Untimely

I am intrigued by the exciting situations that surrealism faced in the 40s and then in the 60s, when surrealism seemed to be somehow – involuntarily – in line with the times, but it wasn't obvious at all in which direction to set off, large numbers of people were attracted by the movement, people in it had been doing very different experiences, the field of possibilities was wide open, paths needed to be chosen. This relates to what Michaël Löwy emphasises in "Morning star" (*) as the "untimely" character of surrealism, because it feels like at every point one of the latent main issues for surrealism is to find the point of non-contradiction between staying at history's edge and dismissing the contemporary in its entirety. I think that the sublation/solution of this is present in surrealism, but it is one of the several things present in surrealism which we often fail to rationalise, and very often get ourselves stuck in rather lame explanations and contradictions that don't quite live up to the synthetic potential inherent in surrealism. In the 40s, in the 60s, and to a lesser but quite visible sense in the present, some people emphasise the role of being "keepers of the flame", on embodying the tradition, and others emphasise the need of radical abandonments and explorations, as if either made any sense without the other...

I will keep talking about those particular dynamic historical situations elsewhere, so let's go back to the sense of dialectical edge. Of course, ignoring the contemporary and focus on that which – in an untimely way – is of inner necessity, is one way of expressing a latent content of the times, one which represent a potentiality and a possible future. But there are many untimely things which are just nostalgic or clueless too, and many which have a great potential without ever finding their connections. Only some possibilities find the paths of associating with other countercurrents, and communicating with people who are looking for change, for negation, for dynamics; suggesting frameworks and imagery for a latent desire for freedom. It is in this sense that I mean surrealism appears to have been timely in its untimeliness in the 40s and 60s.

I am also speculating that surrealism could very well have been similarly timely in its untimeliness in a similar way in the 80s and around 2000, but the movement was too small to make much impact in and through the movements of the times. In the 80s, it was obviously quite problematical, since what I am referring to as the timely current where surrealism could hang on is that period's transgressive aestheticism, the taste for incomprehensibility, hedonism, black humor and sadomasochism, the resurrections of Sade, Bataille, Artaud, Blanchot as fashionable points of reference, etc, which took place now mostly under the aegis of poststructuralism, cynicism and individualism and can be associated with some senses of postmodernism and neoliberalism. To partake in and be able to twist back the objective direction of such a twisted current would indeed have required not only an immense integrity but also a considerable strength! And then around 2000, it was perhaps a minor repetition of the 60s on its way in the sense that a new footing, a new framework for radicalism was being forged, in an even more heterodox way but still remaining a sharp anticapitalist focus – surrealism did take part in this, but never became one of its more visible currents, and then the movement faded.

(*) Great book which fairly recently came in an english translation, with a strangely twisted subtitle. The original's "surréalisme et marxisme" had been openmindedly changed by the editors into "surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia" - not only removing the relational preposition emphasising the unified theme of the book, now suggesting it to be a loose collection of essays about this and that not necessarily considering things in relation to each other, but also violating the broad and unorthodox sense of marxism the author employs by separately adding these various other brands of radicalism which the author makes a point of not separating from marxism in his notion of it.

/M Forshage

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

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


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


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


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


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

/NN

Venus tick

(Some landforms on the planet Venus are famously tick-shaped)

Arch-arms of the Dead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

M Forshage

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

A few possible tasks for a surrealist group in Wien (Vienna) if there will ever be one

* The Donauinsel (Danube island) appears to be an obvious center of the city. An enormously long and mostly very narrow land tongue between two Donau (Danube) arms, apparently largely covered with a mosaique of parkland and worthless places. Try to get lost at the Donauinsel (really a challenge at such a narrow piece of land). Divide it into a random number of segments; investigate one by one in a series (or by different players); fuse the results cadavre exquise-wise; and then shuffle them, place them in random order and see what story is being told; then rearrange them in accordance with their inner logic. It's easy, just like repaginating a book where the course of events has been distorted to conform to linear rationalisations rather than to inner logic. Or pick a spot and gaze out the river, notice every larger object flowing with it and interpret each object as a dream.

