Closet decades and flowerpot vikings

In February, CO Hultén passed away. At this time, he was the last surviving member of the Imaginisterna (imaginists) group that was crucial in surrealist painting and networking in Sweden in the 40s and 50s. Less than a year ago, Gudrun Åhlberg (-Kriland, -Holmstedt) and Bertil Gadö had left us, as did their initial ”secretary” Helmer Lång, and only few years ago Anders Österlin.

Hultén was a very active painter, sharpminded and opinionated, up to a remarkably high age, and he is sadly missed. For such a long time, Imaginisterna was the closest thing to a proper surrealist group that had existed in Sweden. Nevertheless, it must be noted that this was still a mere painter group for mutual help, networking, publishing and exhibiting, and thus far from a surrealist group in the full sense. But such are groups are not only rare on the geographical scale, in Sweden, but it should also be noted that in fact the 50s surrealist organisation was at its lowest ebb globally.


For most of its history, Hultén was the prime motor of the Imaginisterna group, but its origins were a joint effort by Hultén and Svanberg, and the disagreements between the two play a crucial role in the early years of the group. And since Svanberg is the more famous painter, in the world, in the country, and in surrealism alike, Hultén’s role has sometimes gone unnoticed. Instead of writing another Hultén obituary, I will here take the opportunity to talk a bit more about surrealism in the 50s, both specifically as regards the case of Svanberg, and concerning degree of organisation.

C O Hultén (1916-2015)

Invisible international: surrealism in the 50s
The remarkable upsurge in surrealist activity in the second half of the 40s, the number of surrealists and surrealist group and groupings and the number of countries where it was present, very quickly ebbed. The surrealist coordination office Cause had failed to establish itself, very many of the new groups and initiatives had coordinated themselves either in opposition to or in willing isolation from the main movement. The stabilisation of the political and social situation after a precious few years of unsettled questions after the end of the war involved the instalment of a more or less open dictatorships and other repressive regimes in a number of countries, and a climate of ideologically triumphant rationalist-consumerist liberal democracy in others. Surrealist activities in Romania and Egypt had been effectively suffocated, members going into exile or simply quitting; surrealist activities in Czechoslovakia and Portugal went clandestine and maintained radio silence; surrealist activities in England, Canada and USA simply stopped. Contacts with Japan and the whole of Latin America were sparse and activities informal and/or isolated. Only in Belgium there were, like in France, a confusing diversity of groupuscules claiming surrealism’s heritage and occasionally bantering with each other, but in Belgium they were all more or less ”post-surrealist” and more or less no one defended surrealism wholeheartedly and kept up international collaborations in its name.

In fact, there wasn’t a single ”surrealist group of NNN” outside Paris during this whole decade, except for a few shortlived and fairly isolated experiments! The surrealist group in Paris was indeed alone. It had a number of friends scattered all over the world, and André Breton together with others (notably Etienne and Pierre) were still struggling to find the new artists that provided new revelations of the spirit – often successfully, but typically in the form of single exceptions.

While such an experimentation went on on a collective level in the networks that had more or less branched off from official surrealism in the organisational decantation processes in the late 40s; the various (interlocking) networks of cobraists and postcobraists, informalists and lyrical abstractionists, automatists and nuclearists, imaginists and bauhaus-imaginists, etc… Through the 50s, it was Jaguer’s new network Phases that gathered and connected the largest number of nodes, and most of the most still relevant to surrealism, of them. Others were gathered in the Situationist International in a more sectarian, spiteful and hyperradical vein. And we could acknowledge the Popular Surrealist Tendency (TPS) as a more isolated rallying point. And the Pataphysical College as a more diluted and non-committal one.

The surrealist group in Paris, the persevering keepers of the flame as organisational center and pole of continuity of surrealism itself, was more isolated than it had ever been since surrealism started spreading over the world in the second half of the 20s. The French surrealist journals of the 50s typically have news bulletins when they have received word from surrealists in another country, and this is not very often. So it looks fairly obvious, but was not openly acknowledged, that the truce or close collaboration between the surrealist group and Phases in the late 50s and early 60s, was a fairly desperate move from the surrealist group to become international and connect with whole circles and groupuscules of people rather than the single individual exceptions that showed up at the local café or in art galleries in the local neighborhood. Phases was in fact the loose structure organising circles of surrealists and perhaps-surrealists in Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Germany and Poland…

Well, it sort of worked eventually and surrealism rejuvenated itself with a number of new groups in the 60s and a regained sense of internationalism and a sense of radicalism which was not only in opposition to the current times but also in connection with some of its forth-bursting undercurrents. But here, let’s dwell some more in the more bleak, isolated and secret-society-like 50s…

The surrealisation of Svanberg: invention of the surrealist viking culture
Another thing that characterised surrealism in France in the 50s was how surrealism’s inherent lack of love for Judeo-Christian values and Greco-Roman civilisation led to a distinct fad for the old Celts. Celtic mythology and Celtic art were praised, the group established relationships with scholars of bronze-age Celtic culture, there were even rather farfetched attempts to connect specifically the Celtic spirit with the other big fad of the times, lyrical abstraction in painting. But there was also painting with a more mythological, naive, and if you will ”primitive” spirit that perhaps went more easily with the very old aesthetics, both in the unprofessional art brut sphere and in the post-Cobra professional art sphere.

Max Walter Svanberg seemed to fit right in there when he first exhibited in Paris in 1954. The surrealist group in Paris just loved him, and adopted him as one of the movement’s principal new painters immediately. This is well-known and often repeated. Not as often is the other half of the background acknowledged.

Svanberg’s exhibiting in Paris in 1954 was part of an Imaginisterna group show, but Svanberg had in fact just left the group after a final quarrel with Hultén about the direction of the group. They disagreed about the sense and content of imaginism and about the attitude towards surrealism. They had all rejected the cheap aestheticising Dalí-ism (in Sweden represented by the Halmstad group). But Svanberg identified imaginism with his own splendid mythological vision, and strongly opposed this to surrealism. Hultén (along with the others in the group) on the other hand were busy with trying old and new methods of gestural automatism and pretty much in line with contemporary lyrical abstraction; far less eager to keep up a demarcation towards surrealism.

So this well illustrates how the Paris surrealist group at this time was so much more interested in establishing contact with the isolated exceptional visionary than with the collective stratum that was part of a movement specific to the times. And of course, Svanberg’s universe is a powerful statement in itself, it is entirely visionary, and it combines a sense of the archaic and the naive with preciosity and with fetishisms and obsessions that many surrealists can easily recognise as their own. So this selective affinity is not unwarranted or strange.

What is strange is how it is expressed and motivated. All the major texts by Breton and Pierre about Svanberg emphasise that they interpret Svanberg’s vision as reborn Viking mythology. This is a bold trajectory, a fantasy, clearly without any knowledge about Viking culture, and it is difficult to find anything specific in Svanberg’s pictures to suggest this. The archaic-style naive figuration with a mythological directness, and the love of ornamentation, glitter and the golden colour, yes even some specific patterns, may suggest Bronze Age art, but probably far more some kind of Byzantine-exoticising aesthetics. The Bronze Age-suggesting elements surely made the French think of their own variety in their beloved Celtic heritage. And the traditional exoticising boreophilia in France seems to be still focused on the dramatic stories of the Vikings, so they saw no need to make pedantic distinctions in Nordic history between the Bronze Age and the far later, far less aesthetically productive, Viking age… So since Svanberg was a denizen of the Frozen North, then it was easy to project first their own love of Celtic aesthetics onto Viking culture, and then to project this Viking culture as a setting for Svanberg’s vision. It is arbitrary or very prejudiced, but so weirdly so that it is remarkable, it is even contagious, once the establishment has been made, you start seeing connections…

And it also shows Svanberg’s flexibility in the sense that sure, he was opposed to surrealism, but if the surrealists liked him, even if they strangely called him a viking, then who was he to criticise them? (This could be termed openmindedness, or narcissistic opportunism, depending on where you’re coming from.)

 * * *

So, the 50s Paris surrealists preferred an isolated Martian whom they could make into a sandbox Viking shaman to a struggling collective who were keeping a sense of surrealism alive in the late avantgarde. ”Official” surrealism at the time was pretty much under ”occultation”, a small band of devoted believers keeping the flame alive, in opposition to major contemporary historial trends of course but also at a distance from all the groupings and epicentra that represented more or less of an equivalent of surrealism in a lot of countries all over the world. A secret society. Until things changed in the 60s.


