tricks of power. We rejected a priori a
public sphere – and a whole population – we were, in fact, lacking knowledge of.
Our overestimation of ourselves has decreased through the years and our desire to communicate has grown. We still consider the public sphere to be a deceitful, hostile and commercial alien who is always ready to exploit us for its own purposes. But we are nevertheless prepared to try the highways, the media and the latest internet connections. The desire to communicate leads us to expose ourselves to the risk of making mistakes even there. As long as we are watchful and serious, we will also be able to find accomplices through such channels. And we believe nevertheless that it is in the interest of surrealism to communicate and to be questioned in broader circles rather than becoming a sacred secret to be kept within a secluded brotherhood.
We deny the contradiction between thought and emotion, between reason and poetry. Often the difference lies in different speeds. Slow reflection breeds kinds of formulations different from enthusiastic frenzy. In a world of faster and faster information and image flows, we shun negligent texts and simple pictures. We demand an abyss of reflection. We can never be slow enough. Nor intelligent enough. That does not mean that one should stop writing. But the writing is conditional, which is a consequence of that surrealist attitude that is pragmatical and empirical in the midst of all
its dialectics.

Defense of the attack on the individual
Guy Girard defends Stirner's and Freud's bourgeois individual subject and claims that it is only on the ground of the individual that the "utopian" can be built. He may be right. We don't know and are not particularly interested. To us, utopia is but a literary genre among others, often especially appealing as it comprises the fantastic and a kind of freedom of thought. But we deny utopia as a political instrument. On that point we
agree with Marx.
In our view the individual and the subject are the fundamental myth of our time. We are not content with rejecting "one-dimentional man" – the consumer – but want to get at a deeper illusion. We deny the individual subject as an essence and a fundamental unity. Kantianism sucks. Our loneliness – a vulgar materialist fact – is contradicted by the collective character of our thinking. That is also why we enjoy being wrong. Neither
do we consider that a surrealist group is a "freely chosen collectivity". Natural right thinking was already obsolete in the 19th century even if our times' neoliberals still hold on to that idea.
We do not believe in the lonely genius; it is but a signature behind which a wilderness of collective energy is raging. Thus: fight against the subject and everything that looks like it. Related to that is our hatred for charismatic leaders who readily spice their empty texts with dusky metaphors.

Defense of a surrealist scientific mind
Surrealism was from the beginning inspired by both natural and human sciences. A break took place after World War II. When Breton, who for tactical reasons wanted to rally the movement around diffuse manifestations rather than around theoretical discussions or conflicts within surrealism, personally became fond of certain occult phenomena – not the latest fields of science – a certain obscurantism took root, which to a greater or lesser extent, still marks us today. We try to turn away from that, and maintain instead the ambition to carry out a critique and a practice animated by a
scientific spirit – without sharing science's stiffened forms.
The self-evident surrealist stand for wildness and passion includes a terrible desire for more reality. We do not want to transform reality (including other people) into base materials for our thought or into object of our desires (as has often been the case with the surrealist view of Woman, for example). We demand that surrealists be permanentely being shaken by the sight of the reflected participation of their own deficient persons in the dynamic magnetic field of materia and meaning that allow
them to exist.
That is where a scientific attitude is important. We mean that free questionning, systematic investigation, critical inquisitive thought, passionate love for knowledge, in short scientific mind in its fundamental and best form, is superior to any religious or sacred occupation. But we do not want to degenerate to idealism and raise some contradiction between "science" as an idea and the science we see around us today which too often serves the most repulsive interests in an oppressive way. The science that exists is the science that is meaningful to relate to. Long live astrophysics! Long live /evolutionary biology, geomorphology, linguistics and meteorology! Death to religion and the charismatic leader!

