Life as a polygone

(I was re-reading some of my books about isolated Swedish romanticist poet Stagnelius.)
One of the many theorists who've gone through a bit of a reevaluation through the history of surrealism is old Platon (for some reason known in English as Plato). If in the earliest days he was briefly hailed for his lack of realism, for most of the classic years Plato was considered to be on the idealist, confusionist, religious side. Since the 40s however (with a case made by Jean Brun, among others), many individuals within surrealism have found his writings inspiring and greeted him as a partial precursor.

The surrealists' main forerunners in the tireless effort to find forerunners are of course the romanticists, and they had a clearer stand on the philosopher. Or did they? In romanticism, the literature historians show us there is two very distinct ways of advocating "platonic love".

One view is the one clearly advocated by Platon (though I wouldn't want to go into polemics over this, since I am hardly a Platon scholar and have no wish to become one), where hailing the beauty in the physical world, including indulging in carnal love, is in perfect continuity with pure spiritual love, and there is a spontaneous progression towards the pure idea. For the romanticist activists, this idea often took the shape of a radical shortcut, the "immediate transcendentalism" that sees earthly love as directly holy and a part of the absolute and of heavenly order. This is of course close to various brands of radical mysticism, and when dislocated into an atheist framework, basically a surrealist attitude.

However, among romanticists, this platonism competed with the reinterpretations of late antiquity, where especially Plotinos (known in English as Plotinus, in French as Plotin) is famous as the main proponent of "neo-platonism". Plotinos saw a radical break between earthly beauty and ideal beauty, and not just a break but a contradiction, so that earthly love was a deadly trap keeping our soul from seeking its true destiny and pleasure in the ideal world. The radical denunciation of matter in the gnosticist movement is a clear parallel here, while the magic and ritual practices connected with classic hermeticism at least partly seems to redirect the attention to the material world once more.

Classic hermeticism was revived by Italian renaissance philosophers, who connected its classical texts with neoplatonism and studied Plotinos. Yet again, matter came sneaking up, and hermetic philosophy became an important tradition in Europe only in conjunction with the material work of alchemy imported from the Arab world. Classic alchemy of course is all built on a polarity between the high and the low, but more than anything on transformation, and specifically the transcendental potential thus present in whatever is low, and of patient and careful interaction with base matter. Again, a reinterpretation in terms that we may perhaps recognise as overlapping with surrealism.

In romanticism, we see a rather clear dividing line between more platonic and more plotinic temperaments. Organised revolters and visionaries like Novalis and Schlegel have a more sociable mind and a more "platonic" temparement which tends to ascribe a holiness to earthly love because there is no contradiction and earthly love is indeed everything but merely earthly. On the other hand there are the loners, the tormented, who see manifest beauty as a burden which needs to be overcome for higher goals to become visible, and who may for example visit prostitutes to handle their lowly drives in the hope of clearing their minds - Stagnelius is a prime example, going between a gnosticist and a plotinistic expression, with a powerful poetry emerging in the tormented contradictions over love, but without a hope for love (nor a place for women). Loners are typically good at abysses and bad at perspective.

Surrealism is basically romantic, but has an opportunity to be a lot clearer than romanticism on a number of issues. The basic surrealist attitude towards love, as expressed throughout the history of the movement as well as its poetry, got its classical formulation relatively late in Benjamin Péret's "Noyau de la Comète", the essay introducing his anthology of sublime love. Péret's insistence on refusing to separate the sensory and the ideal, the carnal and the spiritual, forms not just a pregnant formulation of the attitude that has been intuitive elsewhere, and thereby forms a sort of a demarcation criterion for love in the sense of historical surrealism. And famously, Breton (in Arcane 17) suggested that the major breaks in surrealism can be regarded in terms of attitudes towards love. Indeed Aragon's libertinism, Eluard's hypocrisy, Artaud's disgusted gnosticism (a radical 20th century cousin of Stagnelius), Dalí's aristocratic fetishism, all fall short of the hope connected with love; all failing to reconcile the carnal with the spiritual and failing to connect real practice with ideal notions, in one way or another plotinic rather than platonic, if you will...

But the major point with love is hardly to defend distinctions, but to dismiss its reduction to one or the other practical purpose, whether it is to find an outlet of supposed biological drives, to receive recognition in the eyes of others, to build up a modest defense against frightening loneliness, or to fulfill ones bestowed destiny and raise a family. Love should be expected to be always transformative and impractical. And that is why it is the sibling of poetry.