MF

A slippery mirror in a rainforest - the framework of the integrity of surrealism

An adventure plunging into a luscious thicket, appearing to some as a spaceship, others an old locomotive, others a party of explorers on foot, yet others an incredible caterpillar with hares' legs kicking in all directions amidst an echinoderm's spines and gently waving tubules, is the vehicle called surrealism. A vehicle for adventure, exploration, drifting, getting lost, and at the same time a hull creating a favoured space which is an inducer of an atmosphere of poetic dynamism and a creativity beyond control, as well as a glittering skeleton serving as attachment points for the defence of spiritual security.

It is a manner of a devil's contract. We tap into a strange power source by pooling our own resources with those already there. A remarkable sense of communion occurs, in which we turn out to have access to the experiences of all the others struggling in similar yet differently shaped causes in a substantially same vein; all those that do it, individually or collectively, in other places in the world at this moment – and, even more remarkably, all those that have done it through history. And in fact not only since the inception of explicit surrealism in the early 20th century, but also in a chain of selective affinities of the pre-surrealist tradition which becomes visible only a posteriori through the conquering of the vantage point of explicit surrealism, a historical reality which becomes real retrospectively, adding the experiences of hundreds of poetic adventurers, radical romanticists, investigative hermeticists, visionaries and revolt movements to our own.

This is the core of the sense in which surrealism is, and needs to be, a movement, and in which the surrealist tradition and the pre-surrealist tradition are crucial for it. The trajectory of organised surrealism becomes a nexus connecting threads of various colours into a monstrous and marvellous body of surrealist experience that goes far beyond the organised movement, in time, place and designation. This is the objective entity that some authors have misunderstood (Jean Schuster and subsequent eclecticists and academics that have benefitted from the interpretation) as an "eternal surrealism", as if it wasn't only the revelation of these surrealist aspects within explicit surrealism that realised them as an integrated objective fact in the first place. And then surrealism keeps changing through the historical choices made by those who contribute to it, making certain turns, retreats from blind alleys and progress into uncharted terrains, reassessments of emphases, new absorptions, in accordance with what the collected experience seems to demand to retain its integrity in new settings and situations.

Thus, the care for the poetic phenomenon, the stubborn trust in the unknown, and therefore a recognition of the inexhaustibility and irreducibility of creativity, of desire, of imagination and of play, as well as the refusal to limit one's quest to rational terms and to ideologically separated forums, the dismissal of conventional solutions, seem to be a constant core throughout ever new guises. Or, as we are mid-journey, any formulation of the core remains preliminary; both because formulae hardly catch the essentials, and because we are still in the process of investigating what parts can be renegotiated still within a solidly surrealist framework.

This is also a kind of real imaginary collectivity, which makes surrealism a collective adventure even for those who pursue their own projects alone. But then it is a matter of fact that any such struggles will usually find it natural to attempt to pool resources with other human beings physically present, in order to ascertain its manifestation in everyday life rather than separate from it, to ascertain a playful dynamic beyond any single person's control, to set aside particular individual fixed thoughts and arbitrary circumscriptions, and at the same time provide intimate criticism as well as creative challenges. Of course, communication technologies today allow us to collaborate remarkably close with physically absent people, but since this is restricted to the hours when we in a sense withdraw from everyday life to tune in with our communication devices, and since it entails meeting specifically as free-floating yet verbal subject positions rather than as whole open-ended animals and physical spirits, it will never make actual encounters obsolete. Groups today can have an active very wide geographical periphery, but they still need a geographical center.

In order to proceed however, this vehicle that we were talking about must also make sure not to get caught in the vines or melt into the background. In order to stay focused on an uncompromised sense of the unknown, in order to stay aware of the limitless claims of desire and creativity, it remains necessary to refuse all faith in given options and good behavior, to refuse to abandon the right to denounce the current order on the whole. We can live as nonconformists and manifest and support any deviations from given normality, from the recommended comfortable ways of organising life, that we may see or invent and recognise as instances of sparks of freedom, even if only in the preliminary form of deeply felt refusal. As surrealists, it seems particularly crucial to not give in to any compromises on behalf of surrealism, facilitating its reduction to merely a thing within art, literature, individual life philosophies, or politics. Whichever pragmatical choices each individual makes in order to survive, surrealism itself will remain a source of connection and inspiration only inasmuch as there is dismissal of petty careers in its name and of pragmatical restrictions of its scope. It requires to be put into practice ridden of utilistic concerns, in the manner of play.

Thus, this adventure remains at heart an international, collective, traditional, historically changing, experimental, non-conformist, useless, playful and moral endeavour. But the notions of collectivity, of nonconformism, of tradition, and even more so of wasteful expenditure – efforts that don't pay in terms of prestige and money, are intensely outdated in these times. (Tradition and morals may be popular in conservative views where they are seen as monolithic and imposed by fate, which is quite the opposite from their application here as radical instances of selective affinities and nonconformism.) All this contributes to our remaining marginalised, as well as remaining a beacon of attraction.

But it is not a modest undertaking. It is not one of those Hollywood devil's contracts where you sell your soul for fame, money and mating opportunities. It is rather of the faustian type where you do it by inner necessity, for the knowledge (in one sense or another), for the massiveness of the desire. And at one point or another there is a particular strait of Scylla and Charybdis to face, navigating between the rather arbitrary but apparently strongly attractive poles that we can most easily describe as revisionism and orthodoxy.

Revisionism, as if an old idea have an inherent programmed senescence, or if the world would indeed have changed enough for the basic aims that surrealism was founded to manifest, investigate, fight for, to have become obsolete in some fundamental sense. Yes, often surrealism have strikingly missed interesting things in the past, or been sticking to prejudices, or trying out strategies that failed. But it is only through the continued application of surrealist vigilance and the continued devotion to the dynamics of the poetic quest that these can be identified and evaluated. The surrealist project needs to be continuously revised for the purpose of its own aims; if those aims themselves are revised or forgotten there is nothing to provide coherence and one can only end up with a superficial eclecticism based on petty personal preferences or shaky pragmatism.

Orthodoxy, as if things wouldn't have changed at all, or if the original project launched was not a living thing picking up experiences and new choices and curiosities along the way. Yes, very often a consistent surrealist rigor is sufficient to assess contemporary phenomena presented in a frenzied queue. But, consistent surrealist rigor itself is dependent on relying on the experiences of the movement as such and of oneself, empiricism, experiment and especially the curiosity and sensibility to be able to detect the truly poetic and emancipatory aims in phenomena where they have not been demonstrated before or where they have not been manifested before.

Revisionist choices very often motivate a lack of rigor and coherence, eagerness to shady deals and major compromises, and ultimately lack of commitment and honesty altogether. While orthodox choices very often motivate an unnecessary self-isolation and paradoxically loudmouthed shyness about entering into dialogue, and a wilful inability to identify dynamic potentiality in the present situation and contemporary expressions. For both cases, it can be argued that the very nature of surrealism as a historical movement embodying a focal point of very long-lasting aims and desires falsifies those self-chosen limitations. The cause of poetry demands rigor and vigilance, demands to stay true to both the ruptures historically made and to finding novel paths in the present, needs to recognise new phenomena as instances in a magic mirror of its own immutable core.

Maybe it is just all about the contagiousness of this particular atmosphere, the inexhaustible transformations projected onto the interface from who knows where, the mutual recognition and the productivity of the encounter between the vastness of the unknown and the integrity of the probe. The forest around it keeps changing and there are no set coordinates to say certainly in which direction we are actually moving, but we keep breaking through layers of illusions, we keep making the company of ever new flocks of never-before-seen birds, who recognise their reflection in the gleaming skin of the vehicle just as much as the vehicle recognises itself in the diabolic fire of these birds' eyes.

(Mattias Forshage, published in What will be 2013)

Open/closed A response to Alain Joubert's "Les Cartes sur table: adresse aux surréalistes", the opening essay in What Will Be

(Merl Fluin's post from Gorgon in Furs in March)

Alain Joubert thinks that Surrealism is at risk of falling into obsolescence. He may or may not be right about that. In this time of global revolt and unprecedented repression, is Surrealism as a movement sufficiently informed, equipped and strategised to be proactive on the ground? Can we, for example, negotiate our ways safely and effectively through the heavily surveilled and “militarised” zone of the electronic public sphere, on which many of us are now almost wholly reliant for communication with each other and the wider world? Do we even understand the new forms of organisation, autonomy and activism that are emerging, much less know whether or how to use them? Is there a danger that we’ll just carry on exhibiting, Lulu-publishing and blogging away in a version of Surrealism-as-usual until the jet stream finally washes us all out to sea?