Short about art
Guy interprets our attitude towards art as a "constriction of the imaginary for the benefit of a shrinkage of critical reason". He possibly aims at our critical attitude regarding the image and its function in society and our subsequent suspicions concerning the surrealist image. We would hardly constrict the imaginary; rather, we would smash the images that stand in its way. The surrealist image is all too often but a hobby, a masturbation, a self-confirming ritual. One may call us the Zwinglians of the surrealist
movement – rather that than its papists.
Art has its possibilities for freedom and its oppressive mechanisms, both within the market-sensitive contemporary art sphere and within the more traditional, noninstitutional and hobbylike surrealist art sphere. Fruitful exceptions can be found in both spheres. The surrealist art sphere can be much more fun to devote oneself to. But we can neither accept nor understand a contradiction between these two in which the surrealist art sphere would constitute a reserve for the true essence of art and the contemporary art sphere the opposite.

A few semantic issues
Our standpoint on morals and Guy's on ethics is probably only a question of semantics and/or personal preferences. Everybody knows that the collective within surrealism has always been an arena in which to examine consistency or inconsistency, risk taking, consequences of and responsibility for actions.
Guy's criticism of point VI in our declaration is on the other hand totally correct. The surrealist tradition does not consist of themes. Instead, it is a form of a historic continuity of the spirit that links given themes into a kind of totality. We have corrected our text and thank Guy for his remark.

The issue of surrealism in general
One of the deepest surrealist insights is that most dangerous and most criminal in everything human is free thought. What we need to ask ourselves is how that free thought – which works according to that real functioning of thought that we readily want to be able to represent and also actually learn to use for the benefit of mankind! – can express itself in our mad, pluralistic and tolerant time, a time that cuts both ways as signs tend to lose their meaning.
During the from serf to lord self-evidently religious Middle-Ages, atheism was the expression of unrivalled free thought. But today? In the 1910s, it was an unrivalled free action to expose a urinal an art gallery and call it art. But today?
These and similar issues are what surrealism should devote itself to. The issues of freedom, thought and imagination in relation to history and contemporary times. Instead many of us seem to grasp at any kind of diffuse invocations that can inspire and cheer them up, either "the sacred" or "the magical image". Are we really that depressed? Well, perhaps.
We are tempted to issue a moratorium, a temporary but absolute halt to all nauseating "surrealist poems", those fusty "surrealist pictures", those conformist "surrealist theoretical texts", those always-alike "surrealist journals". Turn off the surrealist TV-set.
This doesn't mean that we aspire to a negative poetry. We do not believe that silence is the best poem or emptiness the best picture. Neither do we think that destruction is the only creative act worthy of the name. We would not be surrealists. Rather, we want to listen more – curiously, ardently and critically – to listen to the new words, to search for the new images and to feel the new movements like a vibration in the asphalt. No more my-desire-like-a-rabbit-in-the- pocket-of-your-onion-that-is-flapping-in-the-moonlight-with-the-scaly-thighs-of-the-marvellous-etc-etc."
Moreover, the distressing lack of the surrealist movement's presence in our
epoch is astounding. The feeble attemps at criticism of "post-modernism" for instance that have been glimpsed within the movement, and which for certain are totally legitimate, reveal at the same time a fundamental lack of knowledge and perspective. What would the surrealist critique of the 20s and 30s have been worth had surrealism not stood in the world without screening off against everything and everybody that did not want to call
itself surrealism?
It is time to seriously confront the following question: where is the surrealist spirit to be found today? It is up to the international movement to furiously throw itself into the adventure of that question, or else it will look like a philatelic association or anything else, a social network without crime.