* The Rote Wien (Red Vienna) part of the city's history is largely unexplored from a surrealist viewpoint. A furiously active workers movement struggling to organise every single aspect of life in an integrative radical whole (there appears to have been workers societies and collective solutions for everything), and simultaneously of course to integrate and mute the more impatiently radical wings of the movement (apparently in a less hostile manner than in other burgeoning social democratic power nexuses?), and all of this in the presence of the world headquarters of the blossoming psychoanalytical movement. There is a vast range of failed experiments to reexamine (and sometimes retry) here.

* The fin-de-siecle aesthesticism of Wien raises several critical questions about imaginational phenomenology and surrealist perspectives on art. As romanticism-getting-stale and decadent-classicism were venturing continuously further into the absurd and the poetic, which historic aesthetic contradictions played any role whatsoever? If the grand figure of Hans Makart obviously was the Salvador Dalí of his time, does that refer merely to his grandiose-excentric-commercial-megalomanic aspects and painting skills, or also to the part of real groundbreaking investigations into the imagination? If Gustav Klimt turned to the more decorative style for which he is best known by the critical rebuffal of his groundbreaking Fakultätsbilder, was that a major retreat also in terms of the advancement of the investigation of the imagination, or did he luckily hit new solid poetic ground when trying to be uncontroversial? Etc.

* The absence of organised surrealism in Wien is remarkable. The few organising efforts in the 40s need to be scrutinised, and also to clearly demarcate when these transformed into a school of painting, "der Wiener Schule des phantastischen Realismus" (fantastic realism) which at best covers a few detached individual aspects of surrealism. On the other hand, quite other aspects of a possible surrealist spectrum were addressed in a spectacular and often ignorant way in Wiener Aktionismus (actionism). It is important to snatch back the concepts of communal living and sex radicalism, especially in their combination with artistic creation, from their failed local applications. Correspondingly, it is important to emphasise how visions of "fantastic realism" will imply a confrontative radicalism, on the intellectual, spiritual and social levels rather than on the aesthetic. Simply, to demonstrate how surrealism provides a framework that puts the constructive achievements of fantastic realism and actionism both into perspective.

* try regular meetings at the Café Hegelhof

* have a surrealist exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum

* make the Sigmund Freud Park more ambiguous

* try furious dérives through tram-surfing

etc

a tale of a few cities

Just having returned from Wien (Vienna) I am somewhat enchanted by the surrealist possibilities of that city. With surrealism's perspectives on urbanism (note for exemple one or another sketch previously posted here), "the surrealist possibilities of a city" is not just the case of differentiated personal sensibility towards the spirit of the place. It is that to some extent, but it is also concretely manifested in the degree of condensation and contrast, spatial and social heterogenity, signs of expectation, overlayering, dynamism of spatial phenomenology, and overall ambiance. Of course, pursuing a collective surrealist activity is fundamentally about revealing the surrealist qualities of your immidiate environment; any surrealist grouping will enhance and make explicit the process of disenveloping the surrealist sense of the city they are in. So this is not quite what I am talking about here. I am talking about which places will offer a temporary visitor the most distinct signs and ambiances suggesting this particular sense of possibilities. In this sense, my personal favorite candidates for surrealist cities in Europe are Wien, Berlin, Budapest and Helsinki. Of course they are cities that appeal to me personally, but I do think that they all have a specific objective sense of suggesting hidden possibilities that is central to surrealist urbanism.

And I have to contrast this against the perpetually cited surrealist aspects of Paris, Paris which many people consider as the Capital of Surrealism mainly because surrealism originated there and it has for long times been an important organisational center. Of course, if you live in Paris, and Paris is where you take your daily and nightly strolls, your drinks with friends, your intoxicated trajectories, your everyday conflicts and wonders, you will necessarily see and disclose surrealist aspects out of that psychophysical environment.