The bleak little outburst above is mine, though, not Joubert’s. His essay rests on the bold premise that Surrealism today needs to take some radical action to get its house in order. But his premise is presented by fiat, not argument. The only “evidence” he offers to back it up is a remark made by André Breton to Octavio Paz in 1964: “I doubt that the world that is beginning can be defined as either affirmation or negation: we are entering a neutral zone, and the Surrealist revolt will have to express itself in forms that are neither negation nor affirmation. We are beyond condemnation versus approval.” I cede to no one in my admiration of Breton, but if one is making an argument that the whole Surrealist movement needs to change direction, a single quote from the great man does not quite seem enough to carry it off.

From this starting point Joubert leaps somewhat unexpectedly to Karl Popper, citing his distinction between “closed” societies, which are “magical and tribal”, and “open” societies, which are those in which “individuals are faced with personal decisions.” Hitherto, says Joubert, Surrealist groups have operated as closed societies, enclaves from which forays or guerrilla-style raids can occasionally be made into the outside world. But now, he says, Surrealism should embrace the model of the open society, which is more in accordance with Breton’s statement of 1964. He’s not, he says nicely, suggesting that existing groups should be excluded from the movement. But it’s simply more appropriate these days for the International Surrealist Movement (his capitals) to operate as a “diaspora” of free individuals. This way of operating will also strengthen the movement, because it will lead to a pluralism and proliferation of Surrealist discoveries, a whole host of new, complementary and non-identitarian truths.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think any of Joubert’s argument makes a lick of sense, and not just because of my instinctive incredulity that any Surrealist would really suggest abandoning magic in favour of individualism. For starters, the argument is flagrantly self-contradictory. We’re supposed to be moving beyond negation and affirmation, and yet we somehow have to choose between two kinds of “society” presented as binary opposites – to say yes to one and no to the other. Um, pardon?

And if we take at face value these two “societies” (I don’t know enough about Popper to be able to take them any other way), then it strikes me that a Surrealist group encompasses both of them at once: it is simultaneously tribal and individualist; it is simultaneously about magic and freedom; it is, in fact, a perpetually unfolding dialectic between those two things. That’s what gives a Surrealist group its distinctive character, distinguishing it from a collaborative network on the one hand and a brainwashed cult on the other. The peculiar experience of being in a Surrealist group seems to be phenomenologically difficult for those who have never had it to understand; it’s the thing academic surrealismologists most often get most hopelessly wrong. (I encountered another in a long line of examples at Tate Britain’s recent launch event for On The Thirteenth Stroke Of Midnight, when the otherwise very sympathetic and certainly well-intentioned Michel Rémy revealed a startling incomprehension that a Surrealist group might be anything other than just a bunch of Surrealists who live in the same geographical area and collaborate with each other every now and again.) But it’s weird, and even a bit worrying, to encounter that misunderstanding from within the movement.

Tribalism and individualism, magic and personal decision-making, these are not mutually exclusive, and the Surrealist group is the arena par excellence for bringing them all into play: what is closed is also already open. Perhaps we might try thinking about some of these questions not in terms of Popperian open or closed societies, but rather by considering the Surrealist group as an open system in a Prigoginian sense: exchanging energy and information with its environment, seething with disorder and process, subject to feedback loops and non-linear fluctuation patterns that at points of high intensity can erupt, change and transform into new shapes and even whole new systems.

Maybe the aspects of Surrealism’s socio-political environment to which I pointed in my opening paragraph are pushing Surrealist groups towards a Prigoginian “bifurcation point” when the movement will either disintegrate or be utterly transfigured into something new. In that case, Joubert will have been right that Surrealism today is at a watershed. But I see no convincing case so far to abandon group organisation in the face of it. When push comes to shove, I’ll stand with my tribe,  individually and magically.


MFl

Closed/open

I cannot but agree fully with Merl's piece (above and in its original place), though I might take the opportunity to repeat old complaints and address a wider phenomenon that Joubert's view peripherally tangents: the general provincial (or even patriotic) and nostalgic view of surrealism that reduces surrealism to France, French language, the Paris group, from the 20s to the 60s. Of course this is mainly maintained by academics, critics, art collectors, anti-surrealists and all kinds of passive surrealismophiles, who all want to confine surrealism more narrowly in time and space to something managable, surveyable and collectable and who are unable or uninterested in noticing a deeper motivation in surrealism and the continued relevance of that motivation. For them it is just natural. But sometimes sympathetic fellow-travellers and scattered veterans, even active surrealists, express rather alarming and/or foul-smelling opinions and slips of the tongue identifying surrealism with surrealism in France, identifying French language as the true domain for surrealism, identifying the surrealist movement with the Paris group, identifying surrealism since the 60s with mainly a hiatus in activity characterised by the crisis, upbreak and continued crisis of collective activity in France.
 
Joubert's observations are readable, interesting and worth consideration. There is a point in considering the possibility to rethink organisation issues, there is a point in considering surrealist action rather than surrealist letter, there is a point in emphasising the aspect of active myth, even metaphilosophy (whatever that is) and utopia-criticism, there is a point in reconsidering. When keeping in mind Joubert's lucid account of the 1960s crisis in France we can be sure that he's not unaware as to what is at stake. But it is a pity that he has not really considered the vast experience of the surrealist movement since, outside France and even within France, which is obviously relevant when considering the future of surrealism... I cannot but consider this as part of the same kind of blinds as when Tetrault, Mordant and Saban all campaigned for the necessity for contemporary surrealism of studying the depressed and obscure anthology La Civilisation surréaliste 1976 as if it was the most critical, promising, summarising and contemporary benchmark summary of the surrealist position...
 
Joubert lists a number of hastily sketched questions, some of which are sharp and relevant, others little more than witty aphorisms; some are mere repetitions in the most innocent form of whether we might dare reconsider some traditional views in surrealism which have in fact often been criticised or even abandoned in modern activities the past 50 years, and whether we should consider contemporary movements and lines of thoughts, and modes and genres of expression not common in old surrealism, which have in fact often been considered and sometimes even made crucial parts of surrealist activity in various countries for the past 50 years...
 
And most importantly, outside France, the group as a natural unit for surrealist activity has never come anywhere near becoming obsolete (except for internet artists who don't want to meet at all, and perhaps for some Canadians). [Adding afterwards some links to treatments of the topic at this blog: just above, a few years ago and somewhat later.] Within France, the situation might indeed be more complicated and loads of historically amassed contradictions and complications threatingly hang over any urge for surrealist initiatives, but why choose to consider the hardships and doubts of the liaison and scattered groupuscules in the 70s as more significant and more contemporary than the rich experience of the Groupe Parisienne de Mouvement Surréaliste from just before 1990 to now? Again, calls for reconsideration, reflection and path-choosing will be a handy genre for pointing out problems and possible openings, but will be much more useful if not denying or neglecting experiences made up to now...

MFo

Open/closed/closed - political and other implications of organisational heterogenity

Miguel Perez Corrales who (like me) were on the editorial board of What Will Be, has posted a number of blog entries highlighting various part of the contents, which may provide inspirational glimpses to those who do not have the book. Sometimes the angle is surprising, and I had a rather hard time understanding the point of his criticism of either Swedish surrealist veteran Ilmar Laaban, about whom I had written a memorial article, or of me, in one of the posts. As a historical background to the heterogenity of surrealist organisation in the late 40s, where Laaban was involved in several more or less "dissident" forums, I had cited a number of reasons that were historically important for people not to rally uncritically to Breton at that particular time, and I even said that there was a point with a lot of them. Miguel dismisses them with that they mostly smack of stalinism.