September 1999
The Surrealist Group In Stockholm
Aase Berg, Carl-Michael Edenborg, Mattias Forshage, Bruno Jacobs,
Riyota Kasamatsu, Niklas Nenzén, Sebastian Osorio.
Reservations: Kalle Eklund, Maja Lundgren

hell choir pt 3

The crisis of legitimacy for postbretonian surrealism remains and does not remain an issue.
In a sense the easiest way to motivate continued surrealist activity is that it is a timeless endeavour. It corresponds with or innermost desires and critiques, and we feel affinities with the surrealist tradition, and so we go on forever whatever happens. In a sense, this is hopefully a part of the driving force for several of us, but note that it is perfectly compatible with for example a Schuster’s view of the surrealist movement being objectively dead while the surrealist spirit survives eternally, or on the other hand with any wellmeaning cultural snob seeing surrealism as a perpetual reminder of the imaginative sources in art and literature.
So, on the other hand, surrealism still claims to be a progressive movement, some kind of a contemporary force, a historical agent, the present face of a specific real historical movement.
Surrealism has definitely developed before. Early 20’s surrealism differs from late 20’s surrealism differs from middle 30’s surrealism etc in themes, in methodology and in strategy. At least from the second world war on, we see that a lot of the development of surrealism takes place partly outside surrealism or in undercurrents of surrealism (but probably before that as well, with for instance Bataille’s circle and Le Grand Jeu), while an ”official surrealism” was actually constructed not only by art and literature historians but actually by the french group themselves, most obviously in choosing to organise the great all-integrating partly-retrospective timeless 1947 exhibition instead of (as another suggestion at the time was) organising a conference for surrealists to develop the movement’s direction based on a confrontation and comparison of the very different experiences made during the war. In a sense, surrealism as a unified historical agent died exactly there, where for the first time the forum for coordinating/accumulating surrealist experience chose to develop not the sum and its implications but actually something else than the combined individual energies/ experiences, actually thus creating this ghost (or if you will spectacle) of ”official surrealism”. The major tracts of the late 40’s focused on RE-instating timeless themes of anti-colonialist freedom, anti-stalinist freedom, anti-religious freedom, and very consciously did not adress themes or experiences made during the war years (the journals of the same period do contain more than usual of occult-mediumistic themes and display some new artistic themes, but in the spirit of additions rather than developments).
This is NOT to say that the surrealist movement nor the french surrealist group died or reverted at that point. I’m only saying that from 1947 on the surrealist movement was definitely DIVIDED and without a historical focal point. The french group and Breton himself kept up an admirable organisational, creative and critical output and represent the single most important activity center throughout that period, but that is as one group among others, with its specific limitations, rather than a coordination center, focal point or something like that. In a sense, surrealism became ”timeless” in 1947 because it became infinitely inclusive, came to consist of the total sum of themes, works and activities that had ever been a part of it, in an indiscriminately accumulative way, instead of moving forward through new discoveries superceding and changing the meaning of the older ones, that is, without historical breaks, without coupure, without aufhebung. So the legitimity crisis of postbretonian surrealism is actually a problem for the whole postwar period, it was just that the inspiring living presence of Breton made a lot of people unaware of the fact for a few decades until he died. (4)