MF

ethics

Unused polemic

Surrealism is well-known to be a movement focusing on moral questions, most easily seen in its insistence on strategic as well as spontaneous refusal, abstentionism, rupture and excommunication visavis conformism and its agents and the demands of the public sphere, but more generally at heart of the very project as this concerns an experimental search for ways of facing the demands raised by the notions of generalised poetry and therefore of a revision of all human relations.

There is something rather unique about surrealist ethics, and that it is that it is rigorous and yet dynamic; because it is uncompromising, poetic, collective and discoursive; meaning that it is as radical as possible based on a dialogic assessment of the possibilities and demands of poetry applied in everyday situation (or I should say poetry and its supporting disciplines love, freedom and imagination). It can be extremely harsh because it puts faith in collective morality, and therefore may sanction individual deviation (Note: sanction primarily by excommunication which is the most relevant and strongest form of sanction available in an anarchic community based on collectivity.) whenever such deviation puts an absolute faith in individual reasoning as opposed to collective, and in the already known opinions and preferences as opposed to the unknown (such as in boneheaded egoism, daliism, mere eccentricism, etc), or in the letter as opposed to the spirit (such as in dogmatism and retrospectivism - pastoureauism, resigning 60 year old manifestoes, or writing a catechism), simply because such individualism and dogmatism is always a breach of solidarity with the unknown and therefore being antipoetic. It is therefore necessarily collective but still individually applicable, but it is always a question of an enquiry into the possibilities of situations via different individuals' individual and often intuitive assessment of the particular possibilities of refusal, departure, creative manifestation in particular situations.

(This is of course all opposed to ethic practice in artistic currents and in the cultural sphere in general which is nothing but careeristic ultrapragmatism (sometimes with a more or less arbitrarily chosen question of engagement for public image purposes), and to both the activist ethics of duty and selfsacrifice under the instrumental agenda, and the ultraradical ethics of for example situationism, mostly just competitively striving for formulating the most radical critique possible in a vein of absoute negation which has no immediate practical implementation at all and therefore leads to intellectual selfrighteousness, ordinary activism or mere inactivity.)

In what sense is surrealism urban? (sketch)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MF

Conclusions from Dominant Image of the Day game of this summers London festival of surrealist games

Mattias Forshage

(...)



(simple intrapolation:)
There are numerous missing eggs, as so many of the sites are occupied by other sphere-shaped objects;
armadillo-like ceratocanthid beetles, drops of mercury, toy footballs
bouncing back and forth in the middle of the street avoiding the football goals on the sidewalks
But the brain tumor in spain rests safely,
watching three romani girls calling for Clas Livijn and other exotic names.
It is not one of them but the woman who guards the tower who wears this breast face with sunglasses on her chest, which is reflected in the setting sun.
Danvikstull bridge is lowered to bridge the gap and madmen rush forth.
Some of them are caught by the crouching cats or hidden mantises.
East Kungsholmen is a pigeons head, and everybody’s playing in the stairs.
You can’t tell anymore who are the madmen.
It may be one of them who is a stunningly beautiful chinese woman,
waking up in the smoking pavilion
almost touched by putrefaction and pinched by portability
she manages to climb onto the roof of the pavilion and sits there,
in, as the roof blocks the noise of the other madmen,
a euphoric silence