Divergences in the 40s
It is an interesting fact that it was indeed the La Main à Plume and other groups in occupied Europe, which had a certain number of, at the time, left-opportunist quasi-stalinist members (several of whom later developed into actual stalinists) - but also many trotskyists and others -, that were the ones who insisted at the time on maintaining the epistemological project within surrealism that is connected with surrealism's hegelianism and which Breton was largely abandoning in his New York exile. The French group during the decades just after the war were indeed more interested in emphasising the esoteric aspect of surrealism's epistemology and the utopian and anarchist aspect of surrealism's politics, but hegelianism and marxism were part of the outlook of many important individuals and subgroups even in France during those times, and had a substantial revival with the revival of surrealist activities themselves in the 60s. Allowing stalinism a monopoly on Marx's thought is something that fashionable liberals and the most simplistic anarchists do. Nevertheless, isn't one of the most crucial things about surrealism's epistemology to see the broad ways in which a traditional, poetic and secret discipline like hermetism/esoterism overlaps with a systematic theory in the philosophical language about change, identity and meaning such as hegelianism (not without precedents: many radical romantics, radical occultists and symbolists did this)? And isn't one of the most crucial things about surrealism's politics that it has affinities with a broad range of emancipatory and revolutionary movements and may join forces with any such specialised agents for periods but cannot be reduced to either? Most of us agree that it was a mistake to join the French stalinist PC in the 30s, but an understandable mistake which had its reasons, and that it was a much more stupid and hardly understandable mistake to do it the 40s (though many surrealists out of respect for the Belgian surrealists or for Jaguer or for Jorn would excuse that too). But this is another question than that of abandoning a systematical theory on society and history (marxism) in favour of some timeless principles (anarchism and utopianism), or abandoning an explicit poetical, epistemological and metaphysical philosophy in 19th century terms (hegelianism) in favour of one obscurely expressed in "timeless" renaissance, medieval and late antiquity terms (hermetism). In both those cases it's not about betting on one horse for the moment, it is more about investigating overlaps and complementing possibilities or of failing to do so. It is also another question than that of either trusting Breton whatever he says and does and wait for him to tell you how the surrealist movement should be organised after the war, or critically considering Breton's position and choosing yourself how to organise. The latter is not less surrealist than the former, and is of course in no way stalinist by implication... We could even note that Breton himself, always an intelligent man regardless of whether one thinks he may be criticised or not, was not sure how to proceed with organisation after the war and famously pondered the question for a couple of years before he relaunched the old surrealist group at the insistance of many of his friends. The plethora of surrealist journals, grouplets and networks in the mid- to late 40s (and also the vast number of adherents rallying to the relaunched group) is indeed one of the most fascinating things about the history of surrealism.

Ilmar Laaban arrives at the Bureau of Surrealist Investigations in Stockholm in 1986

Stalinism 
Then it is a completely different thing that Laaban of course had no sympathy whatsoever for stalinism. Refugees from the Baltic states in the 40s rarely had! It was not the least his activity as a Trotskyist in his youth in Estonia that made it necessary to escape Soviet occupation. While in Sweden he quickly started increasingly leaning towards anarchism during the late 40s. And made it a point, anecdotally, to refuse to stand as a member of the editorial board of imaginist journal Salamander for one issue where one writer insisted on a point which could be considered stalinist in an article about Mayakovsky.
 
But then, I also fail to see any particular "rationalism" in the positions of Waldberg (nostalgia for interwar surrealism, a dash of bataillian mysticism, and a good dose of bourgeois art-world-professional pragmatism) or Caillois (uncompromising insistence on the rigor of the quasiscientific aspect of surrealist experimentation, avoiding any pragmatism, and later turning towards a certain aloof poetic mysticism). As far as I know the "humanism" of Matta was an invective thrown at him a posteriori and bore no relationship to the ideological sense of humanism that surrealism would necessarily oppose (Or maybe he himself was responsible of some ambiguous comments about returning the focus to man when recognisable figures re-entered his paintings? Still far from ideological humanism though)...

"Humanist" paintings by Matta...

Bretonism 
Well, of course, we surrealists are used to seeing raging anti-surrealists using factually motivated criticism of Breton as a pretext for presenting surrealism on the whole as completely illegitimate. But does that really mean that anyone who says that Breton can be criticised, speaks in unison with the stalinists and is allied with fashionable antisurrealist academics? No, I don't think so. Personally, I find it important that a surrealist today is struggling with the accumulated experience and ideas of surrealism and of the brilliant pathfinder Breton. His ideas have a bearing on our daily behavior only inasmuch as we are able to scrutinise what is their liberating core sense and what is historical contingency and temporary tactics including misguided tactics and directions. If Breton is made infallible, then he becomes a "great spirit" in the pantheon of minds, which we can feel inspired by at will, but whose experiences are less crucial to our own, whose organisational concerns need not be ours, whose ideas and actions is something more distant from us, which we are left to leave without concern in our daily life. That is reverence and canon; it is not the sense of being a movement.

Mattias Forshage

13

Michel Rémy launched his English-language anthology of English surrealist poetry as On the thirteenth stroke of Midnight, Surrealist poetry in Britain (2013). Just like the bad experiences and failures are usually emphasised by anyone discussing the history of surrealism in Britain, also the historiography and anthologising of British surrealism has a long history of failed projects. Paul Hammond's big anthology never surfaced, Alistair Brotchie's big anthology never surfaced, mine and Jonas Ellerström's big anthology in Swedish never surfaced. Rémy is the one that managed to get a few books out, get his PhD title on it, get a popular overview published (a small, entertaining and not very well edited fragment of the full story), a few coffeetable artbooks, and get recognised as the leading expert. Now the history of the group between 1936 and 1947 has been subjected to numerous overviews with academic, anecdotal or polemical bias, and still not to a detailed critical analysis. While the history of the numerous groups, groupuscules, journals and initiatives from 1967 on, has still not been even decently summarised, much less evaluated. In fact, the single most important published analysis of the latter seems to be a little article by Rémy himself in the obscure surrealist journal The Moment ("The cantankerous sunstroke and prickly wagtail, Surrealist activities in England" The Moment #2 1979), which very few have read. And, judging from the recently surfaced anthology, Rémy himself has not read or remembered what it was about at all.

This poetry anthology is a good poetry anthology in terms of the 30s and 40s. Rémy knows the topic, and the material available is limited, so the selection is rather uncontroversial: there are a bunch of good poems that simply has to be in an anthology like this and very many that hardly could be because few but the overzealous historian finds them readable at all. I could have included a few more poets from these times, but there aren't really any whose omission upsets me. The little section with collective declarations and the other extra material is beside the topic but makes a lot of sense to show another part of the width of the surrealist project and of the activities of the group.

But, lo and behold, after the 40s, what then? Hardly anything! There are very few single later poems by some veterans (Bridgwater, Del Renzio, Maddox, Melly, Morris, Rimmington), and then two (2) younger surrealists added (Anthony Earnshaw, John Welson), one of whom is alive... This is remarkable. An anthology of English surrealist poetry or poets in the 30s and 40s could very well be made, but anyone knowing anything about the existence of surrealism since, would want to make sure to clarify this circumscription in the subtitle of the book, and would not add a couple of token contemporaries, as exceptions to prove a rule or so... Surely, Earnshaw and Welson are important figures in the connection and merit their place in an anthology, but they are out of place in an anthology about 30s and 40s surrealists, and are in fact almost as much out of place as single representatives of later times: both have been working as part of larger networks, and though fine poets they hardly stand out above several others. Does Rémy really think that all the other recent surrealist poets in Britain are mediocre poets who haven't written anything that would defend it's place in an anthology? Not Alan Burns and Ken Smith, not Haifa Zangana, and not even acclaimed John Digby and Salah Faiq for fuck's sake – if poets like Michael Bullock and Roger Cardinal are considered but visiting foreigners, Siegfried de Crescendo and Rattus are considered too obscure, and many others like Stuart Inman, Peter Overton, Kenneth Cox, Anne McGrath, Philip Kane, Merl Fluin, Josie Malinowski and others are just all too contemporary?

In the chronology of this book, detailed up to the closedown of the London Gallery in 1951, a total of three single years are mentioned after that date. The last one is 1979, with a paragraph ending "failure to restructure activities". Earlier in life, Rémy knew that the background to this failure was that through 1977-80 there were indeed a number of ambitious attempts in various guises to restructure activities. And even if you might not want to be too hard on a sympathetic academic and expect him to keep track of the contemporary scene, the groups in London the past ten years etc, you might have expected him to have heard about the launch in 1993 of the Leeds surrealist group. which is usually omitted in academics' accounts of surrealism in Britain, and perhaps simply because they have not conformed to what is perceived as the modus operandi of British surrealism: ravaging internal quarrels and quick failure. Staying together and gathering constructive experience for more than 20 years, isn't that exactly a "success in restructuring activities" in this respect?