But it is another thing for visitors. Many people come to Paris to experience a surrealist city. Indeed, most neighborhoods in Paris do carry a load of anecdotes in surrealist historiography and mythology. There are memories of Breton's walks with Nadja, of the surrealist group's interventions and experiments for many decades, there are all kinds of souvenirs of things integrated into surrealist mythology such as the rich traditions of alchemy, of late 19th century occultism, of early 20th century popular culture, of dada, lettrism, situationism, pataphysics, etc; there are souvenirs of the french revolution, of the Paris commune, of May 68, etc. Not only did these things actually occur right there, but they have also been commemorated, giving names to streets and squares, cafés and statues, etc. The shops, galleries and museums are full of actual references to our chosen heroes. Placenames will be easy to associate with titles of well-known works, and the poetic aura of these names will be lying near at hand since, for us outsiders, so much of the french we know is primarily associated with this poetry and these works rather than with any everyday use. Anywhere you go, if you find a square with a remarkable ambiance, you will very often learn that André Breton already mentioned it in a poem, and if you see a strange gargoyle, you will very often learn that Man Ray or Brassaï already photographed it. The place is so abundantly colonised with anecdotes, with reified pieces of history, and then on top of that seasoned with an overflow of empty references, that it is far more a museum of surrealism than a surrealist city. It gives rise to a feeling that there is nothing to discover, it's all written out for you. It might be possibly to indulge in this, in some cases of recently arrived enthusiastic young surrealists who are happy to see traces of real surrealism recognised as real in the official world and the physical environment, and who will anyway just use them not as pillars in a lithified tradition but as glowing suggestions and hints that make stepping-stones in their own appropriation of surrealism as a shared and personal mythology – for those people, traditional surrealist Paris might still make sense. And of course anyone who is attentive could eventually make some original observations revising or adding to the already almost map-filling color-coding of surrealism-codified corners of Paris. But most of those who hail surrealist Paris are external surrealismophiles (academic, arty, or fellow travellers) who will find this abundance of references to surrealism o so blissful, and whose appreciation of such references might stand in exact proportion to their own inability to discover the surrealist aspects of things for themselves. Preferring the pre-labelled surrealist city before having to exercise any imagination and enterprise any investigation of ones own. Often a certain surrealismophilia of that tinge will prove to be nothing but culture-loving nostalgic francophilia in general, nicely arranging the facets of classic modernism into the big history of western society's art, with a certain predilection for the picturesquely radical and romantic - which is all clearly the opposite of the thorough radical departure and nonconformism central in surrealism itself. But worse for us, it will also be the form in which many of our most eager sympathisers will be happy to consider and consume surrealism as something titillating and even deeply felt – but only not dependent on ones own creative, demanding and risky participation and reinvention.

If we go back to my personal quartet of suggested surrealist cities, Wien, Berlin, Budapest and Helsinki, it is striking that neither of them has ever had a proper surrealist group in spite of a rich presence of avantgarde and radical movements in general. It is also, perhaps, notable that they all lie east of a line dividing Europe in halves. (And indeed, if we would extrapolate from this crude geographical division, we could try to count in Bucuresti, Praha, Brno, Bratislava, Beograd and Athina in this eastern axis, most of which have had a strong (brief or enduring) surrealist presence historically, and one of which (Praha) is indeed often cited as emblematic for surrealist urbanism along with Paris. I don't know. The only place of these that I've visited – so far – is Bucuresti, and I certainly don't mind recognising a particular surrealist potential of that city. And what would become of the western axis? it would also include London and Bruxelles, which are another two of surrealism's historical capitals, which most people would agree are largely boring cities, as well as Madrid, Barcelona and Lisboa, about which there are probably very conflicting views available. But no, I do not want to make a big issue out of these axises, it was just a simple thought experiment.)

I would just like to advocate discovering surrealist aspects of cities rather than consuming surrealist aspects of cities. (And I dream of eventually becoming a satellite member of surrealist groups of these four cities so as to be able to explore these surrealist aspects of the cities more substantially than a casual visitor may.)

M Forshage

Experience of the Stockholm surrealist group

Trying to evaluate the actual experiences made rather than merely chronicling the partly picturesque partly boring trajectory of the now 25 years of activity of the surrealist group in Stockholm, we managed to agree on a brief text posted at the group webpage. We've forgotten to arrange an anniversary party though.