(the predictable psychological-sexual interpretation:
Most of the images in this series and a lot of the associative material deals with fertility (but even more infertility), freedom, play, putrefaction, beauty, rest, transgression. It’s possible that any longer series of images chosen would converge on something like that, since they are issues likely to trigger one’s attention.
The eggs and pigeons are the two recurring or significant elements that stand out as more unlikely and thus more informative. On the symbolic level, both relate to peace; while the egg is more on the holistic and productive side, and the pigeon represents an individualistic-irresponsible freedom. Egg is reproduction and mystery, pigeon is lack thereof. Of course both are also associated with the overheated reproductive behavior of most birds (extreme stress, extreme overproduction, extreme mortality rates), and both produce several different associations to circular patterns of nature (involving putrefaction or not).
The notions of infertility and freedom are part of the bachelor machine concept, but other parts of it, such as the repetivity, are here lacking. A (relative) sense of isolation is also to be seen here, but one obviously conditioned not only by a deliberate relative isolation of my general living (the bachelor state as such, the devoted researcher) but also by the specific relative isolation brought about my my hard regular-hours full-time work this specific period. It is remarkable that the imagery of abstinence/impotence (not only the isolatedness in itself but specifically the missing eggs, the two different bags of garbage, the carcass, the armadillo defensiveness) related to this state do not trigger masturbatory imagery to a larger extent (only in the games in the stairs and in the football game over the road). There is one image sticking out it a little where it triggers a triumph fantasy infantile in its banality (the cat suddenly striking out). But in most cases there is an imagery of sublimation, which is always open for interpretation in a selfdestructive sense (castration) or a communicative sense (poetry). If the smoking pavilion is an indication of isolated homunculus-making in the athanor, it is nevertheless one sending out smoke signals! The individualistic-hedonistic pansexual joys of taking pleasure in remarkable beauty, peacefulness etc must of course be taken in their own right, but in this specific connection also related to my wishes of producing good stories for the game account, and thus naively communicative too. Finally, the drawbridge, the communication from Italy, the adventures in Spain, the playing in the stairs, and the general frame of the festival itself, unambiguously point to the communicative and potentially pansexual aspect of this.
Applied on the series of general themes, I conclude the series of images to depict a vague bachelor machine working and its implied transgression into pansexuality.)



some observations on living:
My results in this game, as well as my determination in sticking to carrying it out, is of course connected to the two weeks of the festival being two weeks which I had scheduled in advance as weeks of intense labwork where I would be learning a lot of new stuff and, adapting myself to the office hours of our department lab assistant, having to go up early every day, like in a normal job. So in a sense, the determination is very defensive, to ensure life a share in spite of full-time work. My tiredness (which is accentuated by the heatwave) and my lack of free walking play a major role in conditioning the results, as so many of the images themselves are from the walk between my house and the station or from the train rides, either in the morning or in the evening (at two occasions even in the very last minute, just before entering my house and being succumbed by the relative death of being indoors…).
I think this is one of the most important aspects of surrealist games, but one rarely discussed; how they represent another organising principle of everyday life. We all arrange different types of compromises with the need to work to make money and the need to fulfill different social duties. Just by any means keeping off that dead repetitivity (masturbatory only in a macabre symbolic sense) represented by the determination in the last instance by work hours on the stress to create ”creative” solutions how to fulfill achievements at work and at the same time social achievements in the field of domestic happiness. And as several of us have experienced, bohemic non-planning is usually not a solution, definitely not in the long run, but actually often not in the short run either, by drawing on and strengthening laziness, sloppiness and personal prejudices, rather representing a Charbybdis to that Scylla.
The paradigm of a solution is of course falling in love, which forcefully replaces any other superordinate perspectives on life on the whole and in the tiniest details, producing meaning in the most diverse activities and making almost anything doable out of mere curiosity in the specific context.
Extended surrealist playing is the experimental application of these mechanisms. As the spontaneous driving force transforming the world is absent, it will usually be less forceful. But it operates in exactly the same way, most things will be interesting to do, merely to see what information they might provide in the specific context actualised by the themes and the association chains of the ongoing game. Thus most of the compromises represented by work or social demands will be doable, because they too might provide something interesting, while they are not allowed to set the general agenda, to become the superordinate organiser of things. And on the other hand, other such work or social duties will be undoable, because they are so ridiculous in the relation to the issues involved in the game and the seriousness it invokes (ideally, we should refrain from those things outside a game framework too, but often do we lack not only the necessary determination but actually any particular reason). Correspondingly, we will also grab more small opportunities than usually, of actually really investigating that unknown street, cellar, cave, glade, starting a conversation with that stranger, going along on senseless initiatives, following up that clue or association, looking into that found note or book, etc; things that are the well-known details of surrealist life in general but which, in practice, always have to compete with the counteracting forces of other concerns, of stress and laziness and boredom and of course some accumulated negative experience – in the game context the question is not raised in the first place. The epistemological imperatives of the game tend to set aside all those mere practical limitations, all these nervous objections, all these psychological obstacles, all these prejudices, which constitutes personality, (which are usually given free reign under bohemic circumstances!) and make us take part in the great game of enjoying another sense of civilisation.