So has Michel Rémy been considered the expert of English surrealism for so long that he feels he will get away with anything, and has no need of remembering that which he knew which was chaotic or controversial? Is the thirteenth stroke of midnight intended as when it is already too late?

Mattias Forshage

PS Did someone notice that the two Alans of British surrealism, Alan Burns and Alan Davie, both were reported deceased this very year 2014? Any other Alan waiting to step up and fill their alanine shoes?

Expulse

Cole's take on Expulsion

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

Stuck's take on Expulsion

merdarius

Additional Points about Organising

– turning up more or less randomly in recent discussions:

 

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Interrogation of the 3000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M Forshage

Excursus about Orthodoxy

It is a rather funny and shaky undertaking to write an argument against orthodoxy. It is always easy to win the vote of the laughers and the lazy for whom any call to order, commitment and stringency is a personal threat; while any argument attractive enough can be utilised as a doctrine to avoid own thinking... But trying to steer clear of sophistry, the basic point here is that surrealism is perpetually productive; it is a point of departure that can always produce new suggestions and will always need commitment to find its relevant applications, and any notion of orthodoxy is therefore contrary to its dynamics and rather seems inclinded to enclose it in a preconceived and therefore misleading form. If there is such a thing as surrealist orthodoxy, there are two faces of it that we may encounter here and there.

The most common is a proud retrospectivism, typically seen in aging surrealist artists. For them, surrealism is a thing of the past, but one which lies very close at heart to them personally, and through surrealism they made themselves their name and they made some crucial experiences and often had the best time of their lives. Because of that, they tend to regard surrealism as a rather precious secret, and many who are devotedly interested are welcome to the remaining exclusive men's club of its enjoyers. These people often welcome contemporary surrealist activities because they think it is all about young surrealismophiles trying to approach and revive the spirit of long gone days, while they themselves can become centerpoints and authorities, since they know what the real thing is, in contrast to these youngsters charmingly naive groping experimentation. Of course, this is an obvious misunderstanding of what surrealism is about, but it seems quite "natural" for any old person who is not active in a living collective connection (and who doesn't want to learn any more in life), to look for apparently likeminded company, for admirers and listeners, and for occasions to be the one who knows best. These people typically speak about surrealism and the surrealists in the past tense, "the surrealists always said..." "the surrealists despised..." "surrealism was always against..." and typically the surrealist doctrine thus conveyed is a code of behavior, a rigid set of nonconformist living rules forged in the 20s and 30s and not changed since. They clearly don't think that surrealism can have changed, can be applied on phenomena of later decades, can have a particular relevance in any contemporary situation (except as an eternal reminder of all that's good in art and life, which hasn't changed), can be used as a point of departure for openended experimentation, can be used as a source of inspiration for advanced enquiries and new kinds of revolt... This attitude was in fact a lot more common some time ago, and its decline has natural reasons. It's simply the circumstance that people who have met Breton and the original surrealists, and thus have an obvious argument for claiming they know what it's all really about, are dying off. While their often very sympathetic persons and their often very rich experiences are often sorely missed, we say good riddance to their attitudes and teachings. Those selfrighteous arthistorians and recent-generations-hangarounds that will still propagate such attitudes are far more lightweight and will not bother us more than flies. (1)

The other variety, which unfortunately is not subject to any mechanism of natural decline, is defensive sectarianism. In some centers of collective surrealist activity, it is assessed that the times are so dire that surrealism must be safeguarded against novelties and dilution. A commendable task, but alas so often leading to a certain wilful narrowmindedness, static selfrighteousness and a certain paranoia; ghettoism or sectarianism. Since it concerns active surrealism, it allows for surrealism to have had a historical development, and it allows for contemporary surrealist experimentation and experiences to enter into the body of surrealism. It's perhaps mostly about dismissing certain lines of experimentation that seem farfetched, dismissing the need to be vigilant about tendencies in the contemporary world, and of expecting anybody who wants to contribute to ideally first prove themselves as devoted and knowledgable and unlikely to go astray. I apologise for utilising a logical argument again, but doesn't the notion of orthodoxy imply a certain number of factors: 1) a doctrine that is explicit and coherent enough (or vague, charismatic and flexible enough) to be defended at all times and in a way to provide responses to all questions addressed to it, 2) a trust in one's own capability of deciding what is line with this doctrine and not, 3) a trust in one's own capability of deciding who is in accordance with this doctrine and not, 4) an assessment that safeguarding the doctrine is absolutely necessary; the possible reasons I could think of for this are the following: a) so frail that it will crumble if diluted and misapplied, or b) so complicated that it will not have any objective workings in accordance with its aims if not accompanied at all times by the entirety of its corollaries and the whole of its proper form, or c) so immediately dynamic that it must be kept safeguarded in order not to spill out wildly out of control and make us miss some historical opportunities that we are not presently capable of handling? I don't think surrealism fulfills 1 or 4a-c, and I would spontaneously and methodologically avoid and recommend avoiding 2 and 3 as obstacles to vigilance towards the unknown. (2)

(1) This "type" was discussed in the obituary of Ragnar von Holten. A useful book trying to summarise what surrealism was all about in this vein is José Pierres L'Univers surréaliste 1983 (which in spite of its timeless claims is stuck in a mixture of pre-war prejudices (it is fundamental that surrealism is against music, traditional art from the pacific is superior to that of other continents, etc) and specific french 50s detours (dismissing Hegel, dismissing Marx, dismissing the need for contemporary political action, praising the celtic heritage).

(2) Our closest sparring partners in comradely quarrels about orthodoxy are some friends in the Leeds group (who defend it but regularly are far more dynamic than to fully embody it), but there has been declarations of trust in orthodoxy occasionally turning up in several of the more long-lasting historical surrealist groups and a few of the quite recent ones.

A particular variety is presented when faith in orthodoxy is coupled with an urgency to stay vigilant towards the contemporary situation, and thus allow for one's own radical temporary reinterpretations to be integrated into the doctrine (technically we could call this "orthodox revisionism": what was right yesterday may be totally wrong today and vice versa). Of course this was developed into a fine art close to us by Debord (claiming to have learned it from surrealism) and through the situationists has been reintegrated into a surrealist outlook in some camps (such as the Madrid group's famous ban on images). The vigilance part of this often promotes very interesting speculations; the orthodoxy part of it is extremely difficult to apply without an implied power structure where someone has the authority to make such strategical choices for the whole movement, or a formal organisation of decision-making internationally; both of which are not in accordance with the dynamism and present guise of the surrealist movement.

ps about surrealist groups

To add a perhaps somewhat more pointed tone to the discussion about surrealist groups (Icecrawler october) we could emphasise that there is also a distinction between a group in the widest sense (a pole of communication, collaboration and potential collective dynamics) and a group with a distinct dynamism of irreducible collectivity. Characteristic for the latter is of course that it goes beyond the sum of pooled resources and has a life of its own, a direction, an atmosphere or an explosive power beyond what anyone intended for it ("emergent properties" in the language of modern philosophy and natural science that badly wants to avoid the Hegelian vocabulary of a "dialectical leap").

And therefore, it is important for a surrealist group that it is at all times ready to omit the names of individual contributors – it will sometimes want to list them all for the purpose of the devil's contract, and it will often want to point out individuals as more or less involuntarily responsible for single emissions for the purpose of facilitating communication, interpretation and tracing of personal mythologies, not for achievements; it will always be ready to omit names because it is the invocation of the collective spirit as a creative entity which is the game and the experiment; and as a necessary counterweight to individualist careerism and personality market, individual anonymity is always an attractive option. In fact we could see an important dividing line between those surrealist that still put surrealist activity in the first room and keeps pondering how to implement Nougé's warning that Breton quoted in 1929 ("I would like to see that those among us who are beginning to make a name for themselves erase it") and those who treat surrealism more as a label and a contact network by putting surrealist activity second to their own credentials and individual artistic oeuvre.