And what then are the objective advances of surrealism after Breton’s death? First of all, I don’t know if it’s needed or not to point out that the term ”advance” is intended as ”irreversible development” (and not necessarily ”progress for the better”, whatever that would mean). Contemporary surrealism in a sense only consists of a very wide spectrum, but for those who have chosen to link up with each other in an organisational/activist framework (what we like to refer to as a movement) there may still be some themes and some experiences that are shared. Well, we’d probably need nothing less than an international con-ference to establish that. I do NOT consider, neither as advances nor shared experiences, as some seem inclined to do, the tactical or local retreat from revolutionary politics in france and some other places in the 40s, nor the rhetorical autodissolution twists of the liquidationist faction of 1969, and probably not (but I’m open to suggestions from someone who studied – or experienced – it closer) the scattered local outbursts of enthu-siasm and optimism about more or less superficial occult, drug, humanism, mass campaign politics, or sexual themes. Instead, my suggestions for shared advances are:
* A more effective and more explicit network structure,
due to two mutually reenforcing factors:
a) Changed communication infrastructure, to which the movement has only partially responded but that partial response is still sufficient to alter our organisational framework, with in several sectors a far more effective networking, new transversal alliances, etc
b) Recognition of the lack of an organisational center and the need to base collaborations on voluntarity and mutual interest, thus creating a non-hierarchic free-association-based structure (and if you will, democratic and anarchic).
* reintegration of ”parasurrealist” traditions;
most notably the situationist movement and the work of Bataille and his circle, but also Cobra, various groups of Phases and a number of individual artists and writers. However the experiences of several other such efforts remain for the movement to suck up; for example Mass-Observation.
* a hardcore insistence on the ludic
as the core of surrealist collectivity and surrealist experience
* a renewed focus on urbanism and walking,
partly inspired by the reintegration of situationist psychogeography. (there have been tendencies to forward surrealist focus on rural and natural environments as well, but these have been much more isolated, and usually mere minor parts of more generally focused interests in either geography, biology or so-called ”ecological awareness”).
* a successive (but still far from fulfilled) re-abandonment of official culture.
In a way this was the starting point of surrealism, but rather soon the antagonism softened, and it was for many decades (and sometimes still is) nothing out of the ordinary to have members ”double-organised” contributing more or less the same type of the work to the art market, literature market or academia on the one hand and to the surrealist movement on the other hand. Of course this involves partly tricky questions about the nature of work, and about the ability of poetry to function even in coopted settings, where different groups and different individuals will keep assessing the priorities differently. What I’m suggesting here is merely that after Breton’s death the pendulum has been on a backstroke, with more new surrealists keeping the distance to official culture than striving for recognition and market shares…
* a recognition/appreciation of the surrealist aspects of popular culture,
which of course was partly present for a long time, but first made an irreducible part of the surrealist sphere of interest by the comprehensive investigation and agitation by the Chicago group in the 60s and 70s.
* Music,
a sphere made impossible to keep dismissing with a lazy quote of de Chirico’s and Breton’s (partial) lack of interest, by the number, scope and frenzy of surrealist interventions and investigations in recent decades. These concern the surrealist aspects of popular music (part of the previous point), to a lesser but still significant extent the surrealist inspiration of many 20th century composers, but most of all, the musicking of surrealists themselves including emphasizing the analogies between automatism and musical improvisation, between musical and poetical communication, etc. (Apparently, the partly analogous field of dance remains a minor topic)
* Politics.
Most surrealist groups have made some bad experiences in this field and ended up in defending the good old baseline of emphasising the politically revolutionary aspect of surrealism together with the movement’s autonomy visavis all purely political revolutionary organisations, and the freedom to associate with such in a non-sectarian manner to a lesser or greater degree in accordance with one’s own assessments of present necessities. This is fine, especially in comparison with all these mostly isolated and more or less bitter individuals who think that surrealism abandoned revolutionary politics on the whole; but still not sufficient. A lot of us have also seen the old quarrel between the two classically available alternatives of anarchism and trotskyism as totally fruitless and these alternatives in themselves clearly insufficient or even entirely outdated, and that a non-sectarian revolutionary attitude today must include an openness towards new means of struggle and more recent original theories.
* Critique of the image.
Again partly as a result of the reintegration of situationist critique, but also as a part of the general retreat from official culture and a direct response to the present overflow of all kinds of imagery stemming from the commercial sphere but effectively colonising larger part of the mind and the social; several groups (but not all) have been emphasising the need for vigilance and suspiciousness in this area and the futility of merely contributing to this flow as if nothing happened.
Some of these may not be part of the development of surrealism on the whole but belong to only certain cultural contexts, while on the other hand there may be things which I have omitted, either simply not being able to discern them or believing them to be confined to only certain cultural contexts while they are actually better regarded as parts of the development of surrealism on the whole.
Some controversial issues require more international discussion; I did put the critique of the image on the list because it appeared to be a dynamic force that united several points of activity a few years ago, but the discussion appeared to halt prematurely, just like the discussion over religion and notions of sacredness at the same time, which was perhaps even less conclusive but partly recently made topic by Ducornet’s initiative of reissuing the 1948 antireligious tract and the subsequent call for new positionisngs from the Paris group. At the same time, there is a whole field of ”anticlerical (or even profane) mysticist” practices paralelling and even tangenting surrealist focus on the imagination which is largely unexplored by the movement. I’m sure there are individuals in the movement who are more oriented than others in this and have suggestions for what currents and writers of recent or contemporary occultism/magic, unorthodox psychoanalys/ psychology etc that are more worthy of studying than others.
The attitudes towards science remain to be thoroughly discussed. There are two types of questions there. First the fascinating perspective on reality and the immense number of startling discoveries and poetic details made available in, for example, particle dynamics, spacetime theory and the whole of quantum physics, scientific cosmology and astronomy in general, metereology, systems ecology and microbiology, evolutionary theory and genetics, plate tectonics and geomorphology, quaternary geology and palaeoecology, cladistics and probability theory, cybernetics and general linguistics, etc (as I’m personally able to gather many examples only from the biological and geological fields and not other ones, I’ll leave that for some other occasion). All fascinating, but also partly coming into conflict with con-victions held dear in the surrealist tradition.
Second the focus on methodology and epistemology. How many remember today that the surrealist watchword coupure is actually Bachelard’s description of the leap from prejudice to scientific thinking? Actually there is so much to gain in adopting the methodological stance; to design ones projects specifically to be able to give results regardless of ones prejudices, to always ask how things can be known and investigated rather than if they feel true or false, to abandon faith and custom to be able to identify anything novel, unexpected, counterintuitive etc. In a sense this has always been a part of the core of surrealism, but there is very often a distinct sloppyness in methodology, a tendency to stop halfways and jump to conclusions from there, very often in order to artistically or literarily exploit the investigation and then leave it behind. I’m not saying we should all become scientists (though it would be fun!), simply that there is a lot to gain from straightening up the methodology and pose epistemological questions.