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

Appendix: The Scream in the Sack (1999)

I
We denounce capitalism. Capitalism is a system of exploitation and
oppression poisoning the social relationships in every meaning. Bourgeois
ideology is polluting the mental climate with its enstupiding and
mendacious image of reality and its contempt for human thought and
inventive powers.

II
We reject everything that restrains the full realization of human life.
This life is being stolen from us before we learn to know it. We only
vaguely discern it through traces of freedom, beauty and excitement.
Surrealism is split as it is inspired by split experiences. We want to
expand these fragments and place them in a context; more reality. It is
also a struggle against the narrow-minded thinking that only pays regards
to that which is utilizable in short terms and superficially well-known.
This thinking separates us from each other and from imagination. We find
glimpses that inspire to action in evil, the incomprehensible, utopian,
mad, raving, contradictory, etc, but also in the good, the banal and the
worthless.
It is not a question of ranking, but rather to open up for the totality of
all possible wishes.

III
Surrealists have devoted themselves to philosophical, political, artistic,
moral and scientific preoccupations, but surrealism cannot be reduced to
any of these. Surrealism is a tradition which is mediated by people
organised in a movement. A movement which has a specific spirit and
experience. Throughout its history it has always devoted itself to the
poetic phenomenon and its problems, and it has always strived to make
poetry something which is to be found everywhere.
The aims of surrealism take shape in its direction of movement. It thinks
in a utopian way; it tries to imagine all that is desirable. There is a
liberating function in this conjuring and poetic activity: when the
established order is criticized, thought acquires life and the habitual
modes of thought are thrown over. The desirable demands revolt.
Surrealism always begins with the very experience of life. In the tension
between feeling the whole pain of misery and experiencing the marvellous,
surrealism subsists in its entire ache. A permanent concern of the movement
is to explore, with all means, man with all his creativity, misery and
freedom, his social and antisocial inclinations.
Surrealism instigates and plants new mental disturbances.

IV
Surrealism may not be original in its radicalism, its enlightenment or its
romanticism. But it has four characteristics that may be unique: its
collectivity, its counsciousness of tradition, its moralism and its
epistemology.
Collecticty, consciousness of tradition and moralism all attack the
individualist ego. By placing oneself in a certain connection one disturbs
and puts aside the reign of the ego. In that way surrealism is the very
opposite of an individualist culture where associations are made only to
serve the personal interests of the individuals.
The surrealist community wants to constitute an embryo of a society. This
sociality is based on the fact that the combined individual energies can be
surpassed and what is more also take genuinely unexpected routes. What the
critique against the individualist ego is all about is letting loose the
revolutionary creativity and poetry that arises between people, not
discipline and schematic solidarity.
Surrealist culture is marked by attention, filled with desire as well as
conflicts, on the lines backwards. It is about assimilating experiences
from about thirty countries and eight decades of creation, research and
activism in the framework of the surrealist movement. And also to
continously discover an ancient tradition of profound spirit of liberation:
the "presurrealist" tradition of artists, thinkers, prophets, poets and
movements, possessed with imagination and radically romantic. Not the least
it is about tracking such a tradition within ones own linguistic and
geographical area.
Various stands taken during the history and daily life of surrealism make
the collective a moral instance. Not in the way that the group dictates the
actions of its members. But group activity offers an opportunity for a
basic repudiation of the established order, for greater radicalism and
acuteness, through support and criticism; it offers a chance to preserve
decency and dignity.
This is particularly difficult and interesting when it comes to the sphere
of culture in its narrowest sense. Art, litterature, music or criticism are
mere expressions among others that some of us devote themselves to –
expressions in which we place a great deal of the specifically surrealist
hope. However, as a market and a structure this cultural sphere only
disseminate a more prestigious variety of the same indifference, the same
illusory alternatives and the same publicity for the established order that
mass media do. In relation to this individual surrealists of course choose
different alternatives of acting. But surrealism itself remains in total
opposition to bourgeois culture with its ballyhoo and campaigns, its
institutions, its prestige, colleagiality and pie-throwings.
On the moral-political level surrealism to a great extent is about
restraining daily politics from becoming the only politics. Revolutionary
struggle contains much more than the most short-sightedly burning
questions, which often lead to propagandism, censorship and social realism.
By stressing morality surrealism also constitutes a base of resistance
against the moral reaction: against family, against nation, against
religion, against puritanism.
The epistemology of surrealism attaches much importance in retaining the
ambiguous in opposition to both common sense and common knowledge that
strive to make the world unambiguous. In combining dialectical and
analogical thinking surrealism sees the most human, playful and lively path
to knowledge.
Analogical thinking: interpreting the world and existence through
comparisons in line with old mystical patterns. Yet still to do it without
metaphysical pledgings; to make oneself available to experiences,
systematically explore, only not believe (in god, transcendent realities,
the soul etc).
Dialectical thinking: to cultivate a historicizing conflict perspective. We
also advocate a critical scientism (or rather pseudo-scientism since it is
a question of taking up characteristics of science without partaking in its
culture), i e experiments, analytical mentality, carefulness in observation
and interpretation, matter-of-fact documentation, self-criticism. But all
of this together with anti-academism, moralism, poetic sense, activism and
a respect for peripheral, enigmatic or accidental ways of knowledge.