And we could add that it is important for a surrealist group that it is at all times ready to abandon representativeness. Even if it the surrealist group from an ontological and historical viewpoint is an instance of surrealism, it will get hampered by this fact if it worries too much about managing the label. The surrealist label gives us access to a wealth of previous experiences and to a vast framework of experimentation and collaboration; but in order to let the ludic collective spirit free in this experimentation it is necessary to sometimes forget the label. Surrealist groups have been known to feel obliged to more or less postpone all actual surrealist activity for the sake of first sweeping the doorstep by trying to correct and attack all misunderstandings and misrepresentations of surrealism first. Considering that this society will keep producing an endless stream of such misrepresentations, such a strategy may potentially keep a surrealist group perpetually in a state of irritating preparations by fighting obstacles that are not necessarily obstacles. Now, in practice, I know of no surrealist group that has actually completely abandoned experimentation, games and creativity for sterile polemics, but there are several which seem to have regarded the latter as the primary collective focus while the former are pursued peripherally, in smaller groups, on spare time or in secrecy. Nothing wrong with secrecy of course, it just becomes self-contradictory to create the misrepresentation of surrealism as being a primarily polemical undertaking specifically in order to rectify misrepresentations.

The Surrealist Group as an Individual and an Organisation, again

1

There has been some discussion as to the different particular characters, the role of such a character, and the circumscription-delimitation, of surrealist groups. A surrealist group is typically circumscribed by a combination of its individual character and its partly implicit "area of recruitment" in geographical and linguistic terms (in fact also in broadly cultural terms, but even less explicitly so). Perhaps this is an occasion for merdarius to restate some points that have repeatedly been scattered in different texts about the nature of surrealist collectivity, and to make some new comparisons and observations about it with the background of the history of the surrealist movement.

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Participation

Membership, for individuals, is of course a matter of participation in activities (most obviously by showing up for meetings and participating in discussions, games, experiments and walks, but including web-based participations, as well as activities that are very difficult to document such as diffuse development of a collective mythology), and of subjective commitment.

The instance of circumscription of membership: being mostly informal yet rigid, often comes up only when it comes to signing. Declarations, tracts, manifestoes, invitations, open letters, closed letters, etc. Often it is only there that various hangarounds, maybe-members, distance-members and casual participants have to step out of the Schrödinger box and define their membership or not. It is the moment of the devil's contract; selling your soul to the cause of poetry and the imperatives of overindividual dynamics, or retaining your personal conditionals (and career opportunities and the supremacy of civil compromise...).

It will turn out that some who are eager to participate in certain projects (for some especially if they involve a certain public exposure: publications, webpages, exhibitions and performances; for some more a matter of social company) will not have that urge to come out as integral parts of a collective ("fellow travellers" in the negative sense, maybe even "parasites") – sometimes with important contributions to make anyway, but always without the particular mutual trust.

It will turn out that there often is a particular class of surrealists who have an intense and well-established individual creativity and often individual mythology, and who do not have much of a collective discipline but will participate in meetings only occasionally, and will contribute to collective experiments and projects only from a particular characteristic viewpoint; still will continue to manifest a solid solidarity and a commitment to poetry which will make their individual contributions an important part of the collective mythology – the members we will keep putting our trust in regardless of whether they respond to particular demands or requests; which is probably the same category as the pataphysical college called "satraps".

Then there are so-called satellites of different kinds. There we have the unproblematic satellites of exiled members, who moved out but stay in touch. Sometimes these will enroll in locally available groups, facilitating special bilateral collaborations; sometimes they will instigate a new collective activity, which will thus partly appear as a bud-off, yet more or less firmly based in the local conditions. Another kind of fairly unproblematic satellites is participants scattered in smaller towns within the general "area of recruitment" in terms of geography and language, who partake as much as physical circumstances allow them to.

Then, the more problematic and theoretically interesting satellites are those scattered members basing their membership merely on "selective affinities". In their case it becomes critical to what extent the groups have an individuality that is distinct (and visible) enough for a lone individual to actually be able to choose what group to "enrol" in. In some cases it will be a case of merely social preferences, or accident, and typically rely on a certain ignorance of the character of other groups; in others it will be a recognition of the real particularities.

But then, most importantly, the most significant members of a group are not the partaking individual human beings, but the partaking individual modes and mechanisms, and the emergent ambiances and constellations of possibilities. The persons claimed or obsessed by this, or simply contributing to it, typically play a significant but subordinate role. In the end the question of membership is often the question of whether someone is actively or passively becoming available for these intersubjectivities and contributing to them, hopefully in a way which is a dynamic encounter for both parts.

3

Sympatry

The individual character of each group (or, as some would say, the "authencity", or, why not, the personality of the individual that the group is, or, technically speaking, its methodological/strategical/interest-range/social-characteristics/irreducible-accidentals profile) is what in practice allows distant satellite members, and it is especially important in cases where groups have overlapping recruitment areas. Very often two or more groups simultaneously active in the same geographical/linguistic area is just an expression of a historical split, which is typically a significant one, and one which means a lot to those who were in it, who are able to move more freely, in separate directions, afterwards, but which often make little or no sense to those who arrive afterwards, who didn't experience the conflict but are rather taught it as a mythology, and who can only choose which group to get involved in by chance factors or by savouring the individual character of each group as long as they are openly discernable. And of course there is the tendency for a polemical situation to be swiftly rationalised so that the differences perceived by participants might be quite other ones (though partly self-fulfilling) than the ones at base.

As an obvious example, the two London groups are clearly different, and some of their differences are quite openly manifest, others hidden; probably some mutual recriminations are misguided and some very accurate.

Of course the situation has nowhere been as complex as in Paris, where there were always parasurrealist or subsurrealist satellite nuclei who stayed inofficial partly by the centrifugal pressure exerted by the presence of the one and only unambiguously official surrealist group. Thus in the absence of that group, especially after the dissolution of the group in 1969 and Schuster's subsequent ban on the label "surrealist" (but to a smaller extent also during the second world war), there was a plethora of groupuscules under various more or less fancy names, claiming part of the historical heritage of the official group or not, very often kept apart by personal enmities, employing different strategies and interest-ranges. Amidst infighting, bad feelings and real difficulties, the groupuscule most adamant at keeping up surrealist activity in a traditional-like way, could still not live up to be a group but designated itself less ambitiously a "liaison". Several years later, when reassuming the group label, again with an accumulative and official ambition yet rigidly circumscribed by a number of contingent historical distinctions and personal enmities, it was not as the surrealist group of Paris (that would have been too controversial but also misleading) but more descriptively as that one among the surrealist groupuscules which is a node in the collaborations of the international surrealist movement (Group Parisienne de Mouvement Surréaliste - GPMS) – perhaps not as exclusively as it might have seemed, but giving a clear hint as to its self-image and its individual character.

But even then, membership in this group has been problematical. I'm not talking about the famous split in three groups in 1995 (later more or less remerged), but about the large number of surrealists and surrealist sympathisers who have liked to participate in surrealist activity but has had various reservations against counting themselves as formal members throughout the entire history of this group, leaving on its tracts a bunch (sometimes impressive) of "amis" of the group listed after the group members; sometimes it's like the actual attendants of surrealist meetings constituted a looser collective (actually with a name, "les alchemistes de la rue Pernelle", since the group's meeting café is on rue Pernelle) with an unspecified relationship to a narrower real group (?). This emphatic separation between participation in surrealist activity and membership in the surrealist group, must be partly based on a general postschusterian anxiety over the surrealist label and partly on particular characteristics of the GPMS that I am unable to analyse from afar; it seems to differ from the usual organisation models and hasn't, as far as I know, been explained.

Quite recently, some people have held forth the "liaison" as if it were an alternative to the group as an organisation model. Clearly, in France it was a defiant-defensive act under circumstances that made explicit group activities impossible (Schuster's ban, diaspora of groupuscules, massive internal contradictions, relative isolation, repression of the ambitions of '68 etc); not something freely chosen as an alternative to a group. As soon as circumstances allowed it, the French came back into a real group, since that is the core form of the historical surrealist experience, and more or less the only form which actually puts the poetic imperatives before personality cultivating and career opportunities.

Core home range

The geographical basis of a group is typically a city, to the extent that surrealism is urban. The French surrealist group has always when existent been based in Paris, the "group of Czech and Slovak surrealists" is at core based in Prague, the Rio de la Plata group with argentine and uruguyan members is nevertheless based in Buenos Aires, etc. However, by analogy with international organisations in other areas (most intimately the communist movement and the psychoanalytical movement) surrealism early showed a tendency to speak in terms of national sections – but rarely actually achieving any organising of such national sections. In some cases the group of a major city claimed to be the movement of the country when counting its individual contacts in other, usually smaller cities (Chicago has done it a lot).