The nature of the traditional allegiance to hegelian philosophy and freudian psychology (despite their continuing relevance!) and the superficial rejection of the whole poststructuralist sphere (despite its many deep flaws!) is something that seems partly shaky and demands a critical discussion in the movement, also being the perhaps most concrete aspect of an the apparent lagging behind in theoretical issues. Antihumanism is actually one of the most radical pillars of modern poetry on the whole, present in surrealist ludic/collective/”mediumistic” practices but very often discussed on only the most shallow of levels or even denied; it remains a critical issue for the surrealists to develop a relevant understanding of specifically in this period. Issues posed by for instance feminism and queer theory, of intergender power relations, microlevel democracy and social domination issues on the whole, have certainly advanced and reshaped the movement during the period, but in these issues the surrealist movement very often seem to be lagging a little bit behind other parts of society, in spite of having some extremely radical perspectives to offer; why it is so certainly demands a discussion. Partly this overlaps with the necessity to refocus on eroticism and its potential and pitfalls in present society where the configuration and role of sexuality is partly much different from in the days of classic surrealism. While we´re at it we could also need some fresh perspectives on the role of love.
In all these questions surrealism should have something to say, and possibly a lot of us would be capable of reaching some common understanding of the present necessities. In several of them there appeared to be a broader discussion on its way a few years ago. The difficulties at the time of organising the publication of the international surrealist bulletin seemed to postpone the discussions. (Of course it’s possible that the discussion kept on, only we were much out of circulation; in that case, we’d be happy to see the developments!) Anyway, during the years, digital communication has become increasingly available and reliable, so we should be able to carry on a serious discussion more swiftly now, shouldn’t we?







Mattias Forshage (5)


Notes:
(4) We were very happy to find this course shift acknowledged and emphasised in Michael Richardson’s and Krzysztof Fijalkowski’s anthology Sur-realism against the Current.
(5) The text has been thoroughly discussed and largely approved (but not necessarily in its entirety) by the Stockholm surrealist group and also incorporating important comments from Merl Storr of the SLAG group