Direct perception

One of these negative sleep epiphanies; this time connected with awakening and nausea.

On my way home in the evening I eat a sandwich with an old date (*). It tastes stale but not really bad.

In the middle of the night I awake and think of the sandwich in my stomach. I am not really feeling sick, but I feel the place of the sandwich in my stomach, and my nervous system is slightly stressed: I am potentially sick. But then it feels like the ground is being pulled from my feet when I think of how extremely strange it is that I was mentally focussing on the eaten sandwich in an immediate way! Isn't it the case that the details assume their meaning by their place in the geography, their place in the narrative and grammar of the text? Don't I have to read the whole landscape, the whole story? Is "direct perception" (direkte Anschauung) actually possible? My head keeps spinning, I am scared. I am convinced that epistemology under normal circumstances rests on a reading of geography as grammar, but that one can be capable of direct perception if for example one is going crazy, or extremely sick. And all the time that eaten sandwich is keeping me reminded of itself, without me having to imagine the entire gasterointestinal system – the absence of the entire 9 meters of it is so dramatically striking, a blank book, a blank map. Is it extremely sick or crazy that I am becoming? Then I fall asleep again.

The dream that followed was obviously geobiographical, and so can be read on the Cormorant council page.

(*) the ambiguity of this formulation became an element in the interpretation of the material. Originally it was just poor linguistic skills, I didn't know the best way to refer casually in english to a slightly old sandwich, the best-before-date of which had already passed.

surrealist research & investigations

Recently, the results of the Hydrolith project finally became available. It is a big anthology (large size, 240 pages), English-language and international in scope, intended to display the width of investigations of the surrealist movement today.

The material covers many areas but three themes are focused: music/sound, place/geography, and myth, which might possibly be three key aspects among contemporary surrealist interventions. From the theoretical viewpoint superordinated on this blog we might particularly refer to certain contributors by regulars or occasional contributors here: Niklas Nenzén on mythopoesis, gnosticism and the ontology of the imagination; Mattias Forshage on methodological aspects of approaching the question of surrealism and music; Johannes Bergmark with other more or less general approaches to the same question; Merl Fluin on the poetic aspects of urban legends. The piece on urban geography by Forshage and Erik Bohman previously posted here is included, and from outside this narrower circle there is for example an important study by Eric Bragg on exteriority, contributing very much to the clarification of this concept.

The editorial group has consisted of the mentioned Bragg, Forshage and Fluin plus Shibek, Ribitch and Nikos Stabakis; apart from american, english, swedish and greek surrealists there are also substantial contributions from the surrealists of Paris, Quebec, Turkey and many other places.

The book can be ordered, or freely downloaded, via Lulu, here.

the strategical point of strategy

A recent visit to the comrades in Leeds provided several interesting discussions, including on the subject of strategy - obviously one which it is possible for surrealists to have different opinions on, but perhaps not as different as it first may seem, once a number of demarcations and distinctions have been sorted out. I'd like to relate a couple of points from that discussion to the usual themes of the Icecrawler with methodology and epistemology.

First of all, it must be noted that surrealism embodies a fundamental "antipragmatism" or "antiinstrumentalism" that it shares with anarchism. There is no widely accepted term for this attitude (it might just as well be called antileninism or antiloyolism which both sound rather more specific, and I'll be grateful for suggestions of more general terms) but its application is clear: the aims do not justify the means, because means that are alien to the aims will effectively twist the aims and make the original aims unattainable, while on the other hand, if the means are congenial with the aims they will embody the aim so that they will become meaningful in themselves and not just instrumental. The classic political instance is of course the insistence that freedom will not be attained by authoritarian means, which has at different times been applied against political violence, conspiracy strategies in general, bureaucratic party-building, parlamentarist strategies, self-sacrificing duty ethics, etc etc. In recent decades, the latter application has been among the most popular, after the situationists' (and especially Vaneigem's) pregnant formulations against the activist ethos. (It must be noted however that situationist thought is clearly not unanimous on this point, and Debord's embracing of the hardcore "loyolist" Clausewitz is a case in point.) It is fundamental to the anarchist concept of "direct action", it partly coincides with what different leftist group call anti-authoritarianism and autonomy (or, for some, even libertarianism), it has to do with Fourier's concept of work, with Marx's so-called humanism, it certainly has a lot to do with the dreaming, the rage, and the emphasis on creativity in the tradition of romantical anticapitalism as continued in large parts of modernism and specifically in surrealism. While never being explicitly formulated as such, this was also the issue underlying the political conflicts in surrealism in the 20s and 30s, with the surrealists insisting that revolutionary politics didn't make specifically surrealist experimentation and dreaming obsolete but quite the opposite, and that the resurrection of bourgeois morality and lifestyle in the Soviet Union as well as the mad and bloody power tactics of Stalin meant betraying communism.