So this is usually more on the level of the "extended city group" than of a real national-level organisation. When it has been about fusing groups in two different cities in a country, this has usually meant that sooner or later the group in the larger city assimilates the group in the smaller city, because the most eager members will be encouraged or determined to take part in as much as possible of the activities of the group in the larger city, while the less eager members will become even less determined, sometimes even actively sifted out by the superordinate group, and actual group activity in the smaller city will cease, or go on in a completely informal and less coherent way.

A classic case being how the Columbus, Ohio group was briefly assimilated en masse into the Chicago group in the 70s; other cases of even smaller groups have perhaps not even been recorded in our internal history as such... A more recent case appears to be the swallowing of the Santander group by the Madrid group? I have no detailed knowledge about Czechoslovakia (currently Czechia and Slovakia), but it looks like activities in Brno (and possibly Bratislava?) have been (repeatedly?) assimilated into Prague-based activities.

A different case is that of the current Athens group, which is more of a fusion between the former Ioannina group and another Athens group, a fusion necessitating a reformulation of the basis for both nuclei and resulting in a truly new group. In fact this is very often the pattern by which a lively group is first formed, on one scale or another. The Stockholm group was formed by the fusion of a trotskyist grouplet and a grouplet of industrial musicians. Back in the earliest days, the first surrealist group was formed as a fusion of the Littérature group and the Aventure group, somewhat later joined by the L'Oeuf dur group, the Rue de Chateau group and the Rue de Blômet group, plus several gravitating individuals. Perhaps it is possible to describe the origins of every single group in these terms; surrealist experimentation may start among a small coherent circle of friends, or a nucleus resulting from a split, but it is only when confronted with another circle of strangers, independently doing something remarkably similar yet strangely different, that a surrealist activity finds its expression in an objective and durable form? But since such fusions occur on different levels it might be difficult to rigidly decide where they have in fact already occurred and where not.

National level

Wherever there are two actual groups in the same country willing to endure, they have typically developed different individual characters, often different enough to take part in different international networks or subnetworks, sometimes different enough not to be recognised by the other as surrealist at all. And it is in this area, concerning the two classic Belgian groups, that we find the perhaps only example where a national organisation of surrealist activity has had any constructive organisational meaning, because if it wasn't for an occasional urge to appear as a national section there would probably have been very little collaboration between the very different surrealist activities in Brussels and Wallonia in classical times.

There were no encompassing organisation in national sections in the 30s in spite of the leninist fad, the few that leaned towards that direction were a bit hanging in the air as there appeared to be no international preference for the particular model; some had occasion to give free reign to the impulse only in FIARI, which nevertheless had very few real national sections but mostly individuals outside France (with the Egyptian section as the luminous exception). In the 40s, the "Cause" organisational effort failed before leaving the ground, and during the postwar decline there was no one around to question the tendency that the Paris group kept calling itself "the surrealist group" and involve as signators of various texts more or less the few individuals in other countries they had contact with (as honorary or satellite members rather than representatives of their countries). Ok, technically, there has been many groups which have employed the designation "the surrealist group" without further specifications, in their respective language, but usually then implying "of this particular place"; not so the French group which obviously regarded itself as "the surrealist group" period. Ok, with somewhat more firm reasons for it than others could claim, being led by the founder of the movement and standing in an interrupted but fairly obvious continuity with the original group, yet hereby implying an ontology not recognising the fact that surrealism as such had become (or had been revealed to be at its core) international.

The different kinds of organisations that were possibly or manifestly the local equivalents of the surrealist group in other countries were at least not formally recognised as such in any kind of over-national structure. On the side there was the Surréalisme-Révolutionnaire, and Cobra, and of course the Situationist International, all formally constituted by national sections (in fact Cobra was constituted not by national sections but by real groups representing countries, allowing for Denmark to be represented by two different groups); in SR and SI, several sections were purely nominal, consisting of single individuals, or haphazard constellations of independent contacts who didn't know each other, or they were ran entirely by exiles in the more central cities; at no point in time there were more than just a few sections who had some autonomy and had an actual collective activity. The "organised international" as an organisational model never became much more than a politically inspired projection space.

International networks and scaffolding

When new activities were reflourishing in the 60s, hardly any attempts seem to have been made on the organisational level to account for or respond to this. Even inside France, by irony of fate, the small Lyon group which might have seemed destined to be swallowed by the Paris group, in fact survived the Paris group in 1969. During the late 80s and early 90s there was this polarisation between an alliance of groups working in a trotskyist style for a rigid "reconstituted international" on the one hand, and an explicitly anarchist dissident network on the other hand. The rigid one consisted only of groups, being official national representatives, but the dissident one was not just loosely associated individuals but also comprised groups (often shortlived groups such as the ExTrance group in the absence of a London group, the Agama Expedition resulting from a split in the Stockholm group, and the Chateau-Lyre group as the then current incarnation of the dissident "Melog gang" keeping its distance from all "officially" aiming regroupments in Paris, the Alabama group whose relations with the "official" Chicago group were deteriorating, etc) as well as subnetworks surpassing national delimitations (like Dunganon and later Droomschaar, and networks of Arabic and Chilean exiles). Many countries had representatives of both, but Swiss, Colombian and Japanese surrealists were all "dissidents", and importantly the Prague group was involved in both networks (while the Phases network apparently was friendly with both but, as always, refrained from taking sides?). Based on the "rigid" initiative, three issues of two international bulletins came out, then came to a halt.

In fact this occured as the boundary was getting blurred between officials and dissidents (consider the various signatories of rather different colours of the 1492-1992 tract! ("...mientran sean los viajeros los que ocupen el lugar de los videntes..."/"as long as tourists replace seers"/"...tant que les voyageurs parviendront à se substituer aux voyants...") Even more odd appears the 1991 tract against Marc Eemans ("Saint-Pol-Roux assassiné!"), signed by a motley international selection including representatives of the Chicago group, large parts of the dissident network, plus the secret remaining Belgian surrealists who were staying out of all international organisation, and the old guard of French 60s ex-surrealists who dissolved the French group and tried to impose the ban on the word "surrealism"!

Around the turn of the millennium, there were still or again tireless attempts to reawaken the international bulletin (which came to nothing), still based on a circle of "core groups", but with the "dissident" milieu largely blended into the official groups, and some of the official groups applying an increasingly self-critical, situationist or in itself dissident outlook, the shining surface of orthodoxy was not just blurred but partly merged into the general environment. Today suggestions along the "rigid" line is brought up again at times, but seem very difficult to implement. I'm not saying intensified communication between active groups would be a bad thing, only that it requires either voluntary-based openness or someone's decision of circumscription. It is probably clear that there is no immediate correlation between how "truly surrealist" or "official" a group is and how active it is. If a few well-established groups are widely recognised as belonging to a core, there is a larger number of groups unproblematically counted in by those groups they stay in contact with but regarded with open suspicion by others; either because of inclusion of "unorthodox" elements, just lack of established record, specific doubts about profiles, or simply doubts as to whether they actually constitute surrealist groups (rather than, i e artists groups or other fora for mutual practical help and co-marketing, local surrealist networks without actual collective activity, nostalgic or wishful structures without much content, one active individual sometimes involving friends, etc).

Languages

In small languages, the language community is often an area typically circumscribing the basis for organising. This is not the case when it comes to English, French and Spanish, each spoken in several different countries and often known by people elsewhere. English, French or Spanish- (+ Portuguese) speaking groups will have to be geographically circumscribed and/or have a very distinct individual character.

Especially in very large cities like London and Paris the main groups will gain a certain accumulative character, and attract several members who have the major language as their second or third language only and sometimes have rather poorly developed skills in it. Consider especially the early history of the French group; Paris was the place to be, regardless of whether you knew French or not, and if you were a surrealist, why shouldn't you hang out with the surrealist group? The French group, as several other metropolitan large groups, has often had linguistically defined subsections of exiles mostly speaking their own mother tongue or some other shared language in small open cells, often physically in the midst or near periphery of wider ongoing activities.