V.
(Art has never been a major concern for surrealism, least of all today when
art as a sphere is obviously degenerative and devoid of poetical spirit,
and furthermore exploits human freedom and creativity. We turn against the
institutionalisation of human creation for the benefit of the few, and
instead want to put forward the possibility of art forming independant
collective research projects. Facing the inflated artist role we react as
the man in the street: the stupid, the sterile and the pretentious doesn´t
get better just because it is called art. The feeling that the world is
richer than we see is a concern of everybody, and of art. We would like to
be able to describe our standpoint in relation to today´s art, but do not
succeed in summoning enough interest.)

VI
The surrealist tradition can be regarded as the continuation of a spirit
uniting a set of traditional themes: mad love, the strange content of
dreams, the glimpses of poerty in everyday life, chance phenomena (meagre
ones as well as gracious). Other important areas are automatism, games and
experiments, eroticism, drifting.
Can we expect something today from these classical surrealist themes and
techniques? Previously for several of us they appeared as magical machines
with the power to replace the entire economic, philosophic and esthetic
spheres. Today however we take care not to see them as solutions, even
though they keep conjuring up unexpectable and marvellous things.

VII
We also find it self-evident that surrealist activity today and in Sweden
cannot be just anything offered by the tradition. In the same time as we
try to problematise our conditions, spontaneously the things we do have a
certain direction, that may appear in part original in comparison with
other surrealist groupings. Still it´s rather different emphasizes and new
conclusions from the tradition than with breeches with it.
Above all we have a strong inclination towards the concrete and material,
the sensuous and documentary. Not the least our eagerness to shun all
religiosity and estheticism has made us focus on the materally given. More
reality; discovering what there really is in the streets. Searching details
and connections, now in a notoriously systematic way, now intoxicatedly and
inspired, now clumsily random, emphasizing the inexhaustability and
liberating potential of reality.
The same hope we place in the imaginary images; just because they too are
concrete, sensuous and obsessive. But we also want to emphasize that these
images are not necessarily visual, which they usually are in surrealist art
and writing, but just as well audial, tactile, or in the form of a
participation in the matter of objects and even more in the matter or
physics of languange.
Our aim always to emphasize the materiality and immanence of the poetic has
made us put a stress on that cornerstone of the surrealist tradition which
is games and drifting, and on the interest in objects and in the city.
Furthermore we turn with curiosity to nature and to a base materialism
emphasizing the useless and worthless. While the achievements of the
surrealist imagination and imagery easily have permitted themselves to be
used by official art and litterature, and even more by the advertisment
industry, we know turn our eyes towards the remains, the totally alien and
the useless.
Most concretely this has been manifested in an exploration of the worthless
places of the city. But its also connected with the emphasis on more
reality in a stress on the human. As an answer to the extension of the
personality market, where we are encouraged to design our personalities and
lead our lives as business concepts, we find today greater reason than ever
to threaten, deceive and harass the ego, expose ourselves in our human
contradictoriness, unmanageableness and why not ridiculosity, to expose us
to the play of coincidences, the emptiness of laziness, the anxiety of
deviation, the imperatives of collectivity, the compulsions of creativity
and the aberrations of reality.
The formula will be, first as last, more reality.

(left unsigned by the surrealist group in Stockholm, published in LUCIFER, Stockholm 2000)