As a mere parenthesis, we can note that an inverted loyolism is often presented as the "democratic" spirit today - when the means justify the aims. Anyone who plays according to the rules, obeys laws, appears peaceful, wears a suit, votes, writes letters to the editor, and pleas to the politicians in office, instead of taking things in one's own hands, is then considered good, regardless of the implications of one's ideas. (Elsewhere I have considered this in the context of modern varieties of humanism, and called it "repressive coward humanism".)

This basic strategic concern is related to the purely philosophical distinction between intention ethics and effect ethics, but as a philosophical distinction the latter does not have any immediate applications. An intention ethics emphasises that good intentions are what counts in the end, regardless of the outcome, and an effect ethics emphasises the opposite. The instrumentalist approach is largely fitting with an effect ethics, but an anti-instrumentalist approach could be formulated as either, and very often real contradictions emerge along other lines.

Consider for example how the activist ethos of self-sacrificing for the cause very often serves as a rigid ethical principle independent of whether it achieves any effects whatsoever, often being remarkably untactical and unpragmatic, in the end amounting to "heroic" duty ethics, a principled effacing of individual oddities and "low desires", and a pure voluntarism - making the frenziedly manifested good will everything, and thus ending up in some kind of intention ethics.

There are also other options, of course. There is a broad concept of a "whole human" activist, which was not uncommon in many parts of the early workers movement and went on in parts of anarchism and recently had a brief blossoming in the globalist movements of the 00s. This is about affirming an offensive political content in collective self-organising of everyday life and of demanding a full life in general, coinciding with revolutionary implimentations of humanism (there a numbers of contradictive implimentations of the notoriously ambiguous concept humanism...) and of the classic refusal to make a sharp distinction between personal and political.

But then, the antipragmatism of the anarchists is very often presented as ethics, that is, an abstracted principled doctrine of how to implement good life and fair order. The obvious points inherent in anarchism, remarkably often very effective, are easily available for any thinking person, they even border to the simplistic. In fact, very often their actual subversive effects are due to the unexpected complications and the character of pure obstruction of the application of these simple principles in a rigid way regardless of circumstances and without strategical concerns. An anarchist is always right. Because the anarchist will emphasise these eternal abstract principles rather than take risks and make assessments of circumstances. There is no risk of failure for eternal principles because there are no circumstances that actually put them to test. An anarchist is always right, and will very often be completely uninterested in drawing empirical conclusions, and very often let all opportunities pass through their openmindedly spread fingers like golden sand. This is the very strength and impotence of anarchism all in one.