Then of course, French as a colonial language but even more as an extranational language for the educated and liberal elites of other countries made knowledge of surrealism travel fast in the beginning, and was what facilitated establishing of surrealist activities early in Serbia, Romania, Argentina, Egypt and Japan; later the French language made Quebec and Martinique strongholds of surrealism of the New World. Language communities have facilitated collaboration between surrealists in Spain and Argentina, or between surrealists in Portugal and Brazil. (Though remarkably rarely between surrealists in the UK and US). There has been something like international networks of Spanish-speaking surrealists, and briefly (as far as I know) for Arabic-speakers. With French as a second language, some groups appears to have been almost bilingual (publishing in two languages in parallell or in a sequence) and nowadays some groups are almost bilingual with English as a second language. Perhaps the only more fundamentally and complexly bilingual group was the French-English one in New York during the war? But then that group was specifically organised as an international group of largely exiles (war-time activities in other havens like Mexico and England might have been equally babelian), claiming no specificity and just providing a meeting point for those individuals having ended up at that spot.

4

Stockholm group as an example

The Stockholm surrealist group has without any particular consideration about it seemed to find it natural to constitute a pole of organisation for, more or less, active surrealists from all of Sweden (the southern province of Skåne has sometimes had its own epicentra or competing activities), and in fact also scattered heads from Norway and Finland. Notably, the group has never showed an ambition to organise surrealists in Denmark; perhaps this is largely because unlike Norway and Finland, Denmark has a history of surrealist organising of its own (though no recent efforts). The Stockholm group has organised various satellites of all the different categories; a few important "satraps", a few long-standing members exiled in different parts of the world, and also a small number of those with a merely selective affinity. A few of these latter weirdos have weirdly known some Swedish (for unfathomable reasons) but the language has not been a major unifying factor, since so much of the activities and writings of the Stockholm group are in English anyway.

And if we are speaking Swedish, obviously there are people in Finland doing so too, and it is not very different from Norwegian at all, and not so different from Danish. Is there an "ethnic" community? Well, people do speak about "hyperborean" or "thulean" "racial characters" as well as a "scandinavian" "temperament". And we have the general conditioning from cultural forms, national ideologies, and local traditions. Fragments of a shared sense of what is "normal", items of a ridiculous national stereotype which may be real on the statistical level. We are less inclined to recognise all of this, or rather to accept it as something relevant to the aims and instincts that has brought us together under the aegis of surrealism...

Instead the group has a quite distinct individual character. If indeed we started out in "frenzied voluntarism" and orthodoxy, we have nevertheless always emphasised certain things such as collectivity, theory and games, and we've been going frequently in and out of intense focuses on dreams, analytical responses and surrealist organising, and for the past 15-20 years we have continuously emphasised epistemology, objectivity and self-scrutiny, recent years have renewed focus on the imagination, geography, methodology, science, etc. During this we were for brief periods pulled along by the dynamics of certain political movements, of a deleuzian "anti-oidipalism" or a bataillan "low materialism", and of situationism. We've tried very different strategies towards publicity, politics, art and literature, and international initiatives; these do not seem to be constants (but maybe the strategical-experimental attitude towards them is). Our specific way of constituting "personality traits", such as our specific mixture in combining humor and seriousness, polemics and solidarity, openness and closedness, ability and uselessness, silence and noisiness, rush and slowness, soberness and madness, etc, may be far more difficult to characterise, at least for ourselves. And it depends on the angle. People who know us only from our English-language writings have expressed surprise when they meet us and see how much we laugh, while some who meet us in person more than read our writings have sometimes either complained that we drink too little, or experienced us as incurably silly nogooders. As do we all now and then, but then we typically attack it on an analytical level... But we have a strong feeling that our current focus on methodology and its specific methods solidly based in games, imagination, phenomenology and analytical thinking, its strong scientophilic and antihumanistic tendency as well as its silliness and its outbursts of collective and individual creativity, its awareness of the history of the surrealist movement combined with a curiosity towards tendencies of the present, somehow represent something very distinct, something which not only has some clear differences from other groups' approaches but which also has layed bare an objective surrealism in a particular way. Thus, it is possible for some to feel congenial with the Stockholm group's spirit without staying in Sweden or knowing Swedish (and it is possible for a surrealist in Sweden to feel alienated by the group's direction...).

But maybe we are distilling our individual character by not focusing on our native language? We are apparently not much interested in translating things into Swedish for example. Almost everybody in Sweden speak English anyway. Unlike other small languages where it is considered a heroic task to keep the local language alive, among other things by publishing a lively original and translated literature, in Sweden there are few incentives to publish the necessarily very small editions of translations when it is so much easier to read English originals or English translations. Translating something into Swedish is typically more of just an attempted advertisement coup, to try to make the narrowsighted massmedia notice something (and often fail). Of course, translation is fun, and is a good ground for a sometimes very productive intercourse with interesting texts and with languages, but publishing translations all too often seems like a waste of time, effort and invested money. And since we know the subtleties of English less well than native English-speakers, there is perhaps not so much sense in our contributing to translating things from other languages into English either. Maybe we are just rationalising some laziness and the unavoidable bad experiences from the world of publishing here?

And some of our writings may perhaps be more stiff, repetitive and unimaginative than necessary, simply by our more limited vocabulary and more limited fingertip skills in English?

Maybe we are failing to catch on to relevant tendencies of the times, and establishing relevant contact surfaces, and occupying available arenas of subversion, just because we seem, with the exception of certain periods or certain individuals, usually very detached from what is going on in swedish literature and swedish art, and often from swedish politics? Maybe we are simply unable to live up to the necessities possibly imposed on us by a sense of responsibility for being the national node of surrealism? Yet it would seem that to the extent that we actually would be such a node, an important aspect of that would be specifically to not care about all this crap in the midst of it... to choose a direction not consciously as a response to perceived external imperatives but on an overindividual level as the sensibilities and desires conditioning and conditioned by the dynamism of the manifest collective activity as such...

5

This is all about groups being the core of surrealist activity. Only in a group physically meeting regularly there can be the gradual development of a communicative sense of superindividual association, playing, vigilance; only when walking together and playing games at the same table (or same lawn, or whatever) there can develop a particular sense of overindividual organisms which are central to the sense of surrealist activity. I have no understanding (but this might just be my personality) of being active as a surrealist in a place, or even visiting a place, without seeking out the surrealists there, just to check who they are, see what experiences they have to share, and see if there emerges some particular common ground for further experimentation, play or investigation.

I'm not ignoring other routes. Of course practical collaborations, and communication and friendship between individuals, go on almost as easily with digital communication nowadays. Much more than old romantic time-consuming letter-writing, this allows for a rich development of the network of contacts around groups, for quickly sharing thoughts and works, for instigating various experiments, games and projects that are not geographically based at all but cut across all major subdivisions and categorisations (except that they typically leave behind those who are old or technophobic or poor enough to stay away from the internet), and a rich communication between groups. This is great, but it does not replace the particular sense of communication and activity based on the physical meeting, experimenting, emotionally intense discussions, and worthless hanging around of individuals. Digital communication is rather the next level; a poor basis for acquiring experiences but a great tool for communicating them. Clearly, the networks thus constituted are the suitable global organisation of surrealists: with groups as basic units, and individuals wherever there are no groups and wherever they have either found a group to relate to as their primary group (based on personal friendship and/or recognition of the group's individual character) or they have the time and facilities to establish a solid network node on their own. Since no one controls a network of that kind, every node will establish its own constellation of contacts, and the structure actually consists of a large number of partly overlapping structures. This is what a network is, and this is what we actually have.

There is no use for the national level in organising; nations have little relevance to our non-local aims, our shared tradition and methods, and to our real structures anchored in the combination of solidly city-based groups and selective affinities. There is no use for any n-th attempt to resurrect the dream of a controlled international with sections that has to fulfil particular criteria and be officially stamped as real by those who know best.

Whenever the groups have distinct characters, it is possible for people to join them from a distance and based on selective affinities. Physical distance will of course always limit the participation in the group activity though. Surrealists who are isolated by circumstances anyway will of course be able to develop the most fruitful collaboration with the group they feel the closest affinity with. And dual memberships seem to enhance communication and collaboration. But some people who prefer some distant surrealist group over in fact locally available surrealists, who are not eager to meet and try to find points of contact with the surrealists of the same city, may perhaps act on psychological projections, and, more importantly, voluntarily abstain from the most central sense of surrealist activity, that of collectivity, of the substantial collectivity of developing intersubjectivity in a group of poetic explorers (or super-powered weirdos). That experience can never be removed from the very core of surrealism. No networks based on partly real, partly imagined communities along linguistic, national, ethnic or stylistic lines can replace it.

merdarius