I think a solution to a great many of the contradictions and shortcomings of this perspective will come via the concept of methodology. Methodology is choosing the right method for each task, and specifically through its central position in science, it concerns formulating your questions and designing your methods in congruence, so that the outcome of your undertaking will give you an answer to your specific question whatever happens. Of course it would be very difficult and probably boring to designate life as rigidly as that, but I think a more general application of methodological concern is to make sure to take risks, to try to spark off dynamics, that will have something to teach us regardless of what the specific outcome will be. And if we disregard the obvious psychological fear of failure in many anarchists, I think this does lie in the anarchist concept of "direct action" too; no meaningful actions are strictly instrumental, in that they are depending on attaining a particular distant goal; all meaningful actions do attain something in themselves. The concept of "direct action" usually envisions this as by manifesting and fulfilling our wishes and desires, and concretely changing circumstances for the better. For the experimentally and methodologically minded it might just as well be about just releasing dynamics, in order to widen the field of possibilities, open for the unexpected, which might change things dramatically, perhaps in a particular direction that will coincide with particular desires, perhaps not, and in either case will be an interesting experience to analyse and build upon. In science, there is no such thing as failure, because negative results are just as informative as positive results are. This is the particular scientific dynamic of experiment and failure. Instrumentalist minds opposed to open-ended experimentation will often regard this as "irresponsible", perhaps especially those who are prone to authoritarian politics. If we disregard the aspect of mere psychological control need in such an attitude, it nevertheless remains quite irrelevant: any serious activity that seriously wants to change things will definitely take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, by learning from them and acting further upon them, and responsibility is in no way necessarily connected with being able to predict consequences, In social relationships, in history just as well as science and in poetry, this is certainly true: the predictable is far less interesting than the unpredictable.

So, the political application of this, I consider strategy. It is merely a methodological formulation, based in theory, in individual desire, in collective dynamics, and the analytical response integrating these factors, of an interventional implementation of experiment and failure. Strategy is for causing dynamic effects that will move beyond ones control in an interesting direction and, while doing that, allow for conclusions. That is politics, that is theory, that is the so-called "art of creating situations". In that sense, surrealism in its concrete manifestations will have to be strategic, regardless of whether it will be consciously directed on the political level or not.

Now, considering strategy does not necessarily imply a lot of things that anti-strategic minds consider it to. First of all, there is of course a simple distinction between strategy and tactics, which can be formulated in very different ways, but for most people, strategy is long-term and tactics is short-term, strategy is choosing methods and tactics is choosing rhetorics and presentation in particular situations, negotiations. General antipragmatism may motivate a despise of tactics (it may be debasing, psychologically destructive, and obstructive to real communication to nervously-servilely or authoritarianly adapt one's message to one's prejudices about the recepients), but not of strategy (which is more about how to actually implement ones ideas and possibly change things at all). And of course, strategical thinking does not imply any one particular strategy. For example, surrealism is not a proselytising movement, it does not seek to maximise the number of adherents and does not try to persuade people. This is however not an antistrategical move but exactly a strategical one: surrealist activity is dependent on each participant's individual passion, original perspective and individual path of approaching surrealism, therefore it has little use for proselytes. But then, admitting this necessarily minoritary character of surrealism and affirming the chance moment in its adhesions, does not in any way contradict the fact that there might be good to increase the contact surfaces with other people, to communicate and invite to communication via internet and public events, simply to increase the probability of the rare chance hits! It does also not favor such extroversion regardless of circumstances, it makes it a strategical question for consideration.

Surrealism's political implications, and the immediate social relevance of its organisation, are I think twofold. It is about manifesting a glimpse of a possible other society and about encouraging uncontrolled dynamics that open up new possibilities. Of course surrealism wants to be effective in that. But it is not willing to go to instrumentalism (loyolism), to do all kinds of boring and bad stuff, including imposing on itself a demand to formulate it in some other language than its own, in order to achieve those effects, because that would be detrimental to its passion, its spirit, its health. It is not necessarily the case that wide attention, especially mass medial attention, will actually increase that efficiency, in fact it is obviously very often the opposite, the public sphere has a dynamic of its own which has a tendency to swallow up creative input for its own means. Surrealism wants to involve all those that are seriously interested and capable of making serious contributions, but it does not want to proselytise and collect souls. For me, it seems like an inevitable conclusion, that the interventions and the organisation are best served by conscious concerns about how to relate to the contemporary situation and how to communicate with people outside the group (primarily with the seriously curious and with friends, in the second place with the general public): this is what I call strategy. These will have to be, as I see it, methodological and experimental rather than either "irresponsibly" instrumental or legitimacy-obsessed ethical, in order to be truly congruent with surrealism.